Backpack Battles Review (Synthwave Sunrise)
This game is well made and there's a time for fun early on. Progression is felt, choices are frequent and will have notable impact. There are 6 heroes to choose from with different start-up options. You could likely get tons of playtime out of this one if it's your thing, and it definitely has that 'just one more' vibe--for turns as well as runs.
But I can't recommend Backpack Battles because, in the end, it's not really fun in a sustained or dynamic way. Rather, at core it's a PVP-lite meta-chasing RNG grindfest. The shine of wanting to restart again and again to see the next build wore off for me after the first 10 hours, as having learned the fundamentals my experience became chasing rank for marginal gains until my eyes were bleeding. It's just the same thing over and over; fiddle bags, make some buys, repeat. The lack of dynamic alternate modes or a more predictable challenge-based single player mode is a bit baffling for a full launch.
And while I did enjoy the gameplay loop for a time, there are a few major issues with the experience.
First, the UI is horrid when it comes to figuring out which items are part of which upgrade sets. The recipe screen is the laziest imaginable way to handle this-- they should have had something as straightforward as hovering over an item with a hotkey to see a ring of all other items it can interact with. Instead they made me search every time I had a question and the game presents many questions. Having to constantly flip screens and hover just to see components was terrible, and in addition to lacking an item ring for quick reference, I can't understand why they didn't just add all of the relevant crafting info to the item screen (which is the screen that has an actual search field-- though even that involves way too much tedium and clicking between tabs to get what you want). Navigating these panels became extremely dry.
The other hard sell for this PVP-centric game is that ranking up means playing against players who are increasingly exploiting the more broken parts of the game, and you have limited choice but to do the same by chasing ultra rares and snowballing combos. Balance isn't much of a thing here, so I often swung between crushing my opponents and being crushed by them. Making this reliance on RNG worse, you can't really plan ahead to counter anything, and will mainly rely on the hope that the build you picked / were given early on will develop with lucky shop offerings in the long run; having no control over who you fight and knowing nothing about their build means the game is primarily based on the worst type of shop and encounter RNG and developing meta knowledge. Compare this to DOTA where build/hero knowledge is incredibly important as well, but you actually have skillshots, strategic teamwork, and stable shop and progression content to make a fun experience.
In essence it all feels a bit soulless to me.
So overall, if you like to climb PVP ranks, shuffle things around in bags, painstakingly try to discover builds, and don't mind RNG, sure, go for it. But I personally can't get past the lazy UI design and random nature of pretty much every aspect of the game, or the total lack of engaging/creative play modes.
edit: So I pushed deeper in to see if the experience gets better with more knowledge, and it just doesn't. It still feels like a lottery, and I'll also say that the rank-up system is, frankly, cynical and punitive. I thought Gold was bad enough, but reaching Platinum, I now gain 0 rank from winning 7 of 10 matches and actually lose rank almost as often as I gain it. IMO, winning a majority (6 of 10) should always provide at least 1 point. That's about respecting player time. Instead, winning almost all matches gets you a few crumbs, but you really need 10 wins to get useful progress. This stingy math can be especially painful if the RNG system decides to put you up against a counter to your build, or if you get mediocre shop offerings early on.
So having tried to be open-minded, and pushed deeper into ranks, in the end I think the devs have been way too miserly with their progression system and too loose with the RNG/balance aspects. One of those constraints is fine--tough progression based on skill would work, as would fluid progression with more randomness involved. But you can't have slow and painful + lottery progression.
This is one of those time-sink games that's made to keep you playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours, but doesn't provide anywhere near the control or horizontal depth of design to make a rewarding experience out of it.