After my very first run of Guildrun I had the mouse hovering over the uninstall button. Not because the game played badly. Because the story was stolen. Two hours later I was still playing, and I only stopped because I had finished the demo. That is the whole review in two sentences: terrible lore, great game, and the demo is free on Steam right now.
I tried it in the first place because in August this free demo peaked at 14,283 concurrent players on Steam. Most full games never see 8,000. As I write this it still has around 4,000 people in it, so I wanted to know what everyone else already knows.
Rifts, breakers and a story you have read before
Things used to be normal, until rifts started appearing. Rifts never stay stable for long, they breach, and monsters come out. Some people awakened, they are called breakers, and they step into the rifts to kill monsters and close them.
If you know manhwa or anime you know Solo Leveling, and you know where this is going. It is not inspired by it. It is a copy. Please change something, guys, because the game underneath deserves its own world and right now the borrowing is far too obvious.
And that is the only terrible thing in this review. Everything after this point is a different story.
You drag, then you watch
When I started playing I got humbled. I went in thinking this was a tactics game where I have a lot of impact on the fight. Obviously I don’t. Guildrun is an auto battler: you pick one C rank hero to start, drag your team onto specific spots on a hex map, and watch them fight with basic attacks and skills that cast themselves.
For me this is a rogue-like idle battler. I have tried a lot of those on mobile and wanted to see one done properly on PC. There are three speeds, and I played on 3x almost the whole time, only slowing down when I wanted to see what a skill actually does.
And while you watch, you notice everything on screen looks like League of Legends or Valorant. My first thought was that this is another Riot game. Turns out the studio, Leyline, actually has people from Riot, Activision Blizzard, Konami and EA, and the lead designers worked on Hearthstone. My guess is the Riot person is the visual designer and not a programmer, because visually this is a 10 out of 10 for me. I did not spot any AI art, everything looks clean and hand drawn. The sound is fine, it does its job, and honestly I could not hum the music to you now.
Guildrun screenshots
The relic that wants 1000 damage first
What you do between fights is where the game opens up. Every combat pays you in shards, then you get a shop. Recruit a new hero into your guild, buy gear, buy relics, reroll the shop, or save the shards for later.
Relics are the interesting part, because some of them do nothing until you earn them. One wants 1000 damage from basic attacks before it turns on. Another wants 50 fire damage. So you are not just buying stats, you are buying a condition to build your team around.
Keep in mind, gear you buy goes to your inventory, not to a hero, so you have to equip it yourself. Forget it once and you will fight a boss with a sword sitting in a bag.
One mistake per run
Those bosses are where the real game starts. Every phase ends with a boss of a certain element, fire, frost and so on, and until the first one everything is okay. After it, monster strength grows very fast. Regular monsters start hitting like bosses.
Lose a fight and you have one safety net, the emergency rewind. If you have it, you go back, change your setup, maybe buy something, and try again. If you do not have it, the run ends right there. That is the whole difficulty in one sentence: you get one mistake.
It took me around 2 hours to finish the demo and unlock Endless mode, and none of that time was easy. You cannot just stack strong heroes. Their strengths have to work together, or the game finds the gap.
Building the guild
The way you make them work together is the composition of your guild and main party. There are 25 heroes in the demo across seven classes: Mystics, Mages, Assassins, Tanks, Duelists, Warriors and Vanguard. You start with a maximum of three, and after the first boss you can usually go to four, which helps a lot but gives you one more hero to feed with gear.
Heroes do not stay at their starting rank. You level them in the shop after combat, or at the camp where the game offers to rank up your lowest members, and as they rank up they get new passives, new abilities and multi-classes. My personal best was a very shield-heavy team, three of the four had some shield ability. I used it to complete the demo and reach Endless mode, where I got knocked out after the first fight.
I did not find a broken build myself, but if people are reaching level 80 and beyond in Endless, some combination out there clearly is. That is what I want to go find next.
Who is Guildrun for
If you like those idle battlers on mobile and want a proper one on PC, this game is absolutely for you. I guess people who play TFT will love it too, but I never played it, so do not take my word on that. If you need to press buttons during a fight, this is not your game.
One more thing: my footage is about a week old and the developers are shipping fixes constantly, so some numbers in the video may already be different. Kudos to them for that. I hit no bugs, and performance was very good the whole way.
So, back to that uninstall button. I am glad I did not press it. The story is terrible, the world building is copied, but the game underneath is not good, it is great. It is free right now, and the full release is targeted for 2027.
If you played the demo, drop your best run setup in the comments under the video. I want to know how people reach level 80 in Endless mode.
