I love myself a good rogue lite card battler and without any doubt, one of the best games in the genre still is the game that really started all the Hype - Slay the Spire. In case you haven't played it, you either really don't care for the genre at all or you probably are living under a rock. Either way, it's one of the best games I've ever played and I can only encourage you to give it a shot. I did an article on the game back in 2021 and it's as relevant as it's been 2 years ago. With more than 330 hours played in the game, I was more than delighted when I found a whole new world of Slay the Spire content in the form of Slay The Spire Downfall - a fan made expansion to the game that's totally free and offers a ton of new content waiting for you to check it out
That's right, if you own Slay the Spire, you can get the whole expansion for free over on Steam. But what exactly does the expansion offer? Well, a ton. First of all, there's a new character, The Hermite added to the mix, allowing you to get back into the original game with a completely new play style. The character is coming with a full set of new cards and character specific relics and is really well crafted. If you didn't know it was a fan made addition to the game, you wouldn't be able to tell any difference in quality compared to the original characters.
That's not all, though, the main feature of the expansion is the name giving Downfall mode. In the normal Slay the Spire you climb the Spire in order to defeat the heart. In Downfall, you descend the Spire in order to defend it from these pesky heroes that are trying to kill your beloved heart. Now it obviously wouldn't make much sense to send the original heroes down the spire to fight themselves, so you are instead playing as one of the games bosses! Right now, there's a total of 8 different bosses to choose from and once again, each of these is coming with its own cards, relics, and a very different game style that's inspired by what the boss is usually doing in a normal play through.
All of your favorites are there. For example there's the Slime boss, spawning endless slime minions to stop the heroes. The collector who is build a second deck from the enemies he's defeating along the way. The Snecko, that has access to an ever changing arsenal of cards from all kinds of different characters. Or, my favorite, the Gremlin gang, a party made up of the 5 different Gremlins present in the game, where each Gremlin only has a tiny amount of hitpoints and you constantly have to shuffle around your monsters so none of them dies. There are additional unlocks for each of these characters so you can easily spend another few hundred hours on Slay the Spire Downfall before you've seen it all.
Overall, the boss characters are a bit more complicated than the heroes you know from the base game. That's not to say that they are complicated just for the sake of it, though. Each has its own interesting mechanics and mastering them does take quite some practice. Nevertheless, it's really worth it to play a few runs with each character. Just as with the original heroes, there are several viable play styles for each of the bosses and even after dozens of runs you will still find new combos and synergies for each of the bosses.
As mentioned above, in Downfall you are racing down the Spire in order to stop the heroes and thus, at the end of each level, you will face one of the original heroes. These fights are indeed the only part I'm not too fond about with an otherwise amazing game. The heroes each have their own artifacts, a mana pool, and play cards from their hand from left to right. While this may sound interesting at first, it's simply a bit too much to really take in. Reading what every card and artifact does and then figuring out what the best play would be simply takes too long and I usually just end up looking at the amount of damage I can expect and then just play around it. In this instance, a bit more simplicity would have gone a long way. While I did loose a match or two because I didn't see some big combo coming in the next round, I usually just overpower those heroes even without paying too much attention.
Other than that, though, the game is absolutely awesome and since it's free to pick up there really is no reason not to give it a shot. I've already sunk close to 100 hours into the expansion and I'm far from done. As with the original Slay the Spire, you can expect to take somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes for a run, making the game the perfect option if you have some free time you want to spend on gaming without things getting out of hand too much. So if you haven't played it yet, head over to Steam and get your copy, chances are you'll be rather busy for the next few days...
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!