The Hungry Gamer's Battleforge: Berserker Mini Preview

0:00 Oo, that looks tasty. Welcome folks to the Hungry Gamer is back with another mini preview. And today we're talking about Battle Forge Berserker from Creative Game Studios. And for this one, I'm doing a mini preview for two reasons. One, the campaign is coming up. I just recently received it, and time is of the essence. And additionally, the prototype that I received was missing a couple of the important pieces, and so I had to to make some proxy pieces for it, and it just doesn't look good. That said, I'll have images of the various important parts of the game that I'm talking about as I go through. Now, with that said, what this is is this is a Norse themed boss battler game that is set up as a series of one-offs. Though with that being said, this is a crowdfunding game, so there is certainly every chance that some kind of campaign thing will be added on or there'll be an expansion or something like that. But as of now, it is a one-off boss battler. And I've gotten the chance to face off against a singular boss, that being Thor. And so what'll happen is you'll have your scenario set up. and the one that I know there's playthroughs out there of, I highly recommend checking out the OneStop Co-op Shop playthrough video.

1:18 It's fantastic, but I'll speak to that one because I know it's already out there and I try to spoil as few things as I can. But in that particular scenario, what you're doing is you're trying to keep the bad guys from lighting these different furnaces around the board. If they do that, you'll wind up losing. If you get killed too many times, you you lose. And if time runs out before you've beaten the bad guy, you wind up losing also. And so each character will be both a character that will have various special abilities that are unique to it. Different ways that it's kind of leveled itself up to start and a spirit that is kind of like your inner soul type thing that's kind of giving you power and if you power it up enough, it'll kind of come out and help you. And that will also give you some various abilities you'll be able to use at some point during the game. really all you got to do to set up the game, you put out the bad guys and everything like that, but the core mechanics of the game are manala. As you can see, you have your player board and on the player board there's different spaces and on your turn, you're going to pick up all the cubes in one space. And depending on how many cubes were there, that's how many times you get to do the actions on that space. And as well, you can actually level up those different spaces, which will then kind of allow you to do better and better things. and then you take the actions and then you mancala style place the cubes out which are going to set you up for other things down the way.

2:42 However, in addition to that, you're going to get to take three actions each turn. And so you can do the manala action. You can actually move two cubes from one space to the next to kind of power up different spaces or you can also take your character actions which you'll be able to kind of recharge as you go through. And all the characters that I got to check out have actions that help other players. And the final thing I'm going to point out on these boards is there is a defense action. And those are actually reactions. So when you get attacked and you take damage, you can actually then activate that right away. Again, pick up all those cubes, do the hot mcala action, and then also kind of reset your board. There's also ways where you can get stunned and when you get stunned, some of your cubes kind of go into the middle of your board and you'll be able to pull those out later on when you get back to your next turn. But that's the core of what you're going to do on your turn. Then when you get to the bad guy's turn, you'll have an event card that'll flip up and each different scenario and bad guy has different events that you kind of shuffle together, make a deck, and they'll do various different things, helpful, not helpful, quasi helpful, whatever it may be. And then the bad guy will do its action. And its action will one activate some of the minions, two out of three. And the minions will do their thing. And each minion acts very differently. They'll have different amounts of damage that they're going to do to you, different ways they attack you, different types of counterattacks they do because I'll talk about dice in just a second. And all of those different things. Oh, and also different

4:13 amounts of experience points that you're going to get because as you're playing through, you're going to be moving up this track on the left side of the board, which will be giving you different bonuses based on your character. But once it gets to the top, it'll wind up going to the right side of the board and to the right side of the board. That's when you get to do the cool stuff, which is your inner animal spirit comes out. Now, I have a couple of them right here because I want to show you how these work. Not from some top down view, but from straight on ahead. Now, and keep in mind that these are clearly just 3D prints. They're going to look way better. But so, here we have one of the characters here. Oh, isn't that nice? But we also have his or it could be a bey or it could be a her. There's different characters. And we have this bear wolf spirit thing here. And so what happens is once you have unlocked it, then you take your miniature and it just drops right on in there. And now this is your mini. That's your guy with the big old bear spirit behind it. Just for kicks, here's one with the eagle spirit. Now, this is obviously 3D printed stuff and not painted, but man, these are going to look dope when they get painted. And you're moving around.

5:29 You're trying to fight and defeat the boss. Now, here's the catch about defeating the boss. You defeat minions, you'll get experience points and all of that, and the minions are always going to keep respawning, but when you fight the boss, and unfortunately, I don't have this. And unfortunately, this is a piece that was missing from my copy, so I can't show you this. And I I'm not going to show you the piece of paper I made with tiny little like crayon marks on it, but it's a big hex base because the boss takes up the whole space. And each side of the hex face is a different color and you have to actually beat each side of that boss in order to actually defeat it. And this different sides correlate with different abilities and things like that. If you're familiar with oathsworn and those bosses, it is similar to that as you're kind of beating each one of them. You usually kind want to spread out that damage, but you're going to play through either you beat the boss, you run out of time, you get killed too much, or the bad objective gets accomplished. And so that's kind of how this game works. So what do I like about this game? First thing, I love this manala usage. I think it is. I mean, manala is fun anyway.

