Alina of the Arena

Roguelites are a very popular genre right now, and Alina of the Arena is the latest addition to this category. The game combines roguelite, trading cards, and a hexagon stage to battle on to keep things interesting. In this game, you play as a gladiator named Alina. You must defeat your enemies to survive. The game has both a beginner “Rookie” option, and a “brawler” version for harder gameplay.

An interesting mix of iconic games

Alina of the Arena combines aspects of popular games Slay The Spire and Into the Breach. The game uses both the trading card aspect of Slay the Spire as well as the hex based attacks that require some puzzling and strategy. The result is a fairly interesting game that requires you to think carefully before making each move. Fortunately, the game starts you off fairly gently with the Slave Arena to help get you oriented in how the game works.

Each time you defeat an enemy you get new cards to help you fight, with better abilities. The trading cards in the game are virtually identical to Slay the Spire, though the rest of the game branches away from it from there.

Innovative features

Because there are so many roguelites out there, it’s getting harder and harder to do something truly innovative. Alina of the Arena breaks out of the mold with a lot of fresh new ideas. Everything from moving around the map to node selection that allows you to see the entire stack on the node.

Each boss requires a different strategy to get through it, which makes the game fun to play no matter how long you play. There’s also a rather large difference in difficulty between Rookie and Brawler, which adds some replay value if you play through as Rookie first.

Needs More Music

This game is still in early release, and likely still has some minor polishing up to do. The demo however, is an extremely generous 2 levels, and just seems to keep on going. There’s more than an hour of gameplay in the first level alone, and it’s not the full game.

One thing that became apparent during the demo play however, is that the music is extremely repetitive. Roguelites like this can end up being hours of gameplay, so being stuck with the same few snippits of music can get extremely tedious. Hopefully this will be addressed with the full release.

Alina of the Arena brings a lot of fresh new ideas to the table. The mix of trading guards, hex type movement, and strategy all mix together to create a fresh new game. Although there is still more to be done with the game, the demo alone is an exciting glimpse of what this game could be.

Pros:

• Unique gameplay options
• Hours of gameplay available

Cons:

• Music is repetitive