Forming a team of battle-ready monsters is always a tough decision. You must think about what synergies work well together, the overall strategy, and obstacles in your party. Batomon Showdown condenses everything by having your entire team fight at once. Everyone’s attacking and pulling their best tricks to quickly take down the other team. Recruit your monsters from a randomised roster and win ten matches as fast as you can.
Batomon Showdown condenses the monster battling formula and lets your monsters support each other. The variety of monsters and abilities allows you to freely mix and match, adapting to the circumstances. Some matches can be especially challenging since your opponents grow with you and have great luck. Monsters and elements are also not properly balanced, leading to lop-sided team strategies. Keep an eye on Batomon Showdown as it has lots of surprises to offer.
Batomon Showdown has a playtest available on PC that you can request to join.
Your Batomon fight to defeat your opponent’s team quickly.
Story – Winning 10 Matches
There’s no overarching narrative similar to Bogos Binted. You are simply fighting until you get 10 matches or you run out of lives. While there are various characters to choose from, their backgrounds aren’t investigated and there’s no character development. Everyone is just doing their best to reach 10 wins or at least stay in the game. Some story aspects may be present in the future but for now this is just a battling game.
Gameplay – Finding the Winning Strategy
Batomon Showdown is about team-building and combat. The roguelike aspect comes from the monsters you can recruit. You won’t always see the same monsters in every lineup even when you reroll similar to Deck of Haunts. This creates some degree of unpredictability and softly nudges you towards investigating different monsters. While you eventually reroll until you get what you need, you work with random monsters before your strategy shapes itself.
You don’t know what monsters you can recruit, ensuring you try them all.
Combat is autonomous with every monster using their abilities as often as they can. Both teams battle until one side reaches zero health. Matches are quick but if no team experiences defeat, sudden death starts and teams slowly weaken until one team wins. This helps you see how effective your strategies are and whether something is working as intended. Whether you win or lose, you go back to improve your team and fight your way to 10 wins.
It’s fast-paced combat that never overstays its welcome and the variety of monsters to choose from is immense. There are many strategies you can use to overcome your opponent’s monsters. However, there are two major problems with the combat: balance and difficulty.
Your appearance determines what bonuses your team gets.
Balance & Difficulty – Too Uneven
Monsters have different elements such as Water, Fire, etc. While monsters aren’t too overpowered, some elements have more powerful monsters than others. This means you neglect elements such as Fighting or Grass because the others are better. Some strategies were bound to stand out but it does feel like the number of feasible strategies is artificially limited. If each type had similar numbers of monsters, that would allow a greater variety of moves.
The difficulty is also high because your opponents grow along with you. While that sounds appealing, your opponents often have access to the right monsters that suit a strategy. They might even get better quality monsters that you can barely access. It’s frustrating to go up against an opponent in the early-mid game whose advantages are too great to overcome. There are easier opponents but there are times it feels the opponent is geared to counter you specifically.
Some characters are better choices than the others.
Some character classes are also better than others or require extra steps to fully show their potential. While this is expected of a game that’s still in progress, it does hamper the appeal. As more monsters, characters, and improvements are added to the game, this problem may fade. But for now, it’s something worth noting as you are going through the matches.
Audio & Visual – Familiar sounds
While it’s not following the same formula, you might notice similarities to a certain franchise. The similar sounds, the monster designs, and even character portrait shots. It’s not a complete match but you can’t help but feel it’s drawing lots of inspiration.
However, the 6v6 battles and the effects are their own and you see enough of it every match. It’s 2D pixel art with some visual effects demonstrating relevant status ailments. Character designs are more fleshed out but don’t get much screentime unless you are showing the matchups.
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- The goal is to get 10 badges or wins as soon as you can.
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- Sometimes a team variation is the key to your success.
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- Random events are always beneficial but you choose what works.
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- Sometimes you follow a certain theme to trounce your opponents.
Batomon Showdown was previewed on Steam with a code provided by Unigold Games.
