COMBOLANDS
Autumn is a time of recollection. At least it is for me, as the air changes from the vibrant heat of summer to the ever-growing dampness of the rolling rains. A sunny day becomes a thing to cherish! Chestnuts litter the streets; first trees tiredly turn to their golden hues. It’s a transitory time to settle with a mug of pumpkin spice coffee and have a bit of a ponder. And a question that was recently burrowing into my grey matter was simply what genres do I truly enjoy?
Anyone following this blog to any degree would be able to tell me, obviously. Deckbuilders are up there! Roguelikes of any flavour. Engine builders and BALATRO-likes always to have an easy spot for themselves. But there’s more. There is a family of mechanical features that, when present, always make my brain tingle with happy chemicals. And while I enjoy the challenge, while I cherish the feeling of overcoming a difficult task, there is always a spot in my heart for a truly casual experience - a laidback zen-state inducing romp. Walking sims, Tidy Up games and things like ISLANDERS - where you just put stuff down, get some arbitrary points and move forward.
COMBOLANDS is unique, because it masterfully blends both of my core needs. It is, at the same time, a relaxing, low-stakes kind of chill experience… While also being a cerebral puzzle and an engine builder under the hood. Once can ask, how is that possible? Surely you cannot have both at once - either a game is cosy, relaxing time OR it requires you to grind your neurons together to get stuff done, right?
And yet… Here we are.
COMBOLANDS is a self-proclaimed roguelike city builder. I don’t particularly agree with any of those tags, but hey, it’s their game, they can call it what they want. It’s more a puzzler with a morsel of an engine builder behind. I brought up ISLANDERS for a reason here - the initial key is about properly placing your structures to score points. Unlike that game, though, this one also has plenty of buildings that keep on churning out points every few weeks. And your goal is to dig out synergies between your structures that will ensure as frequent and as fast points generated as possible! It’s, as the title suggest, a game about finding out combos.
Now the fun part lies in how extremely clever the system is. You have access to 7 guilds. Each guild has its own set of relics and buildings, as well as a build-in mechanical focus. For example, Frontier guild triggers a lot on using rerolls while Martial guild is all about removal of placed structures. Every guild interacts best with some key tags, and you never play with a singular guild - you always pick two of them to create a mechanical duo made in heaven. Some of those duos feel like a natural pairing, but - and that’s the genius part that makes this game feels so great! - no pairing is bad or unwinnable with. They all have some mystical ways of working off each other, always letting you find clever synergies that turn a struggling run into an easy slam dunk.
See, the magic, I think, lays in how the difficulty scales. Each progressive level of challenge adds a relatively tiny obstacle to overcome. A small little hindrance, nothing that - on its own - will raise the level of challenge in any impactful way. So, as you progress through these stages you can feel that each and every single one is a breeze. But then, at some point, the cumulation of these little hindrances starts to show up and began to force you into suboptimal plays, into situations where you need to make best of bad choices. It’s clever and subtle! But, and it’s one of those big buts, even at the highest difficulty it never is too demanding. Never becomes an RNG decided monstrous trial where you need to optimize your every placement to perfection.
Another thing that makes COMBOLANDS so engaging is the excellently paced meta progression. You don’t start with every guild ready to play but unlock them one by one as you keep playing, and it never feels like a grind or padding. Then each guild has up to 9 levels to unlock, each offering new structures and relics for said guild, bit by bit revealing its full potential, opening new synergies and key components to score big. This is an excellent way to make sure I want to keep playing - because even if I had a bad time with a particular guild and couldn’t nail a winning combo, getting those new pieces might just be the trick to overcome any difficulty with the ease I mentioned above. Ultimately the game is going to give you all the powerful pieces to make sure you CAN succeed no matter the odds.
Then there are all the fun auxiliary systems that make for impactful decisions and give you some of that much coveted agency. There are factions which you can secure votes off, giving pretty powerful passives or one-time reward to help you along. Shop with relics, blueprints and building upgrades to further customize your, well… Build I reckon, or rather building process! And every single one of them can be very impactful, changing a tight run to an automatic win, if applied correctly. Changing a tag with Ghost Paint can flip a scenario upside down. Giving a key structure rainbow paint to make it count as every tag can have similar effect. Stacking additional range on your huge scoring piece can turn it into a singular structure that wins you every milestone. It’s a fun system that always feels like your decisions matters.
COMBOLANDS is a great time. It’s in equal part a relaxing game where you can easily kill an hour or two, have a nice little play on lower difficulties, just scoring big and making numbers go up. Or you can engage your thinking a bit more, take on higher difficulties that will require you to do some things right, while still giving enough leeway to not force you into brain burn. With excellent pacing, plenty of unlocks and no-nonsense attitude towards gameplay, it is an excellent distraction for a good bunch of hours and a title I always feel happy to launch whenever I have a bit of time between bigger tasks. Spot on fun with brainy innards.
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