CrossOver: Roll For Initiative Review – A Mismatch Of Three

Combining multiple game genres and concepts is a risky move that sometimes leads to memorable masterpieces, and sometimes it’s hard to grasp what the purpose of the game is. One of the most popular and flexible genres that sit well with others is roguelikes, leading to high expectations whenever we see a new title with innovative ideas to combine with the roguelike formula.

CrossOver: Roll For Initiative, developed by Gaterooze, Ink and published by MicroProse Software, is a roguelike strategy game where we make a tabletop character sheet, use dice, and fight tiny monsters who crawl on our sheet and attack our stats and items. As a longtime Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) player and roguelike fan, CrossOver: Roll For Initiative seemed like the perfect game for me.

CrossOver: Roll For Initiative Character Creation
Creating my first character in the game, still excited by the promise of a unique D&D-inspired roguelike.

We begin by creating a character sheet. We roll for stats, pick a race and class from the D&D universe, and start the campaign. Each level is part of a fantasy adventure, as we travel around the world, encountering various scenarios and shopping for items and spells between each level. Everything felt promising until I experienced the actual gameplay. That was when my hopes for CrossOver: Roll For Initiative started to fade away.

The gameplay consists of two separate mechanics. On the right side of the screen, we have a dice tray full of colorful dice, and we play a simple match-three game to collect the dice. On the left side of the screen, we have our character sheet, with small monsters spawning to attack the different attributes. We use the dice we’ve collected to make weapon attacks, cast spells on the monsters, or spend gold to hire mercenaries.

CrossOver: Roll For Initiative gameplay screen, showing a character sheet and a tray full of colorful dice.
This is what the game looks like during gameplay, and you need to constantly shift your focus between the two sides of the screen.

I’m not the biggest fan of match-three games. While I understand the appeal of the simple gameplay for casual gaming, it’s not engaging or challenging enough to capture my interest. CrossOver: Roll For Initiative‘s implementation of the gameplay baffles me, as it takes the relaxing and simple formula of a match-three puzzles, and mixes it with a fast-paced and stressful real-time roguelike gameplay. One would think a roguelike inspired by D&D would naturally use a turn-based system to capture the strategic feel of the tabletop game, but CrossOver‘s roguelike portion feels more like a clicker game. We choose the weapon or spell we want to use, and just aim and click on the enemies.

These two sides of the gameplay rely heavily on each other, and yet feel so disconnected in action. Both sides of the screen require focus and attention, at the same time, without a decent pause option to plan your actions. While the game is paused, you cannot perform any actions, and the best use of the feature is to search and find the dice pieces you need to move to create a match. With how disjointed the two gameplay mechanics are, pausing is unavoidable, staggering the pacing and flow of the experience even further. There’s even a co-op mode where two players can each focus on one side of the gameplay, but neither gameplay is fun on its own to justify bringing a friend along to play.

CrossOver: Roll For Initiative encounter screen
The encounter screens where a pleasant respite from the chaos of the gameplay, and while looking relatively mundane, at least it didn’t hurt my eyes.

I would say CrossOver: Roll For Initiative could still be a fun experience for the fans of the match-three genre if it wasn’t for the inconsistent and motion-sickness-inducing visual design. We have the colorful dice tray on the right and the paper character sheet on the left. Our eyes constantly jump between the two to finish the levels, and once we are done with a level, we are faced with the black-and-white story and encounter pages, and the hard-to-find and confusing shop UI. To top it all off, based on the biome that the level takes place in, there are visual overlays to imply the atmosphere. It was on an underwater level when the wavy overlay made me sick and I had to close the game and step away from my desk for a few minutes.

Once I came back, I saw the other game mode available in the main menu; Tower Defense. Despite my excitement, the main gameplay of CrossOver: Roll For Initiative was not for me, but tower defense was another favorite game genre of mine, so I gave it a try. So is tower defense a better match for the game’s design? Yes, but if you consider playing the match-three game without paying attention to the “towers” tower defense. This game mode is easier on the eyes since I did not need to look back at the character sheet. We have permanent dice towers on the sheet that shoot automatically, and all we need to do is collect dice for them to shoot by playing the match-three puzzle. There are no upgrades, no strategic placements or paths, just a race against time to collect enough dice for our towers to shoot.

CrossOver: Roll For Initiative Tower Defense Game Mode
The so-called “Tower Defense” mode, is an improvement on the main gameplay in the sense that I had only one mechanic to focus on, however boring it was.

If it wasn’t for the visual design, I would give CrossOver: Roll For Initiative more of a chance. But with how the game looked, I literally could not stomach playing it for more than two hours. The game’s main idea seems promising, but in the end, we are left with a disorienting experience with rudimentary gameplay and uninspired roguelike elements.

Nima played CrossOver: Roll For Initiative on PC with a review code.

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jerr
jerr
5 months ago

I liked it. A lot. The tower defence bit does have upgrades and you can move the towers around and change their attack type. You can turn off the underwater effects and stuff too.