NobleGamer Popup Dungeon Review

I can recommend this game to anyone who enjoys single player party based or board game type of RPGs, but anyone who is hardcore about tactics should do some research before buying. I thought it was important to write a review to make it clear what this game is NOT and praise the game for what it is. I will revise the review when I get through the campaign. Let me start with what this game is NOT: -Roguelike/lite: There is no permadeath, and if the entire party dies then the current encounter/battle can be retried. As long as one character survives an encounter, the party continues on with full health restored and any characters that died come back to life. With most game modes other than Endless, you even have the option to Retry the current map. -Card or deck building game: Tactical options and abilities from characters & items are illustrated through cards, but there is no deck of cards to draw to a hand or build from. The cards could easily be replaced by simple buttons or potatoes. -Big dungeon looter: There may be a few dungeon items or abilities that are accessed through certain props in the level, or are granted after finishing a map/level, but it doesn't have tons of loot like some other dungeon crawlers. What you need to know about what the game is: +An easy to play party based tactical RPG with an ample progression curve has something for everyone +Any character, game map, or game mode can be created to suit your preferences, or use anything that the community has created +The stock characters, campaigns, maps, etc are plentiful with a great & amusing look and feel with many parodies/riffs on things within geek culture. +The amount of characters combined with their unique different builds provides a lot of variety in terms of finding something that fits your play style or whatever you want to try. Filtering character types is convenient as well. +I love the option to trigger abilities or attacks plus movement with just a double click, or manually move characters and manually target whoever I want. I do manual actions only about 10% of the time. +The ability to auto assign and auto sell loot is great 95% of the time, where I will only do it manually if the tradeoffs don't fit my strategy for a character +Auto balancing of all the things based on difficulty works well ?Tactical options and variety depend on selected characters and loot earned. This is why some hardcore players may not like this game as much. -"Range" stat is sometimes misleading because the effective range of an attack might be longer because some attacks are projectiles and not an AOE, yet not noted as projectiles. ?Between runs, progression consists of players using coins earned to buy randomly generated charms that provide a variety of buffs. Players can also combine charms to create new charms. The player can "wear" up to 5 charms at a time and can store as many as they would like. ?There are a variety of difficulties and campaign types, but... -Campaign difficulty versus the difficulty in the game settings versus difficulty from charms equipped is confusing. If I select Normal difficulty in the Campaign but I have Hard difficulty in game settings, and my charm necklace is considered Painted class, then what does that all mean? -Different game modes don't explain up front the differences in charm rewards or the ability to retry. I think Endless mode does NOT allow map retry after death but most others do. Arena and Top 10 modes provide a charm reward that supplements whatever gold you earn.