6:31 It's very satisfying and because even with sometimes you don't have a great turn, which and all boss battlers and all dungeon crawls, sometimes you have substandard turns. But in this one, a subpar turn leads to a cooler turn later on. That's really cool. But you also have the ability to kind of move the cubes around and you're going to get to do three actions every turn. So, it's rare that you feel like you have a turn that was just a bust. And I love that. I love the way you can build up the way the different actions work. Maybe you want this one to be really, really heavy defense and you're kind of piling up cubes there. So, you're tanking these hits. Very, very clever the way it works. It's very satisfying every single time I play. To be fair, I haven't played a lot cuz I haven't had it for a long time, but so far it's been very, very satisfying. In the same vein, the ways you can combo the spirits and the characters really satisfying. It allows for fewer components in this box, fewer things that you need, but still you're getting a very different experience every time you combo these characters together. That's really cool as well.

7:38 And then finally, I like how quick and easy it is to activate the bad guys. It's very simple. You flip over your event. Hopefully, you get something good. You flip over the boss card, you get a little flavor text. It says, "Activate these two types of bad guys. They move and they activate." Really, really simple. And then along with that, I'll say the actual attacking. And I should have talked about this earlier, but I didn't. Is just very simple dice rolling. Your basic dice are going to have three sides with a single hit, a side with a double hit. One side will have a counterattack, a skull, which means you're going to get hit back. And the rest are going to be blank. And it is quite easy to actually reroll dice. You can never reroll the counterattacks, but really easy to do that. And as you're leveling up, you're going to get more dice. You can pick dice that will give you healing abilities as you go, which is really, really cool. Or some that just hit really hard, but still have counterattacks. All around. It is a very clean, wellthoughtout, and fairly streamlined mechanic system. It just very streamlined, and I really enjoy it. And I haven't played a boss battler dungeon crawl style game that uses something like it. And that is always really exciting to me. Obviously, I'm very excited about the potential of those spirits kind of nesting on top of the heroes. That's super cool. I Yeah, that's just super clever and cool. That is very very inspired and the gimmick is great.

9:06 The next thing I'll say is as it is in Oath Sworn, the way you're battling the boss and trying to position yourselves to hit different sides at different times is really satisfying because it forces you to not just fall into what can happen sometimes in various dungeon crawls and stuff in a big boss where you just plant yourself and they're there and you're just boom boom boom hitting back and forth. To that end, the boss, at least Thor that I've played with, is constantly moving around. It doesn't It doesn't quite teleport around the board, but it kind of teleports around the board. It's always moving all over the place. So, there's constant movement and it feels exciting. This is not just a two boxer standing in front of each other and just slugging it out. And so, all of that I really, really think works well. So, what are my quibbles with the game? The first thing is obviously I haven't seen a lot of stuff. I haven't seen other bosses. I don't know what all the other scenarios are going to do. I don't know how much stuff is going to be there as add-ons that you have to get.

10:12 What's going to be in the main box? Lots of things that I don't know about. And because of that, I don't know how satisfying all the different scenarios are going to be. Are they going to all be different enough to make this worthwhile? Are the different bosses going to feel different enough to make it worthwhile? I can't answer that because I haven't seen them. And then the next thing that I'll say is as someone that loves dungeon crawls and adventure games and story, you're not getting that here. As I said, this is as I know it a oneoff game. You're going to fight a thing. You're going to be done. Little scenario, but really there's no through line. You're not carrying anything over. You're not trying to stop some overarching whatever. It's just straight oneoffs. And that is either intensely exciting for you or a major disappointment for you depending on your point of view. I love the ability to do one-offs. So, I am hesitantly excited about it again just because I don't know what all those other scenarios are. But really, that's actually it for me as far as my quibbles go with obviously I'll throw out the caveat that depending on what the different add-ons and stuff are, this could be a huge, huge, huge, massive game. Now, my little prototype is a very reasonably sized normal box.

11:32 Clearly, it's not going to be that small, but how big of a game are we talking about in the end? I just don't know. And shelf space to me is very, very important. But there you have it, folks. I think if you are into boss battlers and you like Oath Sworn and I have to keep calling out Oath Sworn because that directional attack, you have to hit all these different sides of the boss and that Mala thing is interesting to you, then this is a game I really think you should check out. See if the different scenarios are going to be interesting to you. See if the way the characters come together is interesting to you. But with that said, if that manala thing is exciting to you, which it is to me, then I think this is one that you absolutely have to check out. So, there you have it, folks. As always, if you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful, wonderful day.