"Active DBG: Brave's Rage" is the rather clumsily titled new roguelike deck builder with a twist from developer ISVR and published by Astrolabe.
ISVR are a team of developers from Beijing, IS for Internet Stars and I'm guessing the VR is for virtual reality? As their only previous release was a rather poorly received VR game back in 2018 (PC and PSVR) called Animal Force.
Going to hazard another guess that Active DBG is "deck building game" but will just call it "Brave's Rage" from here on out.
Ambiguity seems to be a recurring theme that continues beyond acronyms and into the actual game.
I must make it abundantly clear that this is an early access preview and the final, full release may differ further down the line.
Brave's Rage at it's heart, is a roguelike deck builder that puts it's own twist on the genre with RPG elements and a kind of real time combat element (the active in 'Active DBG').
You take control of an initial fantasy character from the usual archetypes of tank, dps, ranged etc.
From here you explore a series of small tiled maps, one tile at a time. Revealing encounters, choices, treasures and additional party members, as you make your way to defeat a boss and on to the next map.
At the end of the series of maps a final boss encounter and a reward (a new character unlock).
There is a tutorial but I found it only sightly helpful, there seems to be such a mash of mechanics that the game somewhat gets away from itself. At times, especially with new characters, it gets very confusing and unclear.
I like that the developers are trying to expand on the traditional deck building genre, but for me personally, I find the direction they took to be a big miss.
I'm a huge fan of deck builders and CCG and was really looking forward to Brave's Rage but it just didn't click for me. I found myself bouncing off it repeatedly before finally giving up.
One if the main attractions I enjoy with this genre, is a more chilled out approach, tactical planning, building synergies in your deck. Brave's Rage essentially adds 'Soulslike' parry windows to this formula and it just doesn't work.
The action element ruins the deck building experience and there's just too little of an action aspect to draw in a live RTS fan. It just fails to land it's idea in either camp.
Gameplay aside, Braves Rage is graphically very pretty to look at, it's very well presented.
Although features state full controller support, there are a lot of occasions where only M&K prompts are given, so there's need of a quick button mash to find the corresponding controller command, these are not always that intuitive.
This genre really lends itself to cloud or remote play on a handheld device, or now ideally SteamDeck. However the UI and in particular, the tooltips, are very small and there is currently no option to scale this up.
Lastly the crisp and polished visuals are somewhat let down by the audio, especially the voice work.
Anyone who has ever watched Chinese TV, sports commentary or listened to radio or KTV will know that audio usually gets the 'chabuduo' treatment (roughly translates to "meh, that'll do").
Unfortunately Brave's Rages falls into this pitfall. Voices sound like they've been recorded into a phone app, various quality and wildly different sound levels, with popping and distortion. Thankfully there isn't too much of this, mostly just for the character's ultimate skills. These are also all in Mandarin, so hopefully might be improved during later Western localisation.
Brave's Rage is definitely one to keep an eye on if the overall premise appeals, but it's extremely 'marmite' (love it or hate it, it's a acquired taste).
It's $10 on Steam, but might be worth waiting to see if they bring out a demo in one of the Steam events to give it a try first.
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