An unfamiliar island, eight weeks on the clock, and a hunter’s hut that needs to touch as many forest tiles as you can manage. That’s the entire opening move — and it’s already an equation.
A lot of studios have gone hunting for whatever lightning LocalThunk caught with Balatro. Some fundamentally misread why that game clicks. Others are simply shameless about the borrowing.
Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder, from Crux Games, falls into neither camp.
The game grafts Balatro’s run structure and combo chains onto the sort of tile placement Cities: Skylines lives on, and going by the Steam demo, it’s gripping in a way I honestly didn’t anticipate from a loop that boils down to putting squares beside other squares.
Adjacency bonuses, but they’re the entire game
For most city builders, adjacency is a pleasant little extra. Civilization 7 pushes you to bunch production and food together so your metropoles swell as fast and as fat as possible. Cities: Skylines and its sequel tie citizen happiness and education to how close libraries and parks sit. Anno 117 will let you inflate a population on porridge, among other levers.
Combolands makes adjacency bonuses the whole point. Every bit of it.
Each run generates its island procedurally, so no two terrain and resource layouts are alike. You’re handed eight weeks to reach a fresh population milestone, a small set of actions, a capped number of action rerolls, and every action you take eats a week.
What starts in your pool is the economic bedrock: hunter’s huts tucked into forests, apiary networks planted beside flowers. Every extra resource node a building touches makes the population spike larger each time that building’s effect goes off.
Honey does not work like that, no. You don’t bottle a jar and wake up with 100 new residents by Friday. It’s a video game. Go with it.
The complexity sneaks up on you
Climbing into higher population tiers opens up new buildings, and each one nudges your strategy somewhere else. A few grant multipliers tied to particular productions. Others trim the wait before a building’s effect fires.
And then there’s the group that keys off proximity to something as broad as “nature” tiles — anything that isn’t human-made. That sounds like a gift. Nature everywhere!
In practice they’re the trickiest to slot into a combo chain, and combo chains are the point where this stops being a casual game.
Your early sloppiness will come back for you
As in Balatro, the threshold you have to clear rises with every round, and nothing rescues you except planning your layout. Dropping huts and berry-picking stations wherever they happened to score highest will get you through the opening rounds without trouble.
Then walls enter the picture, and their multipliers only kick in once tiles are completely enclosed. Or railroads show up. Suddenly that ad-hoc sprawl is a cage.
Perhaps you leaned too hard on forestry camps, cleared out the woodland early, and left your hunter’s huts with nothing to feed on.
Luck swings the other way too. Strip the woods and the next few turns might deal you a string of buildings that specifically pay out on cleared ground.
You get a finite stock of rerolls for reshuffling a week’s hand, a couple of demolition opportunities, and a single per-run option to buy yourself three extra turns to hit the target.
You’ll lose. Repeatedly. That’s the good part
None of that stops the losses from piling up. Losing is the moment the game unfolds.
In the demo, anyway, Combolands is the more generous of the two, doling out new buildings and between-run progress with shorter droughts than Balatro.
Begin a run after your first defeat and you’re choosing guilds. Or you will be, in time — the demo ships with only two.
Guilds dictate which categories of building can appear on a given turn. The agricultural guild does precisely what its name suggests, piling on farms and farm-adjacent structures. Crux Games says seven guilds will be in at launch, which leaves a huge amount of combination space.
The shop is where runs get decided
Progress unlocks more still, among them an in-game shop — another Balatro echo — where gold gets spent between rounds on new modifiers. Chests turn up as well, potentially holding modifiers or free rerolls.
Certain modifiers really do rewrite the math. One of them hands every building a free multiplier for the closing week of a round. Choosing well, or badly, is very often what separates a run that lands from eight weeks thrown away.
Turning traffic logistics into an art form
The demo’s strategic demands sit at a nice altitude: plenty to think about, never so much that you sink. It moves quickly enough that it won’t swallow a whole evening before you clock it.
I want more. Handily, the wait is short. Combolands releases in full on Aug. 24 for Windows PC via Steam.