Bossgard

Review

(Early Access Review. As an early access release, you may experience bugs; content, interface and optimization changes. If you are not excited to play the title in its current state and to help support the title to full release by reporting bugs and requesting additional content, you may want to wait for further development.)

Set in an alternate reality, Vikings from around the world gather together to defeat the biggest, the baddest Titans the world has ever seen. You will have weapons, powers, and upgrades at your disposal. As well as the bosses, they have their own sets of power to wreak havoc on the Vikings. As a 1 vs 5 brawler, one player will get to play as the boss to take on the Vikings.  The Bosses have 2 additional powers over the Vikings, 1 of which is healing. All powers are timed for both sides and must recharge between uses. On entering the lobby, each player will choose their role. When everyone has hit the ready up button the game will start and give us a choice between 2 maps; you have to vote for your choice of map to play in, and the majority vote wins! From here it's game on - you will need to learn all the characters’ special powers and use them wisely if you are to defeat the Titans. Work as a team or fail separately. Same if you're a Titan; use your powers wisely or be overpowered by the 5 Vikings. I would recommend you play the tutorials to learn games mechanics.

Released and self-published on Apr 18, 2019, by the developer Sand Dollar Studio, this is their second release on Steam. This indie title is a 5v1 co-op brawler. It features a brilliant cartoonish low poly art style that is very well-done, and the animation work is stunning as well. The game has a nice score & sound effects that bring the battle to life. It supports up to 6 players (bots will fill in for unfilled slots). Online and Local couch potato support - mix it up with both, as you wish. Even if you have nobody on to play, you can play with bots (the A.I. seemed very well-done and I had no issues for solo play). So play it your way! Currently, there are 10 maps, 10 characters (5 melees, 5 ranged) & 5 Bosses.  With an upgrade system for your characters, as you play, you’ll earn XP that will unlock items for each of the characters as you play them.

In Online play, there are 3 options; Join (opens the server browser), Host & Kustom (both are a private host (where do we host public games?); both work the same as the local host. In Local, you can do a quick match or set up all the settings individually in custom. For the quick match, you will notice a small icon to the left center of the lobby, which allows you to alter the A.I. settings for both the Vikings and Bosses. For settings, it covers the standard audio controls, and the video has gamma, resolution, fullscreen and v-sync. You can view the bindings for the keyboard and controller, but they are not re-bindable. There is also a Streamer tab; you set up your stream from in-game, allowing your followers to interact with the game directly (I did not test this feature).  There’s even a Privacy tab, though I seem to need a code to unlock it (posting in the discussions thread for it). Do not worry, if needed, just hit the handy reset button to set everything back to default.

There are a few areas that need some polish. The U.I. has a few default areas that need cleaning up that are not used, which has no effect on the game play at all. More clarification on the leveling system would also be very useful. And it could use more content as far as bosses and maps, which they are working on adding in as free updates. The server populations of course are low numbers as the title is just releasing; this will take just a little time for the game to get players. With as much fun as we have had so far, this should not be an issue. Although there is some work to be done yet, they do have a solid game in place already for early access. I cannot say that we had any issues with crashing or disconnects.

What a fantastic little indie title! I love a great coop game; it is one of my passions, along with exceptional art styles, of which the title has both. The 6 players, 5 vs a boss was really fun. We did a mixture of friends games mixed with public players and had a great time. The graphics really are well-done, I simply loved the artwork in the game. The imaginative Bosses are as fun to watch as they are to play, and the animation work is top notch and sets the title apart from other titles in the genre. I really do not understand the upgrade system much yet as I have not unlocked a lot yet trying out all the characters; it would have been nice to have a little more guidance in this area of the game. Maybe a small section added to the tutorial explaining the system. I am looking forward to seeing additional bosses added, some more maps, even a few additional characters would be nice. This will give the title much more replayability (these are already in progress). They do say they will not have paid DLC or Microtransactions.

Review written by DamageInc.for Zeepond.com!