Caveblazers - Arena Mode

Worth buying if you enjoy the base game. Its also a great pack if you need to learn how to beat certain enemies mid-late game.

The base game is quite nice to play and provides lot of fun. This DLC however feels just plain lazy and unbalanced. A "play-through" can only go 2 ways: All the stars aline, you are blessed by the holy father himself and you took your Leprechaun to a massive booze-up the evening before. Then my friend you have a slight chance to snowball out of control. If you are just a typical normal guy, however, then you will experience the usual scenario: you get some more or less useful items and blessings and still have to deal with massive numbers of teleporting garbage that will put your champ to eternal sleep faster than you can hit the uninstall button. Overall i can say, i had some fun to try out different approaches for 2 €. However, you should really be sure that you are kind of a masochistic person to buy and play this DLC.

Arena Expansion gives you opportunity to fight with waves of monsters on closed caverns. Before you enter arena you can customize your hero with magic items or cards. Cards can be obtained from cards packs which you receive after arena runs. After clearing every wave you can select new perk or weapon. In my opinion it's definetely worth to buy it. For small ammount of money you'll recive a lot of hours of challenging fun.

Get this DLC if you thought fighting the exploding blue guys was fun. Because they added enemies even more annoying.

The game is great and the Arena DLC is neat but its implementation is subpar. At the start, everything is completely reasonable and leaves you wandering and wanting for more, not in small part because of that old man repeating "What does it all mean?" Minor spoilers ahead. [spoiler] The second mode is sheer lottery, and the only way to win something is to win a jackpot. And I'm not talking about perfect weapons and perfect perks - they can be suboptimal. I'm talking about the game not spawning utter BS, like e.g. a bumblebee (or whatever it is) right inside me that immediately charges through me without any build-up. Or me losing 260 HP to [i]something[/i] in two hits, without absolutely any clue what could've done it (I had my wife watching me play, and she had no idea either - there was just one enemy at the opposite corner of the screen and something just exploded near me 2 times, and it wasn't bats or bombs). It doesn't help that the second mode is not only harder but is also twice as long, without any indication of that, and the second half is just repeating the 8-10th waves with maybe a couple of unique items. I even began to suspect that this mode is infinite. And the game's engine starts to crumble at that point. After wave 12 some enemies stopped making sound. After wave 15, there was only music, which is especially unhelpful when there are a lot of witches nearby, accompanied by occasional lags. [/spoiler] Also, the game keeps giving me tomes as if I can unlock something else. I already have 4-5 copies of every card, I have already bought all the items and have 400 gems. IMO it would make more sense to introduce a soft level cap when every single item and card is obtained. Or maybe an ability to spend all those gems on a limited selection of some temporary buffs, like 50 gems to drink a single Mojo Juice before teleporting to an arena. The absolute worst thing though is that you get no closure at the end. The question that you can hear being asked in the DLC is never answered. Just a "You did it, kiddo" and that's it. I did [i]what[/i] exactly? Who is that old man? Why are there electronic devices all around him, which look completely out of place in the setting of the game?

Absolutely worth it. If you love Caveblazers, might as well grab this for 2 bucks. It's fun, varied, and challenging, and even has its own set of unlocks and stuff to give it some progression. It's also a great way to practice combat against all sorts of enemies, without risking a lengthy main-game run. Buy it.

it kinda gets repetitive, even with the cards boss also has a terrible glitch where you get helplessly stuck in the floating blocks sometimes taking damage and using revives also often feels incredibly demotivating to continuing the run, but that might just be me

It is simply put an exellently crafted edition to the main game. I do however have one gripe, there is a crystal enemy added that fires a laser beam at you, every time it fires it peaks my audio causing a horrible sound I hope they fix.

This is a really fun mode - it plays kind of liek horde mode - wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemies. You earn cards as progress, all of them give you unique stat boosts and abilitires, liek 45% more damage to downward attacks, reviev at 20% health ifkilled, there's so many of them You can equip 5 to use in your arena mode runs, and also you can buy magic items to use in the runs with the green stones you earn as well. It's well balanced, and lots of fun. I really enjoy this, almost more than the main game Here's some gameplay footage http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1232413222

An expansion absolutely worth its price. Faster-paced wave-by-wave combat cutting out the cave exploration and extensive character development: this is a great way to hone combat skills and in general just play something really fast. You get to choose your perks before you go in and then upgrade your character every few waves. Like the main game, this mode is even funner with a friend, bar some minor glitches with the card menus (before starting an actual round in arena mode) while in multiplayer.

A brilliant arcade-style addon to one of the best action-platformers in years.

Good dlc. An overall fun time to play with,

the dlc mode is pretty trash ngl

i don't regret the 7,19 zł that i used on this dlc.

