Introduction

Czarina Must Die is a small, lighthearted game. Being designed in a creative rush type of event, the game isn't intended to amaze players with epic quests, glorious cities, mind boggling puzzles and stuff but it still gets the job done. "How?" you may ask. Let me elaborate.

Gameplay

The gameplay is pretty simple and in this case, that is a good thing. You wouldn’t want to get lost in complex systems in such a small game anyway. Your path from start to finish is completely linear. The party is going through a dungeon that is made of several floors, pretty generic but the fun battles and the humor sauce make up for the mediocre dungeon design.

Battles are well balanced for the most part, especially the boss battles are really challenging but around the middle of the game, you will notice a huge difference in power between the mobs you start to encounter further on and the ones you left behind. A much smoother transaction would have been nice (you will know what I mean when you reach the elementals).

The battle system gives player incentive to play more strategically rather than spamming the strongest skill or base attack. You have as many number of actions as your party size. That means you can use the same character in a single turn more than once but you can use a skill only once in a turn. Therefore, you should still pick your actions carefully.

One thing I didn’t like is that there is no skill you can use outside battle. There are many save/recover crystals around so it isn’t really a big issue but still, I would like to cure myself when I needed since the encounters aren’t visible so you might bump into some tough troops while trying to reach the next crystal. At least, it is easy to escape in battle. Maybe making it so that healing skills cost higher outside battle would have fixed the issue in a balanced way but again, it is really no big deal.

Another thing I wasn’t really fond of is that the stats on equipments look a bit too random for this game. You will be wasting time if you care too much about what to equip except some obvious improvements for certain characters.
8/10

Sound

There are some custom pieces and I can say that they are pretty nice to the ear but you will notice that the battle music for the regular encounters is a bit too kinky. There is no comic relief in the battle scene so the music sounds a bit off.
7/10

Graphics

Short version: RTP
Long version: RTP

Seriously though, visuals are nothing special but not ugly either. There are also some simple animations in battle. You will notice that the battlers on the ground look like they are breathing while the flying ones are moving up and down. It is nothing fancy but a nice touch.
5/10

Story

The story sounds more like a small part of the lore (if there is any outside this game) so I would spoil it if I talked much about the story since it is already pretty simple. There is a twist near the end though to add some flavour.

Another point to make here is that if you are strictly against fourth wall breaking, forget about immersion as you will find it being used excessively.
6/10

Technical integrity

I didn’t notice any passability issues or misuse of tiles but I got an error window popup once. I couldn’t replicate it when I fought it for the second time so it wasn’t compeletely game breaking at least.



It may not be so fair to include this in the rating of this game so that is all.

Conclusion

Czarina Must Die is a nice and little fun game where you will find pretty well designed battles and a fine dose of humor. Don’t expect a brilliant story or impressive visuals but if fun is what you are seeking for, you will find it.