As Steam Next Fests go, I think the one this June has easily been one of the best Next Fests in a little while. Seeing all the great demos this week has made me far more excited about the future of video games than any of the notE3 streams did the other week, and I’m not gonna lie, a large part of my excitement stems from the brilliant Let’s! Revolution!, a beautifully animated tile-based roguelite that has a touch of Minesweeper about it. I highlighted it in our big demo rec list at the start of the week, but 150-odd words simply wasn’t enough to really get across just how excellent this is. So indulge me a bit while I tell you more about it.
Let’s! Revolution! combines almost all of my favourite things in video games: puzzles, tactics, lovely animation and a chill soundtrack. At the start of a run, you pick a hero to chase down the smug King of Beebom as he hightails it back to his throne. Each level plays out on a tiled board that’s split between road and landscape tiles. These are all face down when you begin, and you’ll need to flip them over by hopping across to them to unearth the King’s location before you can move on.
Problem is, the King’s lackeys are patrolling the roads, and you’ll lose health if you accidentally bump into them. Luckily, the landscape tiles have little numbers on them denoting how many road tiles surround it – your Minesweeper connection – which allows you to deduce where the next safe tile might be (as well as the direction any uncovered road tiles) in order to replenish your energy and unleash your next attack.
You begin your demo by playing as The Trooper, a cloaked warrior with a mean spinning punch that can instantly uncover all surrounding tiles, and deal one point of damage to any hidden guards. He also has a bow to take pot shots at them from afar, but when you’ve only got five arrows to play with initially, this is best saved for special occasions. There are shops you can find to replenish your bow (and buy additional health potions), but you might only encounter it two or three times, say, in a ten-odd level run.
Managing your health, energy and attack pool is a vital part of Let’s! Revolution!’s charm. Enemies take time to attack, but their strikes never miss, so you’ll need to deal with them efficiently (and not uncover too many at once) to make it through alive. It’s quite Into The Breach-like, in that respect, but the key difference is that you have a lot more control over what’s on the board. Happily, you always know how many enemies are lurking beneath each board’s assortment of colourful cardboard, giving you yet another tool to help plan your actions with some semblance of strategy and logic. Did that stop me from repeatedly face planting into spear-wielding chumps, though? Not on your life, mate. But it was great fun all the same, and the sight of one of its shops or gyms to learn new abilities was always a treat.
The King himself is a brilliant villain, too. He looks like the grotesque relation of Sonic’s Doctor Eggman and Nigel Thornberry, and careens around in his floating, Bowser-style clown car egg like a gnat that needs to be squashed with a rolled up newspaper. He’s very easy to hate, and I took great satisfaction in finally showing him the business end of a knuckle sandwich when I got to the end of the Trooper’s run.
The demo also unlocked a second character, the nimble, almost sylph-like Shadow, and I’m excited to dive back in and see how their fighting style compares. There will be six classes to play altogether when Let’s! Revolution! launches in full on July 19th, and with the promise of five levels of new game+ for each one, I can’t wait to see how advanced it gets once you start unlocking new powers and abilities. It’s an impressive debut from animation studio Buck, and you can expect a full review later next month. Until then, though, why not try its Steam Next Fest demo for yourself?
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