Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic has the potential to be a 5/5 in my book because of it's neat systems, focus on buffs/debuffs/status effects, a wide range of unlockable rewards and other challenges and a large number of skills and items to use. Sadly, poor balancing in many spots, lack of information to focus player choice and other oddities made me stop playing after finishing the first campaign and rolling a new party. It's still pretty fun, and good!
You first create a party of characters from the tavern, you can only pick from the 5 characters that are available and you must make a full party of three from these five. You can re-roll up to six times, but that's superfluous. There should be a way to make the party you want from all the classes you've unlocked. Each character has stat bonuses from its 'backstory' and each class has two skills.There is plenty of information about what stats, effects and elements are and do, but when you create your first party, prepare to die because it's probably not going to be balanced.
Each character can equip five pieces of gear; two usable items, an accessory, a helmet and an armor. These things can have a wide range of effects, strengths and protections. Accessories can make you immune to certain ailments, armor have elemental protections and weapons have various affinities and can cause many debuffs. Spells are also factored into usable items and you have a range of offensive and defensive magics. Each dungeon has a theme - water monsters, undead, robots, etc. - that you don't know at first, and walking into a fire dungeon with only fire spells and no fire resistance is kinda bad. Same thing with status effects, it's a bit annoying to fight waves after waves of enemies that are immune to what you can do. The game should say "This place is going to have 'Fire' enemies" or something of the sort, in order to allow you to prepare better.
While moving to and from the dungeons, you'll encounter NPCs and other strange things and you will be able to make choices that will sometimes give you rewards, other times trigger battles - even difficult ones - then you get into dungeons, a series of rooms which are usually fights, but sometimes treasure challenges. I think it's a bit weird that you're not automatically fully healed between fights, because by the end of the game I had all the potions I could ever need to get myself back up to max between each of them. Fights work like this, you have three heroes, you can use only one per turn - weird - and you can't use the same hero twice in a row, enemies also have one attack per turn. Skills have cooldowns but usable items don't. And this is where I found a weird balance issue; My priest had a book - usable item, no cooldown - that healed the whole party and cured status ailments. Another class has a skill - with a cooldown, so, much less usability - that only cured status ailments. Skills don't ever get better, while you might find better books - one that healed for more, for instance.
What I loved most is the number of effects you have to juggle with. The game presents a good log of everything that happens if you need to take a look at the various turns of combat, and this is quite useful. Lowering defenses is also pretty important because some enemies seem to take almost no damage without doing it. Also, in order to make you do many different things, the game will unlock new classes as you progress and fulfill certain conditions. I had a pretty good time beating the game with my Priest, Battle Wizard and Barbarian. The stat distribution on level-up is a bit inconsequential, but at least you know exactly what stats do and what stats are used by each weapon.
My weirdest moment in the game was during the last dungeon. There are no ways to resurrect heroes - I wish you had revive potions or something - so I went against the last boss with only my priest. He had no attack abilities, so I had to throw away one of my healing books and I only kept the one that cured status effects. I killed the last boss with weak punches and the fight lasted about 500 rounds. I also came back to town and fought again unwanted battles only with my priest, punching and healing himself, non-stop, forever. I kinda wish the game didn't let me do that. How weird is it that all of my team died except him and he managed to clear the game by himself?
To conclude, PH:B&M is a really neat little game. Maybe some spots could be improved and maybe some more information could be given about everything - you get no info on monsters, for instance - but it's still a fun experience if you like deep RPG battle systems, dumb jokes, and turn based harp duels.
