Is Combolands Worth It? The Numbers
97.5%positive
Overwhelmingly Positive
What holds up
- The combo chain genuinely escalates — endless-mode players report scores past 1e12 per week, which means the maths holds up far beyond the ~30 minute run it is designed around
- Nine guilds and 21 pickable pairings give the replay loop somewhere to go; the Steam discussion board spent launch week arguing about which guild is best without reaching agreement, which is a good sign for a strategy game
- The developers patched four times in five days (v1.0.3 to v1.0.6) and shipped the most-requested feature — an in-game Compendium — 48 hours after players asked for it
- $9.99 with a 20% launch discount, and a run fits in a lunch break
What does not
- Trigger wording is under-explained in game. A launch-week thread asks how to fire buildings whose text says they act "when triggered", and the answer came from another player, not the game
- English only. Official localisation is priority one but has no date; the Chinese and Russian translations that exist are unofficial community patches
- The free demo was pulled at launch, so there is no way to try it first
- Not Steam Deck Verified, and the developers do not own a Deck to fix it with
- Endless mode breaks: a player reports score requirements bugging out at Megalopolis XXXV
Notes on the score
- There is no Metacritic score for Combolands as of 2026-08-30, so the Steam figure above is the only aggregate score available.
- Polygon's preview called it, in the developers' own retelling, "Steam's coolest new roguelike in years" — the piece the studio credits for breaking the game out.
- We have no way to independently benchmark this game, so we do not publish a score of our own. Everything above is either a number you can check on Steam or a quote from a named source.
Who it is for
If the phrase "Balatro meets Cities: Skylines" made you lean in, this delivers on the first half more than the second: multiplier chains that snowball on a small board, in runs built around 30 minutes. If you want a city to manage — budgets, roads, citizens — this is not that game.
Two practical checks before buying, given there is no demo any more: the system requirements are modest enough that almost anything runs it, and if you were planning to play handheld, read the Steam Deck page first — it runs, but it is not Verified and text legibility is a real complaint.
Review score pulled from Steam: