Kādomon: Hyper Auto Battlers Preview

Kādomon: Hyper Auto Battlers — as its name would suggest — is an autobattler heavily inspired by the Pokémon franchise and Super Auto Pets. Its other notable inspirations are roguelike deck builders in the vein of Slay the Spire, but the question is: is it a successful combination?

Kādomon’s biggest draw is probably the designs of its namesake. With over 180 individual Kādomon, along with having variants, known as misprints, which add recoloured versions of each creature. They all have distinct charm; and while a couple do feel a little too close to their inspirations, they can definitely stand alone with some cute and charming designs. A great example is one of the Beleaf misprints, being a homage to Gurren Lagann.

Its main gameplay loop consists of building a team of Kādomon and taking them into battles, which play out automatically (as you could probably guess). Upon completing each battle, you gain some money, a new Kādomon — or experience for a currently owned one — and, occasionally, Items and Field Effects. Items can be equipped to your team to add unique effects, while Field Effects have much larger, game-wide consequences, such as directly altering the typing of certain Kādomon. Typing functions as you’d expect: each creature has set types, which affect their advantages and disadvantages in combat. This is where my biggest gripe comes with the game, as this system, along with some others, lends to the game relying too much on random elements to make building a team particularly viable. Each run I played felt as though I was having to build relatively uninteresting teams to handle any situations rather than sticking to a hyper-focused build and trying to create a strong individual team. This wasn’t too bad for the most part, as the map shows the typing of the enemies as you progress, which makes planning your route to the boss incredibly important and is a nice way to emphasise player choice; unfortunately, this falls apart, thanks to the terribly balanced minibosses. There is no indication about their typing until you’re in the fight with them and unable to make any more changes, which leads to it often feeling incredibly unfair and more of a gamble than a strategic plan.

Build crafting is relatively fun if bogged down somewhat by the unbalanced typing, but the uses of different Kādomon, Items, and Field Effects can make for an interesting plethora of choices. Each beast has different abilities and falls into different categories, from supports to tanks and attack-focused Kādomon. Each ability plays into their strengths, which makes for a fun team-building experience, along with working out which items work better and what Field Effects synergise the best.

Kādomon: Hyper Auto Battlers, at its core, is a fun title with some incredibly interesting ideas and good designs, but a few issues hold it back in its current state. Still, it’s absolutely worth keeping an eye on in the long run, as with some effort and care, it could absolutely become one of the best in its genre.