Squad Busters 9+

This is a really interesting game from supercell, and seems like a bit of a departure from the rest of their titles. Most of the time there’s a team-based competitive aspect to their main games, but that’s not here (yet, at least). The gameplay loop is pretty simple, but it is absolutely NOT completely dependant on luck as many people are saying. A there is a lot of luck involved, but the overall goal of each match is to place in the top 5 of the 10 players. Your job is not to *win*, but to *not lose* which involves quickly adapting your strategy to the options that are presented to you. Maybe you need to take Greg because the loot on the map is running low, or maybe you need to take some chickens because you don’t stand a chance in a fight and need an option to run away (hog rider my beloved). You’ll typically be transitioning through a spectrum of fighting to farming, depending on what your options are. Speaking of options that are presented to you, the current progression system. You start of with a set of characters and slowly unlock more as you go along. There seems to be some kind of soft cap with unlocking characters from chests, could be to improve the odds of you levelling up characters you own, or could be to try and get you to buy the characters in the shop for around 100k gold each (which would likely take a couple weeks per character). Each game you play has a random selection of 5 characters of each rarity (common, rare, epic) and can have any character that is available to you. What this means is that if there are 5 epics that you have available via your world but are not unlocked, you could have a game where your epic character list won’t have anything available to you. What’s more is that chests in a match give you an option of 3 characters, and if it rolls a character you don’t have unlocked then it takes up a chest slot and you can’t select them. Basically, sometimes chests will just be unlucky and only give you 1 option, the chance of this being lower the more characters you have unlocked. However, again, there seems to be a soft cap on character unlocking, so we’ll see what’s up with that when it goes global. Overall though, the act of levelling up your characters is satisfying and fun because it’s not strictly stat boosts, they’re new mechanics that give the character more identity. As for “oh this is p2w”, the game is about being above average, not winning. You can absolutely place above average in many games with baby characters, though having more options with stronger abilities certainly helps you place higher more consistently. Anyways I’m done yapping. It’s a different game that I didn’t expect to like as much as I do. There’s enough macro and micro gameplay that it feels satisfying and engaging, but not too overly competitive that it breeds toxicity. I’m excited to see where this goes and wish the best of luck to the devs for a successful global launch.

Good👏👏👏