Game file / ROGUE BY ROGUEDecktamer
Deck-building meets monster catching in this turn-based roguelike. Recruit enemy cards to your party as you dive into the depths of the abyss. Will you kill them or will you tame them?
Why this score?
Original text · Simplified Chinese
把招募与技能移植放进永久损耗的队伍中，提供了强策略取舍；捕获运气和恢复偏科是主要约束。
Core gameplay
Weight 25%8.5 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
根据资料评估：每个生物的动作选择、执行顺序和长期存活相连，战斗有紧凑的解题感；连续消耗会加重规划负担。
Builds & strategy
Weight 25%8.5 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
根据资料评估：能力迁移和捕获替换创造丰富组合，治疗与捕获共用资源构成实质取舍；回血坦克等路线又因持续损耗过强。
Replayability
Weight 20%7.5 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
根据资料评估：不同捕获对象和技能转移要求调整阵容，重复事件与有限后期修饰让长期新局变化小于初次探索。
Randomness & fairness
Weight 20%6.0 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
根据资料评估：多数战斗可算清行动，但关键捕获失败和恢复资源短缺可能让后段损失难以补救。
Polish & usability
Weight 10%6.5 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
根据资料评估：生物设计与图鉴能帮助识别单位，能力滚动、奖励解释和特效高负载反馈仍增加使用阻力。
- Reviewer
Original text · Simplified Chinese
Rogue by Rogue · AI 资料评测- Version reviewed
Original text · Simplified Chinese
具体构建未知；以所引资料描述的版本为准
Scope and limitations
Original text · Simplified Chinese
基于收录评论与官方产品说明的主观资料评测，未试玩；原始玩家评论及所有补丁未逐条重新核验。未复核所有难度的捕获概率及性能；不给尚在路线图中的改进计分。
Review sources 02
- 01Archived materialView archived external material ↓
Original text · Simplified Chinese
收录评论与社区资料（2026-10-01 快照）
使用 作者观点摘要 的具体玩法优缺点（Tier list Part 5 (2026)）以及 玩家好评与批评；只引用这些资料的具体反馈，不采纳旧等级或外部分数。
- 02Web sourceView original ↗
Original text · Simplified Chinese
Decktamer — Steam 官方商店页
2026-10-08 访问。确认了敌人捕获入牌组、死亡永久移除、每回合动作和跨生物转移能力。该页不作为实测性能或缺陷已修复的证据。
Video reviews
Reviews and deep dives from YouTube and Bilibili, in every language. Open the original video to watch.
Other voices, for reference.
Archived third-party reviews and community material may refer to different versions. External opinions and ratings are presented separately; consult the original videos for their full context.
Community discussion
A turn-based roguelike deckbuilder where you tame enemy creatures into your deck, sacrifice or evolve them, and transfer mutated abilities between monsters while descending a Lovecraftian abyss.
Decktamer launched on Steam on Oct 27, 2025 (Horizon Edge, published by Assemble Entertainment) and sits at Very Positive, about 86% of roughly 2,400 Steam reviews. Players love the hand-drawn creature art, the taming-and-mutation hook and the tactical combat. The recurring complaint is a steep, sometimes punishing difficulty curve with attrition and RNG. Even many positive reviews carry caveats about balance, and several negative reviews call it a good game that is not yet tuned. It is a full release, not early access, and the dev appears active: players mention a published roadmap, community creature-submission events and difficulty rework. Critic coverage is thin: Metacritic shows one critic review (Softpedia 85), too few for a Metascore, and OpenCritic could not be confirmed.
What players praise
- Striking, surreal, Lovecraftian hand-drawn creature and card art (reportedly by essentially one artist/dev), cited in nearly every positive review
- Taming mechanic adds real tension: monsters you tame are permanent-until-dead, so you weigh healing vs taming a stronger unit vs sacrificing
- Mutation/syringe system lets you move abilities between creatures, enabling inventive and sometimes broken synergies (e.g. speed-buff stacking snowballs)
- Deep tactical, puzzle-like combat; reviewers describe it as highly deterministic and min-max friendly
- Moody soundtrack and atmosphere, plus well-written bestiary and explorer diary lore entries that reward collecting new creatures
- Good value at $15.99 with many modes, bosses, secret bosses and high replayability for players who click with it
- Responsive developer who engages the community, runs creature-submission events and published a roadmap to address complaints
What players criticize
- Difficulty is widely called overtuned, even on the lowest settings; one reviewer cited under 41% of owners beating the medium difficulty
- Attrition problem: your creatures do not heal between fights while enemies do, so regen/lifesteal tanks dominate and glass-cannon or gimmick builds become liabilities
- Healing items and taming items are the same resource, forcing painful tradeoffs that feel punishing rather than fun to some
- RNG dependence at higher difficulties: missed tames, weak event rolls or no synergistic creatures late in a run can make it unwinnable
- Performance and optimization complaints: high GPU use, card shine effects with many syringes, older PCs struggling
- Some UI clunkiness and unclear unlocks/rewards (scrolling through abilities, battle reward clarity)
- Windows only on Steam (no Mac/Linux) and only partial controller support
- Limited long-term depth: some reviewers feel they have seen most of what the game offers after a few runs, citing too few ascension-style modifiers
Distinctive features
- Creature-catching as the deck-building engine: enemy cards are recruited into your deck rather than picked from reward pools
- Nuzlocke-like permanence: units that die are gone, and low-tier tames are treated as disposable fodder to trade up
- Ability extraction and mutation system (syringes) that moves abilities between monsters, which affects how creatures evolve
- Enemies have non-static moves and abilities, so the same monster species can appear stronger or weaker in later stages
- Lore delivered through a bestiary and explorer diary tied to the monsters you tame
- Turn-based battles closer to tactical puzzles or XCOM-style positioning than typical card-draw combat
Divided opinions
- Difficulty: some say it is fair and rewarding once you adopt the sacrifice mindset, others say it is brutal or unbalanced even on easy
- RNG vs determinism: some praise it as deterministic and min-maxable, others find late-game RNG and unreliable tames decisive
- Run length and pacing: slow deliberate turns are a feature for some and draining for others
- Disposable units: seen as fresh tension by some and as a lack of long-term attachment by others
Repetition and friction
- Runs feel draining: roughly 8 encounters per depth, each needing heavy thinking with little breathing room between them
- Very long turns and runs (turns of several minutes; Very Hard runs around 1.5-2 hours; Endless waves taking about 15 min each due to effect text)
- No sense of attachment or build identity: every creature eventually gets scrapped, so some players feel nothing builds on itself like in Slay the Spire
- Counterpoint complaint that levels are too short to assemble a deck, leaving finished levels feeling unsatisfying
- Losing runs teaches little, because the next run's creatures and events differ so much
Hoped-for improvements
- Retune the difficulty curve and give better guidance for learning higher difficulties, where reviewers say there is no reference for what works
- Add more between-battle activity and events, such as a Slay-the-Spire-style run map; events are few and their order is random
- Offer a toggle to turn off or speed up effect explanations and animations, especially for Endless mode where battles drag on
- Make the undo/redo on easier modes more useful; it only returns to before combat and does not refund items or placements
- Add more content and meta-progression: more ascension-style modifiers, since extra modes are seen as only added harshness, plus more bosses and events
- Broaden viable builds so that not only high-HP regen units work, and add optimization options
- Additional language support (Russian requested repeatedly) and platform support
Metacritic needs 4 critic reviews for a Metascore and currently has 1 (Softpedia 85); user score 8.3 from only 8 ratings. Steam: Very Positive, with the scraped page showing 89% and a recent-30-day 88% positive; the local dataset shows 86.2% of 2,409. Early negative reviews focused on difficulty and balance, and several reviewers reference a difficulty rework, a published roadmap and developer assurances to rebalance, so reception has been partly shaped by ongoing patches. Commercial data is unavailable: steam-revenue-calculator shows $0 and SteamSpy shows 0-20k owners, so no reliable sales figure. Limitation: web search was unavailable (session budget exhausted), so this is based on Steam reviews, the Steam store and forum, and Metacritic; OpenCritic, Reddit and outlet reviews could not be read, and Steam patch notes were not retrievable.
Community sources
- Top helpful positive and negative English Steam reviews (primary source for most bullets) ↗
- Local Steam metadata: appid 2870340, developer/publisher, release date, price, review counts, SpyOwners and revenue-calculator estimate ↗
- Steam store page: description, tags, review summary, languages ↗
- Steam discussion forum: bugs, PvP/DLC/workshop requests, Russian localization, generative AI question ↗
- Metacritic page: no Metascore yet, 1 critic review (Softpedia 85), user 8.3 from 8 ratings ↗
- Revenue estimate page (shows $0.00, effectively no data), via local data snapshot ↗
- Decktamer demo listing referenced in candidate data ↗
Archived creator commentary 1
Third-party summaries based on automatic captions may contain transcription or interpretation errors.
Tier list Part 5 (2026)
Deck Tamer is a board-centric deck-building roguelike where you fight beasts, capture them into your team, and extract their actives and passives to move onto other monsters. Combat is simple: place beasts, pick an ability each, and they attack automatically left to right. He finds it a deeply strategic, under-the-radar game that more people should know about. He beat it, calls it challenging, and places it in a really solid A tier, describing it as one of the best deck builders of recent years.
What the creator praises
- Very simple core gameplay (place beast, choose ability) that produces extensive, domino-effect strategy
- Fair encounters: you always fight things you could field yourself, so nothing feels unfair
- Capture-and-extract system (syringes, even mid-combat) creates unique self-made synergies and varied runs
- Pokemon-like tension of weakening enemies to capture them rather than kill them
- Every monster stays relevant, even weak starters, since they can absorb blows; constant deck churn
- Undo/redo mechanic that scales down with difficulty, good for teaching then committing
- Strong audio-visuals with attack art popping out; not AI generated; single final boss makes no-capture feel justified
Issues raised by the creator
- Animation/zoom is a bit claustrophobic; he wishes it could zoom out to appreciate visuals
- Only two path choices before each battle; he wants a third
- Capture chance RNG (e.g. 80%) can abruptly end a deep run, which feels bad at high levels
- Losing monsters permanently feels rough at first and takes getting comfortable with
- Challenging; requires wrapping your head around many possibilities
Design observations
- Monster-collecting plus extracting abilities/passives between monsters for self-made synergies
- Forced use and disposal of monsters and consumables teaches you not to hoard
- Limited redos as a core, difficulty-scaled mechanic
- Starter monsters always retain value
