Overview
In Legend of Keepers, you control the master who is the boss of a dungeon trying to kill off the heroes trying to steal your gold. You do this by hiring training and taking care of monsters (and traps) and assigning them to rooms to kill or make the adventures run away crying like little girls. If they get through your rooms they face off with you in the treasure room. If you succeed you can gather their blood or tears to use for upgrades later.
When not defending your gold stash you go through a series of choices of events or training or upgrades and such. Once you complete the set number of weeks you are evaluated on your success or failure. You also have to manage the morale of your monsters so they fight at top efficiency and do not leave.
To defend your base you set your monsters and traps in a series of rooms. You can customize your defenses to the weakness of the adventures and either try to run them off by reducing their morale or kill them. There are only a limited number of rooms till they get to the boss and the treasure room. Monsters have special abilities and an increase in power when they are leveled up. Monsters dying while defending is not permadeath they rise again although with lower morale.
Legend of Keepers is at its heart a roguelite. It has traditional roguelite progression systems and unlocks. There are dungeons, monsters, keepers, heroes, traps, artifacts, and more to unlock. Your Keeper can train skills and increase in power, there are multiple areas to go to and there are even custom games that can have Twitch integration.
To round things out there is even Steam Workshop support and there are already a good number of new heroes or monsters.
Graphics
The pixel based graphics are really well done and convey the uniqueness of all the items, monsters, adventurers, and such. The interface is good and shows you mostly what you need to know with a few exceptions that I am sure will be worked out in Early Access.
Criticism
With most roguelites, you have to be concerned about the long term appeal of a game. We have all been spoiled by the never-ending roguelites like Slay The Spire or Monster Train. So that’s the bar that has been set and all roguelites are unfortunately judged on. The main game loop in Legend is good the concern is will it have a lasting play. As it is now there is a good chunk of content and time that you can put into it. But will it have that long term appeal… They are still adding content so we will have to see when it launches.
Overall
While still in Early Access with a release date of somewhere in Early 2021 there is a good amount of content here. The updates seem to be going on strong monthly for main content drops. I found no major bugs or crashes the only thing I noticed was some display issues with tooltips and interface nothing at all major. The quality here is pretty good for an Early Access game.
It is a fun game but as I said about my concern is that is there enough to do and keep you coming back. New monsters, new heroes, and new keepers will all help keep things fresh. The custom game modes, as well as specific loadout-based modes, will help of course Steam Workshop support could also be a big winner. I think they are certainly on the right track.
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Semi-retired game designer and developer trying to use my experience to enhance the strategy and strategy adjacent gaming sector. Strategy game player for over 35 years. Game development experience in AAA, Indie, and Board.
