Forced Showdown – Drone Invasion PC Review

The Drone Invasion DLC comes with a new playable hero, and extends the game in just about every way. It adds some new cards for the Hearthstone-esque buff system, a new futuristic stage design complete with robotic enemies (hence the ‘drone invasion’), an extra campaign known as the ‘Mentor’s Maze’ and more. Settsu, the new mech-suit hero, is a long range fighter who feels like a much easier pick-up-and-play character for newcomers. The great damage output and ability to stay away from the hordes of enemies surrounded by death-traps certainly feel like it’s lowering the difficulty, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing due to the randomness of the game. What I mean by that is it’s still pretty easy to find yourself having the odds stacked against you immensely through a mixture of difficult enemies, stage-layouts, traps, and boss powers when none of the cards you desperately need are coming though.

So, even though the original problem with the randomness isn’t fixed by the add-on, it at least helps the game feel fresh again for a little while. Although, even then the new stuff rapidly becomes the norm and you’re left playing the same old rooms and fighting the same old enemies to reach the same old bosses, over and over until you die or win. Then you start again. The core gameplay is still the problem, where every individual run feels too familiar to hold a player’s interest despite the use of different decks and characters. The expansion can only do so much to stave off that inevitable, repetitive feeling and the new campaign ‘Mentor’s Maze’ doesn’t help too much either as it is literally a maze comprised of levels in every direction that one must navigate through to find a secret boss. It can already sometimes feel like a chore to chug through the levels in the normal campaigns so you can imagine what it’s like to not know where to go or where you are in a labyrinth of same-y battles

In all, the expansion does exactly what you’d expect from a cheap or perhaps even free update but unfortunately this one currently comes at half the price of the original Forced Showdown and I’m afraid I simply can’t recommend it at that price. Whilst it does add to every mechanic in the game it does so in the laziest way possible – by trying nothing new and instead simply piling on more things for the random number generator to chew on. I’m just hoping that the entire team isn’t working on the DLC for this title and we’ll see something new from BetaDwarf sometime in the future.