Zet Zillions

I've played enough roguelike deckbuilders to recognize when a genre entry is coasting on Slay the Spire's coattails versus actually solving a different problem. Zet Zillions, from Raw Fury and OTA IMON Studios, is genuinely trying to solve a different problem. Your deck starts as literal Trash and Junk - two card types that sound useless and kind of are - but the game's central fusion mechanic transforms that weak hand into the engine room. You drag one card onto another mid-combat, cost-free, to produce something new: a Meatball (metal and bodies smashed together), a Big Jilm bomb, or something stranger still. Traits on both your character and enemies activate on every fusion, which means building toward a fusion-heavy strategy is its own distinct win condition, separate from raw damage or armor-stacking. That design decision alone creates multiple viable paths through a run, which is the real test of whether a deckbuilder has legs. The map structure is the second thing worth understanding before you buy. It is not a linear Slay the Spire climb. Think FTL: branching nodes you can navigate freely, except the planet-devouring antagonist Thanatos is actively corrupting the nodes behind you, which means you cannot grind. You pick a route, commit, and live with the consequences. Each node type has its own flavor - labs that mutate cards, a dragon you can sacrifice cards to, optional crew missions from captain Foam Gun or the eccentric diplomat Ziggy, and a shop that runs on pineapples (the in-game currency). Some reviewers have noted the shop feels underpowered and rarely worth the pineapples, which is a fair criticism. There are also some cards in the pool that simply do not pull their weight, narrowing the practical strategy space more than the card count implies. These are real issues, not cosmetic ones. The population mechanic is what separates Zet Zillions from everything else on the genre shelf right now. Every enemy - planets, space bugs, cosmic horrors, sentient waste - has both a health bar and a population bar. You fill the population bar by flinging your own synthetic crew (Trash cards) at enemies. Max it out and the enemy staggers for a turn, which is often the only reliable way to survive boss fights without taking catastrophic damage. Then you detonate the population for a burst of damage and start over. That loop of colonize-then-explode is the central rhythm of combat and it forces a kind of dual-resource thinking that most deckbuilders skip entirely. Burn builds, armor-heavy builds, and pure fusion-chain builds each interact with population differently, giving you genuine build diversity once you understand the system. For newcomers to the genre, the onboarding is better than most. The difficulty ramp is approachable early, the tutorial handles the basics, and dying awards XP that permanently levels up Foam Gun and her equipped companion - unlocking new starting cards and additional decks. That soft progression means early runs are instructional rather than punishing, which is a design philosophy I respect. Veterans should know that total run depth is finite: most players report 15 to 20 hours to see everything, and the deckbuilding does not reach the combinatorial ceiling of genre anchors like Slay the Spire or Monster Train. A post-launch patch (1.5) reportedly widened the viable strategy count, and a Chaos mode functions as a difficulty modifier system for players who want harder runs after the credits roll. Bugs were present at launch - some run-ending, some cosmetic - but reports suggest the worst have been addressed post-release. At 81 on Metacritic and roughly 87 percent positive on Steam across several hundred reviews, the community reception is warm without being hyperbolic, which is about right.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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