Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• MonsteRL puts you in the shoes of a Poke, erm, I mean Monster collector - every playthrough generates 52 random monsters, and lets you explore about 20 dungeon levels to catch them and use them in your own team. The game overall is a bit grindy - you gotta dive several levels, find fill up your 6 slots of monsters, and come back out (most likely using the Escape Rope) to heal them, deposit the worse ones, exchange found crystals for items, and repeat this several times. Unfortunately, the levels are not particularly varied, and the procedurally generated Monsteropedia might or might not be enough motivator to explore everything. In terms of controls, I think my keyboard really suffered from 10,000 clicks (pressing the arrow keys down does not move the character; you gotta press separately on each move), and I would have appreciated the heal item on some sort of hotkey instead of inventory access. The game has quite some depth in terms of combat (elemental types rock-paper-scissors, leveling, and even Evolutions!), but the balance in the current version isn't tuned well enough to really need to explore it - the most I did was spawn an elemental monster to combat a vulnerable type, and gave up on that after my starter monster evolved. I think what this game really needs is some kind of rewards system for unlocking more monsters - maybe a small quest system that forces you to evolve a couple monsters before descending to lowest level?
• A good looking, fun game. Despite its repetitive and grindy gameplay, I could not stop playing until I captured that legendary creature. A bit more options to intervene in combat would help the game to really shine.
• Oh, cool, a Pokemon themed roguelike! It took me some getting used to not being able to actually fight enemies and having to think about my monsters' health that I got wiped out a few times before capturing my first monster, lol! I think it would be interesting if you could choose to get involved in combat, but that would aggro the enemy monsters causing them to attack you as well as your own monsters, an interesting tactical decision! I find it odd that you added an endless gameplay mode without the option to save, but I can only assume you ran out of time! But yeah, a monster catching roguelike, that's definitely something new! Cool! The random monster names are a nice touch... 😉 Oh! One thing I really liked - monsters only gain XP from killing enemy monsters, not when you interrupt their battle to capture them. This leads to an interesting (and cruel) decision of, do I want that monster for myself, or is it weak enough that I can sacrifice it for my own monster's benefit?