Have you ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? It’s the form of bias where once you learn about something, you begin to see it everywhere. That’s how I feel about auto battlers right now. After finishing my review for Valefor I began to see that Mechabellum had put up some huge numbers on Steam. Songs of Silence is out and looks promising. Yet amongst all the options something about Seer’s Gambit caught my eye. The prospect of an autobattler with the more competitive multiplayer elements removed and replaced with addictive roguelite unlocks seemed right up my alley so let’s discuss what I found from my time with it.
Introduction
Released on Steam on the 18th November, Seer’s Gambit is a tactical semi-autobattler and the second Steam release from developer pair Unleash The Giraffe. Set in a vibrant pixel land, you play as the titular Seer who has mastered the ability to preserve your experience and has the mystical power to give a lore reason for the title being a roguelite.
A trait that will serve you well as you recruit a band of heroes and set off on a quest to save the realm of Emalon. As with any roguelite title your initial quest is doomed to failure. Still, when every defeat can lead to upgrades and unlocks, a loss isn’t such a hard pill to swallow.
“Semi” Auto Battling
Now if you are like me you might be wondering what a “semi” autobattler is. With most titles in the autobattler genre all of the strategy takes place before the fight. Assembling your party, equipping them with the right items to boost synergies and flesh out your strategy before placing your heroes to ensure your plan goes off without a hitch.
Seer’s Gambit adds an active element to this by giving each character an ultimate ability that is charged up by combat and activated at a moment of the player’s choosing. While you can set these to autocast and play the game as a true “auto” battler, using abilities at the right moment is key to more successful runs.
I honestly found this system very engaging, especially as most characters can unlock some form of bonus for using their ultimates at the right time. Watching my duelist dash in to get a kill with her ultimate for an immediate reset as well as a permanent power boost led to some great moments of stylishly dismantling squads of enemies and that is just one example from the whole roster.
The idea is further reinforced by many enemies having powerful but interruptible attacks and I frequently found myself frantically clicking a character’s ultimate in the hope it would come up just in time to prevent an opponent’s powerful swing, surprisingly tense moments for a game that really proceeds at your own pace. Combine this with a good amount of enemy variety and it’s a great way to add some level of player interaction to the actual combat without feeling like you are taking away from the core autobattler mechanics.
Movement, abilities and targets are still not controllable although can be influenced by characters’ initial position similar to other auto battlers. You will quickly learn that different enemies will punish you for poor positioning and certain maps may challenge you to split your forces adding a second layer of strategy to your placements before the battle. Overall I found it to be a really fun spin on the genre that kept me wanting to burn through more battles.
Assembling Your Squad
Of course using your ultimate at the right time is only part of the combat, you also have to assemble and outfit your team. Seer’s Gambit features a colourful cast of almost 20 heroes featuring classics such as a knight, a healer and… a barber? Not all of these will be available immediately and unlocking new heroes as you go does add some variety to the runs but get used to seeing the same characters a lot as you have numerous opportunities to recruit and reroll your party of 6 in a given run.
The skill tree system does allow each hero to have a number of distinct builds but there is definitely room for expansion if the developers want to add a bit more variance to runs, as much as that likely makes the game more difficult to balance!
Similar to other auto battlers your combination of heroes can grant additional synergies beyond their abilities simply complimenting each other. Each hero comes with 3 unlockable passives that can only be obtained by having the right squad mates. I really like this as a way to think more tactically about who you might want to bring along, higher rarity heroes do have higher stats and more build options but you might choose to support them with lower tier characters that promote the synergies you want to play in to.
Sadly I do have a slight problem with how it’s notated. Rarer heroes get more symbols to unlock these passives however as you have 6 different characters with 3 different unlocks each it can be rather difficult to go through and work out what you actually need to get unlocks across the team. The symbols themselves also add an extra level of confusion.
I was particularly bemused that the one represented by a crossbow bolt does not apply to the crossbow wielding character by default! Having said this, the actual bonuses themselves are both different and powerful enough that they can really define a build and add extra replayability to your runs.
Finally we come to the items. There is a variety of equipment to find, most of which is focused around a single skill type or stat. There are definitely some fun combinations to be found where you can utilise a character’s scaling for some huge damage but I would have loved to see additional options where items could be combined or maybe even have an active element.
As it stands I often felt like I had only a couple of key options for each character build and ended up discarding a good amount of items for minimal glod… and no that’s not a typo. I don’t find any of this to be a deal breaker but I feel like the sweet spot of making me excited to see what the next run will drop isn’t quite there. Instead I am spending more time looking forward to updating the world map, so let’s talk about that.
Exploring Emalon
After each series of fights you will end up back on a map view of Emalon, exploring a larger than expected area with a lot of nodes to fight and unlock! Each victory over a new area will give you between 1-3 meta upgrades you can then buy with earned resources to apply stat bonuses to all your future teams as well as unlocking some new characters and perks.
I fully admit to being a sucker for gradual meta progression, especially in cases like this where it also updates the visuals of the conquered area, giving you the feeling of your gradual liberation making a difference.
Players should be warned however that while it appears to be a large branching world, many paths will result in instant loss due to some rather unforgiving difficult spikes in certain areas and days. These are highlighted as more dangerous but it does feel like not every “1 skull” area is born equal for example. Multiple times I just had to grind (and you will be grinding) against levels I had no chance or old levels I had cleared just to get resources in the hope a few meta upgrades would give me a chance. Still, I can’t deny it’s satisfying to paint the map, especially when you invest in some upgrades that help resource collection.
I do want to note that the developers have taken note of this feedback and this issue has been patched since I wrote the review to smooth out the difficulty a bit more.
The exploration is not just limited to the world map, in each individual area between fights you will run into a variety of scenarios and events. The mystical sword in the lake offers a resting place to recover, offer it some gold and it may bless your party with further healing. Alternatively maybe a demon will offer you some gold to help you in your journey… but at a price.
Again I have some slightly mixed views here. For one, the event pool seems a little limited, in one decent length run you are likely to run into a number of repeats. On the other side I do like that every event comes with multiple options. You will often find you are locked out of certain options due to party composition or monetary restraints but it certainly adds more tactical choice and player agency than being told of an event and moving on. They serve as a nice way to break up the combat but again I would just like to see more!
Final Thoughts
A lot of my more recent reviews have come off rather lukewarm so let’s be perfectly clear. I really enjoyed Seer’s Gambit, 20 hours of my time had been lost to it in the blink of an eye. Considering the price of entry for the game it’s honestly a great proposition as well as being a very good gateway title to auto battlers as a whole. The small addition of player controlled ultimate abilities which have a focus on timing goes a long way to making it a more engaging experience and the different builds and meta upgrades kept me coming back for one more run. All enhanced by the charming pixel art and 8 bit soundtrack.
While there are some rough patches that I would love to see ironed out, the fact the developer has already fixed a number of the points raised above gives me faith the title is in good hands. With these fixes I am simply left wanting more because I enjoy the game and that’s not the worst position a title can be in. Currently I give this title a solid recommendation to any strategy/auto battler fans in the market for a single player focused title and I sense it’s only going to improve with time.
A review code for this title was kindly provided by the developer. No animals were harmed in the making of this review but many cows were tipped.