Yeah its fun, but can I win, no. Love the maps

Before I start: Potential spoiler alert here. If you're checking out this review at all, chances are you're already familiar with the main game (it's an expansion, after all). So I might mention some spoilery things here. And honestly, if you arent that familiar with the main game yet, well... the first thing you should probably know is that this expansion is very clearly geared towards experienced players. You are going to die. Alot. And that's if you already know what you're doing and have alot of hours in the game. The main game is already pretty brutal... many players just die over and over again in the initial cave level, or at the first boss. Arena mode is far more brutal. The idea is pretty simple: You VS boatloads of enemies in an ever-changing, single-screen arena. An arena run is divided into "waves". Each wave is actually made up of more than one group of monsters. Defeat one group, and the next group appears. Take too long to defeat a group, and the next group STILL appears... this means you have to stay aggressive (which is a good idea in Caveblazers anyway). After you've defeated 3 or so groups, the wave ends. Between waves, you are given STUFF to choose from. Melee weapons and ranged weapons will first be offered to you... pick exactly one. And then, you'll get a choice of some blessings... again, pick one. Healing items can also appear here. When you're done choosing, BAM, the arena transforms, and the next wave begins. The combat is the usual. Caveblazers has always had absolutely fantastic combat, and it is of course no different here. And of course, how you build up your character will determine just what you can do during combat. This is where the arena mode starts to differ from the main game. Firstly, there's the new card mechanic. Before entering into the portal to begin an arena run, you can select from a variety of cards with different effects. You can take exactly 5 cards in with you. And yes, you can choose more than one of the same card (if you have more than one) as their effects stack, allowing for all sorts of screwball combinations. There are many types of cards, so you have alot of options here to try out crazy build ideas. Whether you want to min-max the hell out of things, or try really loopy builds for fun (5 cheese cards, for instance... stab an enemy so hard that your own head explodes... what a great plan), it's up to you. You get cards in packs of 3, which you'll receive upon levelling up, similar to how you level-up in the main game after each run. You can also buy cards individually. Also, you choose a magic item to take into the run with you.... you do not find those in the run like you would in the main game. All of that means that you're effectively choosing a theme for your build BEFORE going into the run. It's a unique way of mitigating the RNG that is inherant in this, and actually works out pretty well. One odd thing though is that you have no inventory here. None. You've got your weapons, a magic item, and your blessings, and that's it. No inventory full of gizmos, no rings to equip.... those things dont factor into this mode. Of course, none of this ends up mattering too much if you get splattered. And you WILL get splattered. All of the game's toughest monsters are here. All of them. There are certain foes even that hardly ever show up in the main game (such as the big purple slime dude) that'll show up here to ruin your existence. What's more, even the monsters from the Shrouded Land show up here. This was a nice bonus to me... one thing I have not done in the main game is go to the Shrouded Land, and that's because the 5-relic run is FREAKING AWFUL, and frankly, I dont want to do it. Silly reason? Bah, I dont care. That was never any fun to me. So it's nice to see these monsters here, giving them a chance to shine outside of an ultra-rare area that hardly anyone ever goes to. And they do shine, adding to the variety nicely here. In addition, there are a pile of new monsters that only appear in the arena. This seemed a bit off at first to me... why not add them to the main mode too? You'll understand when you see what they do. The new monsters would be SERIOUSLY broken in the main mode, but they work just fine here. They're pretty brutal though. And that's the thing about this: It's all brutal. Those really difficult monsters from the Shrouded Lands? Yeah, they arent just going to show up 20 waves in. They'll show up on like, wave 3 or something. Big dangerous things appear right from the start, and the lunacy only gets nastier from there. The difficulty goes up FAST, meaning that most runs will end up being short. You'll have to deal with many enemies at once, whether it's the usual orcs, the Thwomps from the Shrouded Lands, or the Stupid Irritating Teleport Jerks that are new with this expansion. The good thing is, the game never has any "cheap" moments here. While Caveblazers has always had... er... balance issues, to put it lightly, the actual combat has always been entirely fair, and that carries over here. You'll die, and it will be because you werent good enough to go any further, or because you made bad choices. Oh, and the music for this mode is bloody incredible. All in all, you're getting a pretty amazing amount of content here (did I mention there's a bunch of new items and blessings, too?) for hardly any price at all. If you like this game, this mode will keep you coming back, and it can be a nice alternative to the bloody long runs in the main mode. I'm quite surprised at how much I've ended up liking this one.

PLEASE MAKE A NEW GAME! I LOVE THIS GAME! ITS ONE OF THE BEST ROGUELIKES! PLZZZZZ MAKE CAVEBLAZERS 2222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222