Circus Electrique the sort of game that pulls you in on pure style alone. This Steampunk-inspired experience is part story-driven RPG, part tactics experience, and part management sim, all set in an alternate Victorian era London. All this comes from Zen Studios, a studio most well-known for making digital pinball tables of major properties.
Circus Electrique places you in the shoes of a journalist and her companion lion who find themselves in the middle of a mysterious event while visiting her uncle at the Circus Electrique. When everyday Londoners turn into vicious killers after this mysterious event, only the performers of the Circus Electrique are spared from the change and must use their various circus skills to save the city and find answers.
The game takes place over a series of tactical turn-based battles much like in Darkest Dungeon, a game that the team drew clear inspiration from. You build your team from circus performers at the circus, those who come to join via the train to the circus, and those unique enemies that you beat in small boss encounters. There are a number of character classes and each class has a ton of alternative looks and abilities making each unique and giving you lots of combat options.
And because of the Darkest Dungeon implications, when a character dies in battle, even if they were a boss you battled earlier and played into the story, they are gone forever. I didn’t think I’d be a fan of a mechanic like this (I’m not a perma-death fan in general) but it works in this regard. It forces you to play more strategically and I found myself building connections to certain characters and wanting them to survive. It takes a visually simplistic single-screen game and makes you care.
Building your team of members from the Circus Electrique will be essential to your success. Strongmen, fire blowers, escape artists, clowns, sword eaters and more (15 types in total) will give you a lot of options when heading out into the streets. Certain classes work really well against others and you’ll also have to be aware of day and night cycles as well as environmental effects that can positively or negatively impact an upcoming battle.
When you aren’t in battle you’ll be running the Circus Electrique by managing the staff that comes in by keeping them busy. If they become bored, no matter how powerful, they might choose to leave and take their skills with them. You’ll be sending members to the training tent to level up while not in combat, send some to the medical tent to recover from battle and recover devotion, and others to the main tent to preform in the nightly circus.
These nightly shows are incredibly important and you’ll have to pair performers together based on their skill, chemistry with one each other, and the teams overall Devotion to bring in cash to pay your performers and earn circus XP to upgrade your buildings. All of this will keep you pretty busy as there is always something to be doing or managing. This is great as the game is going to take you dozens of hours to finish.
There is also the issue on everything feeling pretty linear. There are no featured random dungeons or areas that you can use to upgrade other team members or experience a different run. Replayability, mostly because of the insistence of a story, is minimal as you need to be shuffled down the path the game wants you to go down. Sure, there are a few alternate paths in each area, but the experience will be the same. You won’t be farming before a boss so if you aren’t where you need to be you’ll be screwed.
Now, Circus Electrique may sound like a winner, and it is to an extent, but it also comes from a number of issues. Most of those problems arise when you get deeper into the experience as the difficulty scaling really ramps up out of what feels like nowhere. The first part of the game is so much fun but I can easily see most people giving up on this one after the midway point. There will almost always come a point where you hit a brick wall and the game offers you no way to progress without forcing a game restart.
Now, it’s important to note that this is my first gaming experience with this type of game. I know DD and watched a lots of people play so I understand the appeal, but this is my first time. For that, I think Circus Electrique is a lot of fun and perhaps a nice entry point into the genre because of the inclusion of a really fun story with voice-acting and lots of dialogue. This goes a long way to get someone not well-versed in the genre a good reason to keep pushing through.
Circus Electrique is a fun Darkest Dungeon inspired experience with a fun story and slick look that’s held back with some late game balancing issues and its overall linearity.
Final Score:
*Review code provided by this publisher*
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