LET'S! REVOLUTION!
- Hubert Spala
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
There are a lot of reasons to like indie games. Projects driven by passion. Artistry and focus on unique presentation. Exploring new and daring ideas that no big corporation would ever risk exploring. But one of the things I enjoy most about this scene is the desire to revive genres and gameplay mechanics few dare to meddle with. Heck, I am still holding my fingers crossed to see VIVA PINATA's spiritual successor come out one day or another! Indies are responsible for the revival of quite a few genres, keeping them going while the Big Nasties of the industry dropped them due to lack of monetary milking potential. RTSs are a fine example! But sometimes it's not about injecting new life into a genre that was seemingly dead for years, but rather reinventing the wheel. Sprinkling fresh ideas into a set of mechanics so old they predate all social media by a long shot.
LET'S! REVOLUTION! is Minesweeper on steroids. And if you are of a certain age, I will safely assume you've played Minesweeper. Either bored out of your mind during a drudgery of a work day. Or at school IT class, letting all that precious knowledge about HTML fly over your head as you press on some tiles to avoid the mines and clear a stage. It's just a thing we all know about, a part of the collective consciousness of Windows users. And so, it was refreshing to see the core concept of that title being recooked into a stylish, roguelike romp.
The game is quick and eager to show you the ropes.
Starting with a peppy Phloxian Trooper, you will get the gist of the basics easily enough. A grid of tiles awaits you, with numbers informing you about the possible roads hiding in adjacency. Each road tile is a risk - it can be empty, and therefore safe. Or it might contain an enemy you need to deal with, one way or another. The key is to find the path dead ends, because there is always something good at the end. A treasure chest with precious gold, a shop or gym for upgrading your kit. And the most important of all - an evil little King whom you revolt against. The chase is on!
Do not be deceived by the perceived simplicity. There is plenty of nuance here to work with. Health is a precious resource and every uncovered enemy is on a tight clock to attack you, no matter where you are. As the time is counting down, you will need to use your limited resources to deal with them using a variety of attacks. Alternatively, ignore them and chase down the King to move to the next stage. Armed with sets of skills and passives, you'll need to use your stamina and gold well, and have some game plan in mind to progress with minimal losses. Saving as many powerful items and being in good health at the end of the run is crucial, as facing the boss (our nasty monarch) will require all of them to breeze through.
Oops! Yeah, you got that right. It's a roguelike! No two runs are the same; levels shift and change, but also your access to skills and upgrades shapes up your capabilities. There is a way to create builds here, but honestly, I never felt a strong connection to the variety of skills and items. They do their job, they craft a custom toolkit for you to play with but... you don't have a vast variety of them to really cook up some outrageous combos or overpowered setups. It's not that kind of game. If anything, they are just little nudges in a direction, fuelling your game plan and helping you make better decisions to get positive outcomes.
That would be pretty much the end of the review here, if not for one fantastic addition. New characters, each playing completely differently from the others. This is the brightest spot in LET'S! REVOLUTION!, it's driving force and core of the fun for me. The mechanics remain the same across the board - uncover key tiles, find the king, juice up your build, stay alive and healthy, and top up on powerful items. But each hero goes about it in a completely different way, reshaping the core experience to feel brand new. Shade hides and covers tiles, doing great damage to hidden enemies. Oracle avoids combat, skimming the grid edges to uncover all safe tiles while using powerful magic and utility to move around. Hunter focuses on cleaning the screen and eliminating threats from afar. And so on, and so on. Each character transforms the experience to such a degree that I boldly claim you get multiple games for the price of one - that's how different their handling feels.
There's a lot to praise the game for. The runs are snappy and quick. The game never feels unfair, and if anything, it merely punishes impatience and lack of focus. Every character is perfectly fine and feels balanced to play with - you might just navigate more towards certain playstyles they offer. There's enough variety here to never really feel the gnawing tooth of repetition. Ever-growing difficulty with each character layers up the challenge, but also hopes you have learned enough of the character toolset to be able to overcome it. It's a great title to boot up for a session, clean a run or fail trying, and happily tune off to do other things - a great, joyful intermission.
One more thing. The presentation. It's pretty dope! I wasn't at first sold on the pastel aesthetics and the colourful, wacky characters, but there's a lot of charm packed into the writing and tutorials. The king is a nasty little fella, with his jibes. Various enemies like to talk soft smack back. And the animations have a hypnotic charm to them. Everything is very crisp in execution, fluid, bouncy and fun. The game might be about revolting against a tyrannical ruler, but the world in question is a slightly zany, high fantasy setup of whimsy and pleasant vibes. Soft tunes and great sound effects follow, with everything gelling together into an overall soft audiovisual experience. It aids the cerebral gameplay well enough!
LET'S! REVOLUTION! might not be the greatest game I played this year. It might not be a masterpiece that blew me away with its mechanical depth or nouvelle concepts. But it still managed to hold my interest, and I can only lay genuine praise for how different each character feels to play. It is not the most challenging puzzler I encountered, but it has just enough bite behind each run to not let you carelessly run through the challenge. It's colourful, it basks in its own fun and knows you might settle into its core loop with delight - even if for a little while. If a bit of tactical puzzle combat is what you're hankering for, you really can't go wrong with this title.
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