I always felt like FITS, the original game, was a hair short of being great; a really good effort from a new studio but pretty rough around the edges, with a novel concept and some fun mechanics. This is their second attempt so I have to be more critical.

None of my issues with the original game seem to be addressed. I gave similar feedback during the EA period of the first game, and I am going to give it again here.

Block: I don't know why this game has block as a mechanic. What makes FITS fun and novel is avoiding damage by moving and moving enemies into the path of friendly fire. On top of that, block values on single cards are so low that they rarely block one attack, let alone the 2-3 you usually have coming at you each turn. All of this pales in comparison to the real issue: block clogs up your hand. It's much better to move out of the way of attacks and deal damage than ever play block, and the starting decks feel like starting the game with three dead cards. Blocks also delay the end of a fight, which almost always costs you in side objectives, leading to snowballing damage to your build effectiveness. Dodge is great, avoiding one hit from one attack is valuable, and you can keep the counter mechanics by attaching them to dodges. Dodge feels balanced and useful, block is cluttering up your design really badly.

Side objectives: Every fight, you get three little side objectives you can meet for extra rewards. I really like this idea, but the execution is awful. The objectives are completely random, and early on you are at the mercy of the fight and the starting deck for completing them. Just like in the first game, I feel powerless to get these rewards early, and if I don't get them, it makes every following fight harder. There needs to be some kind of scaling mechanism to provide goals that are achievable but risky each fight. It should be a risk/reward mechanic, where I can trade potential health loss for a bonus, not something I arbitrarily can or can not get. Tying the power of my run to this arbitrary reward system feels downright terrible.

Pathing: The pathing between fight nodes has always been a little awkward and i will admit it is better in FITS2. I still feel like there are very few real decisions to make, and I am either dying and aiming for a medic or doing fine and aiming for a gym. The fights and rewards themselves don't differ in meaningful enough ways to drive a difference in my decision making. The new multi-stage fights as "elites" are a cool idea but maybe a bit exhausting.

The Gym: God I hate the gym. Scaling costs on everything, no nuance in what is on offer. Buy cards, remove cards, upgrade cards. If I don't have the money to upgrade a card, I'm stuck traveling through it for no reason. It's some kind of hybrid shop and campfire mechanic and everything is powered by money that I may or may not have based on the issues I outlined above. If you want to give your player a fighting chance of getting out of a death spiral, it needs to be at the gym. Both the gym and the medic need some sort of free reward just for getting to them.

I'm not sure whether this is an early access lack of assets thing or the new direction you are going but the new card art is... not art. Every card should be visually distinct so players can let familiarity with the art drive play instead of reading card titles. I'm not going to consider this a flaw until I know whether you intend to keep the game this way.

On a positive note, the new mechanics seem really fun. I love the hazard tiles, weapons, and disarming. I haven't gotten into the multiplayer but I won't until I feel I can recommend the game, but I would dearly love to play this with friends.

I am happy to pay for the game because I do believe Ground Shatter has great ideas. I just want to see some refinement and some deep thought about the design at this point.

I really liked FITS but it was not fully realized. I do hope that FITS2 corrects some of the core design problems before 1.0, at which point I will be thrilled to flip this review to positive and tell all my friends. Monitoring until then.

FITS2 suffers from a lot of problems the first one does IMO:
- Block cards are huge deck bloat, enemies later in the run usually do more damage than block cards offer especially the upgraded ones, and god forbid you have to block more than one attack.

- Side objectives feel mandatory since they are the main way of gaining currency, but you are at the mercy of RNG. Getting an objective like "3 enemies killed by friendly fire" means you basically have to forfeit getting it.
- Game is still insanely feast or famine, you either get everything you need or risk dying in one turn from a bad hand, enemy damage is still pretty high and enemy modifiers that stack up such as Advance and Auto Attack only make getting lucky even more mandatory the longer you go in a run.

- Gym/Health costs are still terrible. Even if you complete side objectives to get cash you can usually only afford one or two things max. Not having enough money makes these "rest stops" completely dead tiles that offer you nothing at all. Price scaling for Gym is also brutal. Costs need to be massively lowered or these tiles need to give 1 freebie at minimum to make these feel less terrible, I can't think of other deckbuilders that give you literally nothing for reaching these kinds of locations.

- Card balance is still all over the place, feels like there are a massive amount of dead cards like FITS1 where they almost never fit into any deck and waste space.

- Momentum/Energy (This game's version of card cost) is still a huge balance pain point, especially with any card that costs more than 1 energy. Enemy action economy scales up the further in a run you go so you either get more Momentum from level rewards or you can't keep up. Cards that give Momentum don't really fix this since you're just praying you pull them.

I really hope things change for FITS2 because most of the balance issues from FITS1 stayed for the entirety of the game's lifespan such as very overtuned enemies in the later levels with 2-3 modifiers for late game enemies.

I also didn't play KITS because from what I've seen in gameplay/reviews is that many balance issues seem to have carried over from FITS1 as well as having its own slew of problems unique to the game, and like the FITS1, it seems to have been forgotten in favor of another new product.

I really hope I'm not falling for it again, but this is a very early review, and things might get better. I'd heavily, HEAVILY recommend waiting to see if they've learned from their previous games before getting this.

There's definitely fun to be had here, my feelings are mostly mixed but if i had to choose one it's more towards "not recommended" and here's why:

1. The "side" objectives feel very brutal early on, often the game will ask you to do something that's either quite unreasonable or somewhat possible but will be very tedious to set up/do. And because of that you'll end up not being able to do these side objectives which will end up crippling your run, because the rewards for these objectives are usually quite good

I don't remember this being an issue in the prequel, the side objectives used to be more reasonable and even if you didn't do them early game you can still bounce back mid game

Aside from that, it also feels like the side objectives force you into a specific way of playing instead of playing how you want. Some playstyle are not possible due to the side objectives, for example doing the "win the match in a specific number of rounds" objective is annoying when you're playing the defensive/blocking deck. And the side objective where you have to kill enemies using the head smash card which forces you to build into that specific card and play a certain amount of way in order to deal the killing blow with that card.

Another example of an annoying side objective is the one where you have to kill 2 or 3 enemies in one turn. It's not necessarily hard, but it's just tedious/boring to do. You have to lower the enemies' hp down to a slither and tiptoe around them until the one card that can hit multiple enemies come up, and if the card doesn't come up in the right moment or the enemies dont line up you just have to keep dancing around them waiting for everything to line up. Again it's not necessarily hard to do, it's just tedious and further goes into my point of the side objectives forcing you to play in a certain manner

2. Im playing on steam deck so im not sure if this issue is because of that, but there were times where the game just froze when im loading into a round? So i was forced to reset the game. Another bug is sometimes buttons just refuse to work, one time i tried to remove a card from my deck and it refused to work, so i was forced to reset the game

3. The difficulty doesn't feel all that balanced, could just be skill issue on my part but I've finished the previous game on the hardest difficulty numerous times. With this game even when I'm playing on the normal difficulty it's still not as balanced compared to the previous game

4. The performance seems oddly bad, i had to use lossless scaling to get stable 60fps and the game occasionally freezes for a sec or two even before i used lossless scaling

Overall, it sucks that i have to leave a negative review considering i enjoyed the previous game a lot. This game is still in very early access so as the game gets to cook even more I'm sure it will turn out to be better, but in its current state i find it hard to recommend