A six-dollar roguelite shooter that builds its whole identity around a randomized talent tree, and mostly earns it.
Official art · via Steam
TurtleFox Games' Talented straps a procedurally generated talent tree onto a top-down survival shooter: pick from six classes, then watch the game deal out a fresh spread from a pool of over 500 talents and 100 abilities each run, fighting off escalating waves across a series of nights.
The randomization reshapes how each run plays rather than reskinning the same optimal build, and all six classes support multiple viable directions instead of one obvious best pick. The pixel art and soundtrack pull their weight, escalating "mastery" difficulty tiers and a separate Waves mode stretch the content well past the core campaign, and the developer has kept shipping updates since launch. At six dollars, the amount of game on offer is hard to argue with.
Stat caps on things like max HP and crit chance can leave certain late-run talent picks functionally dead the moment you draw them, and pushed meaningfully past the campaign's own twenty-night structure, runs start converging on the same handful of proven builds instead of staying as varied as the early hours promise. Steam shows no separate recent-review bucket, so there's no clean way to tell whether sentiment has shifted since the 1.0 launch.
Steam holds Talented at roughly 91 percent Very Positive; the exact review count shifts depending on language filtering (a little over 1,100 English-only, upward of 1,500 across all languages), but every cut lands in the same tier. Metacritic has no critic reviews on file and won't unlock a user score without more ratings than it's received, so there's effectively no outside critical record to weigh against Steam's own number here.
Buy it. At six dollars, the talent-tree randomization alone clears the bar, and a game honest about where its own content runs out beats one that pads past it.