Reptilian Rising Review: A Campy Tabletop Experience (PC)

Reptilian Rising is a turn-based tactical game developed by Gregarious Games and Robot Circus, co-developed by Hyper Luminal Games, and published by Numskull Games.

Released on April 23, 2026, for PC and Nintendo Switch, the full game arrives with seven complete time eras, over 20 recruitable heroes from history and myth, nine boss fights, and online PvP.

At $29.99, Reptilian Rising is worth it for its inventive tactical loop and campy presentation, though checkpoint resets and ranged AOE monotony keep it from feeling fully polished.

1. Story: History’s Greatest Heroes, Assemble!

Cult of the Dragons mission

The premise is exactly as gloriously unhinged as it sounds. Genocidal Reptilians have broken through the time dimension, and humanity’s only answer is drafting its greatest icons across every era to fight them back.

Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Albert Einstein, Robin Hood, and Winston Churchill end up on the same squad, defending the spacetime continuum against flesh-hungry lizard armies commanded by the three-headed monstrosity known as the Dictatorsaur.

What Reptilian Rising lacks in polish, it makes up for by leaning into its identity with total confidence.

• Campy Energy: Think Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure crashing headfirst into The Terminator. The game fully commits to its ’80s B-movie vibe, right down to the menu screens and voiced quips.
• Hero Lore: Each hero comes with background lore tabs you can explore between missions, a nice touch for players who like knowing whose miniature they are commanding.
• Thin Narrative: The story is deliberately nonsensical, but it is bogged down by long walls of text that amount to very little in the grand scheme of the game.
• Slow Start: Getting through the tutorial’s opening screens to reach the actual battlefield feels longer than it should.

2. Gameplay: Tactics on a Tabletop Battlefield

Time Rift

Reptilian Rising runs as a campaign rather than a true roguelite, though it borrows liberally from the genre. Each era operates through a sequence of missions with checkpoints.

The shop opens between eras to spend accumulated Obsidian and Gold on Time Tech upgrades and Hero Perks before committing to a run. Once you enter a mission, your loadout is locked.

Behind the quirky premise lies a tactical system that is easy to read but still pushes you to plan ahead. Heroes act first, the Reptilians respond, and that predictable rhythm makes each gate capture, retreat, and summon decision feel deliberate.

Hero Classes and Team Composition

Bert

Every hero falls into one of four classes: Scout, Warrior, Elite, and Heavy. Scouts possess an extended base movement range, allowing them to rapidly cross the grid to capture contested time-gates while your Heavy units hold the frontline.

• Action Economy: Each hero gets two actions per turn. These can be spent on movement, attacking, defending, claiming a gate, blocking a manhole, or interacting with the environment.
• Synergy and Balance: Characters gain team and matchup bonuses depending on who is on the board, which gives squad-building some extra texture. However, ranged heroes with AOE attacks (like Ankha) quickly dominate the melee-heavy enemy spawns, turning matches into speed exercises rather than deep strategy.
• Permadeath Stakes: Heroes have limited lives that carry over across the campaign. Retreating wounded heroes back through a time-gate to preserve their lives creates an X-COM-adjacent tension.
• Mid-Mission Recruitment: Missions offer the option to recruit one of three heroes to your team, but only if you reach them in time. This adds genuine tension to positioning decisions.

Time Gate Activation

Capturing a time-gate is also more involved than it appears. Gates require two separate claims to conquer. You either need two heroes to claim the same gate, or you must run the same hero back to it across consecutive turns.

Controlling a gate opens a summon point to call additional heroes using Time Energy.

Campaign Progression and Failure

Extinction Era

Checkpoints soften failure, but they also create the campaign’s most noticeable pacing problem: losing can mean replaying several missions before you get another shot at progression.

• Checkpoint Resets: Failing a mission typically resets you to a checkpoint around three missions back, requiring you to replay that sequence. Repetition can easily set in during these moments.
• Meta Progression: Progress never feels entirely undone. Heroes retain the levels they had at the checkpoint, and passive upgrades can be purchased using currency acquired, whether you win or lose.
• Difficulty Scaling: Difficulty settings stretch match length rather than meaningfully increasing the challenge. An average match takes 20 to 40 minutes, making added time feel like an annoyance rather than a tactical hurdle.

3. Enemy Roster and Boss Fights

Deploying Heroes

The enemy roster spans dozens of bizarre Reptilian enemies and nine unique boss fights. Manborgs, Lazer Raptors, and the Tri-Cannon fill the rank-and-file, while the Dictatorsaur looms as the campaign’s most theatrical set piece.

Watching that three-headed abomination thunder onto the tabletop is a genuinely memorable moment that fully captures the game’s tone.

• Boss Encounters: The nine boss fights represent a welcome difficulty spike. Enemy reinforcements grow stronger over time, forcing you to choose between playing defensively or rushing objectives.
• AI Weaknesses: Outside of boss encounters, the AI can be directionless. They often try to win by sheer numbers rather than applying reactive pressure to your positioning.
• Spawn Pressure: Enemy forces spawn every three rounds through uncaptured gates and eggs, keeping the board constantly populated.

4. Graphics and Audio: Totally Tubular Presentation

The visual identity of Reptilian Rising is immediately distinctive. Heroes and enemies are rendered as claymation-style miniatures battling across detailed grid-based tabletops.

The ’80s-vintage toy-collection aesthetic remains consistent from the menus to the final era. It feels like you dug out the remaining figurines from your childhood toy box. The game is not visually groundbreaking, but a sharper or more realistic style would clash with the scrappy toy-tabletop charm that makes the game works.

• Voice Acting: Each character features unique voice lines and sound effects that play into the game’s comedic themes with exaggerated accents.
• Soundtrack: The backing music is appropriate and never feels repetitive. The cassette collection mechanic is a clever in-world system for unlocking alternate tracks.
• Missed Potential: Different eras still share too similar a sonic palette. Era-specific remixes would have deepened the feeling of genuinely traveling through time.

5. Replayability and Online Play

Reptilian Rising actively encourages you to replay missions to uncover hidden secrets and tackle new bonus objectives. Mission branching adds genuine incentive to return to the seven time periods.

A second run on hard difficulty feels like the best way to see the full campaign. Starting-team upgrades matter more on repeat attempts, and you likely will not recruit every character in a single playthrough.

The online PvP mode is a worthwhile addition if you enjoy the game’s positioning puzzles and objective races. It carries the same focus on squad choices, gate control, and tactical timing into a competitive format without feeling detached from the campaign.

This Reptilian Rising Review on PC is made possible thanks to JF Games Marketing and Communications.