With art by Marlowe Dobbe and music by Chipzel, Dicey Dungeons’ style really shines. The game plays out like a game show where your character, an adventurer turned into an anthropomorphic die. You descend down six levels, each with stronger enemies and more complex level layouts all culminating in a boss battle at the bottom. Enemies are varied in their design, from wizards and space marines to snowmen and vacuums, each with their own distinct gameplay mechanics.

You start by choosing one of six RPG class archetypes: Warrior, Thief, Robot, Jester, Inventor and Witch. Once inside the dungeon, you choose your path to make your way to the stairs down to the next level. Along the way are one on one battles with enemies, shops where you buy upgrades with your gold form defeated enemies, health recover items and treasure in the form of new card abilities or chances to upgrade your existing cards via forges.

One interesting mechanic is you have an active set of cards and a backpack of extra cards. Only so many cards can be active at a time which leads to editing your cards and making potential combos out of what you you’ve plundered thus far. Each new card you find or upgrade to an existing card has you wanting to rework your active deck and strategies. A very cool game component indeed.

Ranging from the warrior on the low end of the difficulty scale to the jester on the high end, each character has a individual play style. The thief gets to steal a random enemy card every turn, the Witch creates a spellbook to summon powerful cards and the Robot gains dice by playing a push-your-luck blackjack game. On top of that, each of the six playable characters has multiple scenarios to complete.

Our playthrough at PAX and our time playing after the show has us super excited for this game. It’s a very unique concept and has enough variety to keep you busy for a while. We’re certain more tweaks and content will be added before the launch to.

You can access the very stable alpha here which also gets you access to the full game once it comes out. Also you can check out the Steam page and add it to your wishlist here.

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The main conceit of the game pits you in control as Mayday and Zuke, fighting as an indie rock band against an EDM empire. You can take control of both characters, using the shoulder buttons to switch between them. My playtime had me going through a small tutorial mission and then a boss battle against a large, hulking DJ. The action was tight and the move set was varied. The boss battle was a multi-staged event with specific attack patterns you need to avoid and then find the opening to go on the offensive. Overall the battle was a fun fight. There is also a base building/customization feature to this game as well but it wasn’t present for me to demo at this time.

The visual and audio style of No Straight Roads had very slick, hip feel. It felt very much like the Jet Set Radio series with it’s bright, colorful visuals and upbeat, bass heavy soundtrack and that is definitely a good thing. No Straights Roads is set to launch later this year on PC and PS4.

Everyone in the game is a one hit kill including you. If you die you rewind to the beginning of that section. You keep repeating that section until you get to the end. We were given two missions during our demo time. Both had varied level design and clever enemy placement. The environment as well as objects within the environment can all be used to your advantage. Laser switches, breakable doors, bottles, vases and more can all be used to yourt advantage. Beyond that, you have a time stop mechanic called Chronos, which allows you to carefully plan out your attack all with a cool visual flair. Overall the controls felt tight and the level layouts fair. A little bit of practice and you’ll get a good idea of how beat that particular section.

In between missions, you’ll have some downtime at home. You can make some tea, watch tv and sleep to advance the story. Your character, dubbed the Dragon, has some nightmares whilst sleeping that may or may not be exacerbated by all the murder you’re committing. A visit to the psychiatrist who helps you work through your nightmares plays out after each mission as well. Your dialogue choices affect what parts of the story that gets revealed. All of this is a refreshing break from all the action and fits perfectly in the game world.

We here at Rated G are sufficiently excited to delve into the game world of Katana Zero which drops on PC and Switch April 18th.

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Download Episode