Slay The Spire Review | Is It Still The Best Roguelike Deckbuilder In 2026?

Jan 28

Written By VDGMS

With Slay the Spire 2 finally releasing into Early Access on March 20, 2026, nearly a decade after the original first launched into Early Access in 2017, there has never been a better time to revisit the original to find out why Slay The Spire is a classic, pioneered the genre and why it’s still, arguably, the greatest deck-builder ever. As a bonus, at the very end, we are going to list a few things we would love to see incorporated into the sequel.

If you’re looking forward to Slay the Spire 2, then here are a few lists of upcoming 2026 games you’d like as well:

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SLAY THE SPIRE REVIEW (2026) | IS IT STILL THE BEST ROGUELIKE DECKBUILDER?

When I think of Slay the Spire, I think of Vanilla Ice Cream and how similar the two are. A very basic set of elements, which are all unimpressive on their own, but by selecting the finest ingredients and in the hands of the right chef, it can be transformed into something sublime.

Slay the Spire is a Roguelike Deckbuilder, which I can already sense you rolling your eyes because almost every indie game released these days is at least one of those things, if not both. However, in 2017 when Slay The Spire hit early access, it was a wildly different landscape. There is a very good chance that every great Roguelike Deckbuilder that you have played not only came after Slay The Spire, but took great inspiration from it as well.

When you begin, you aren’t given any information or lore about what the spire is, you are just thrown into the game with a character select screen. If this is your first time playing the game, you won’t have a choice, because the three other characters will need to be unlocked, but this is where the genius of Slay the Spire begins. Your only choice is The Ironclad, who is the most straightforward of the characters and is most akin to a warrior archetype that you’d be familiar with from other RPG’s. Well balanced with a skill set that focuses mostly on doing basic attack damage and blocking with a shield. By being forced to use The Ironclad, MegaCrit is silently teaching you the basics of the game without you having to do a meaningless tutorial and allowing you to jump right in to the full experience.

On the first floor of the spire, you will meet a talking whale that offers you a small boon to assist you at the start of your spire climb. This blue whale is question goes by the name Neow and is the source of your constant resurrection. Although Slay The Spire features procedural generation for the maps and dungeons, you still have a lot of autonomy and this is the other half of what makes Slay The Spire special. Even though there are a lot of elements of randomness and procedural generation, player choice is always front and center. Sometimes you will draw a bad hand, but rarely does Slay The Spire feel unfair and that the outcome was completely out of your control. You are always making micro and macro decisions that will shape your journey. What card to play or what path to take or when to use a potion or which enemy to attack?

After taking your gift from the talking blue whale, the spire is presented to you on a map that highlights what can be expected to find on your journey. In the core experience, there are three Acts with each one having sixteen floors and a boss, making for a total of 51 floors. Each Act is laid out in a similar manner. You will have to choose between standard combat rooms, elite combat rooms, mystery rooms, treasure chests, and rest sites. How far you will go will largely depend on your choices during Act 1. It might seem logical to skip boss fights for a rest area, but Slay The Spire embraces risk vs reward. Your health will restore after each act , so skipping rest to improve a card of choosing to fight more elites earlier in the game will provide you with more relics, which offer passive abilities that can make you overpowered.

Eventually, no matter what you do or what choices you make, you will die. Depending on how much experience you gained, you will either unlock new cards for your current hero or possibly unlock one of the other three characters, which happens in order. You will first unlock The Silent, which is closest to an assassin archetype with lots of small blades and poison. After that will be The Defect, which is more akin to a wizard or mage as you need to juggle orbs to harness elemental powers. Finally, you will unlock The Watcher, which feels closest to a dancer archetype as this character constantly swaps stances between calm and wrath that drastically changes block and attack attributes. Each of these characters possess the own unique pool of cards from which their deck can be built with a combination of shared cards. Every single one of the characters is fun to use, full of nuance and they are all balanced. In the right hands, any of these characters can win the game.

Unlocking new cards and characters is the roguelike meta progression and how Slay The Spire slowly removes the training wheels. Considering that there are over 350 cards, over 200 items to find, over 50 unique combat encounters and over 50 mysterious events, the amount of variables should keep each run unique. The other form of meta progression is the knowledge you learn, which could range from what cards can do and how well they work to enemy behaviour. Something as simple as learning that doing enough damage to the slime blob can make it split in half.

Even with all of the variables available during each run, one of biggest strengths of Slay The Spire is how easy it is to understand. The UI is clean, everything is clearly explained and you’re rarely caught off guard. Slay The Spire informs the player by using the intent system that indicates what the enemy is going to do, this gives the player autonomy to make the most informed decision. You always understand why you succeeded or why you failed, which is why you always want to do just one more run. The intent system might seem like commonplace today, but this was a revolutionary feature when it MegaCrit added it to Slay The Spire.

Slay The Spire Defects

Slay The Spire is proof that what matters the most in a video game is the core gameplay itself. This is verified because Slay The Spire features very simplistic visuals with minimal animations, almost zero plot unless you go digging deep and one song throughout the entire journey, albeit a good one. These are all shortcomings of Slay The Spire, but since the gameplay loop provides as much freedom as it does, spiced with just enough randomness, the experience is incredibly addictive.

HOW TO MAKE SLAY THE SPIRE 2 BETTER?

Before wrapping things up, let’s look ahead to Slay the Spire 2. Often sequels feel uninspired, but Slay The Spire is the rare instance where just more of the same and a few small tweaks would be more than enough. From what has been shown so far, that is exactly what we are getting. Visual and animation improvements are the first things to jump out, but there are also new characters and a whole bunch of new cards for the returning heroes.

There are two things that I think would really be incredible. To begin with, I would love to see MegaCrit give players more of an explicit story. Something more than just climbing the spire. Why are we here and what lies beyond?

The other thing is now that MegaCrit has a lot more clout after the roaring success of Slay the Spire, the door is open to a lot more collaborations with other high profile indie studios. We’ve seen Balatro, Brotato, Terraria, Dead Cells and loads of other massive indie success collaborate and bring their universes together in fun ways. It would be great if a boss or even a playable character was from another IP.

Slay The Spire Verdict

The thing about vanilla ice cream is that it’s a timeless classic. It’s a dessert staple because it’s predictable and not overpowering, but it doesn’t have to be basic and uninspired. By using finer ingredients like pure cream, real Madagascar vanilla bean, and liquid sugar in the hands of the right chef, the result can be transcendent.

Slay The Spire might be the video game equivalent of vanilla ice cream, but it’s also proof that with the finest ingredients and the right craftsmanship, something simple can be transformed, given impressive depth and become something magical. There are other deckbuilders, but Slay The Spire is the deckbuilder that you will always come back to, just like Vanilla Ice Cream.

SLAY THE SPIRE SCORE

9.5

If you’re looking forward to Slay the Spire 2, then here are a few lists of upcoming 2026 games you’d like as well: