The Bazaar could be the future of autobattlers, if it stops strangling itself to death with its own microtransactions

If you've heard of The Bazaar, it's probably not for a good reason. Any excitement around its recent launch into open beta seems to have been almost entirely overshadowed by community outrage about its newly introduced microtransactions. The pot has only been stirred further by creator (and former professional Hearthstone player, esports team owner, and streamer) Reynad, who reckons your game's subreddit being permanently furious is good, actually.

The vast majority of that upset, however, is coming from the existing playerbase—dedicated fans as well as backers of the original crowdfunding campaign, many of whom have been playing in the closed beta already for months. Understandably, they feel betrayed by what they see as broken promises, and upset that a game they've already been playing has suddenly changed.

As someone who'd never tried the game before, I was curious whether I might feel differently coming to it completely fresh, with no preconceptions. Are the microtransactions really that heinous, or are they just jarring for long-time fans who didn't expect them? And is the game accessible for someone who doesn't already have 100s of hours logged?

The Bazaar is an accessible, shiny, and clearly very Hearthstone-inspired take on autobattlers. Over a series of rounds, you buy or otherwise acquire a board of items, which will then automatically carry out various effects when you battle monsters and other players.

The game's clever conceit is that it takes place across an enormous, fantastical marketplace. Where in other autobattlers you're often building a roster of heroes, here you're shopping for items—everything from guns to cargo shorts to skyscrapers to jellyfish. It's a great marriage of mechanics and theme—given that you spend most of your time in all these games buying and selling, why not make merchants the stars?

What you're looking for is synergies. Your board has limited space, with each item taking up one, two, or even three slots, and the key to success is finding the perfect spread. Which items are next to which, what types of items you have, whether you have lots of small ones or a few big ones—it all makes a difference in a fight.

A double-barreled shotgun, for example, is quick and powerful, but limited in ammo. Put it to the right of a powder flask, and that'll give it more bullets every five seconds. But the shotgun can fire every four seconds if properly stocked, so we might want to put a captain's wheel next to the powder flask, which will speed it up at regular intervals. But then a captain's wheel itself gets faster if you have at least one three-slot item, so we should get one of those and ah we're running out of space…

The squeeze

The game makes a great first impression as you begin to experiment with the possibilities. Randomised shops and events force you to adapt your build as you go, whether you're creating a menagerie of poison fish, steadily increasing the protective power of a smuggler's cove by selling illicit goods between rounds, or finding increasingly devastating ways to roll a giant boulder at your opponent.

But even in these giddy early stages, the dark shadow over The Bazaar is obvious. Completing runs in the free "normal" mode generates no rewards at all—but not only that, the final screen makes a show of letting you know what you would have won if you were putting real money in. Ghostly chests you can't open stack up, taunting you, and you walk away only having made progress via any daily or weekly quests you were able to complete.

If you want to get something for your time, you need to play ranked mode, with each run costing a ticket. Some can be acquired for free, though at an increasingly slow pace—but once you run out, you have to pay a dollar a time. But even then, half your chests will still be incorporeal. To get all of those rewards, you also need a $10 monthly subscription.

But at least then you'd be set, right? Well… no, because then you also need to buy the premium season pass for the month for another $10, which is the only way to actually unlock new items for the game rather than just cosmetics. Make sure you've got that subscription as well, because without its double XP bonus (and long daily play sessions), you won't be getting far along the pass to actually get the things you've already paid for. In fact, redditors have worked out there's almost no room for error—without bonus XP, the pass requires you complete all your daily quests for 27 out of the 30 days it's active to reach its end, meaning anyone buying it after the first day of the open beta may already be shafted.

And then if you want to play any characters beyond starting hero Vanessa, it's 500 gems for the first, 1500 gems for the second, and 2500 gems after that. (Currently only three characters are available, including Vanessa, but at least three more are planned.) Technically that's earnable through very slow grinding, but otherwise it's equivalent to $5, $15, and $25. It's here that the theme of rampant, fantastical capitalism starts to feel a little on-the-nose.

Priced out

From a new player perspective, however, the biggest problem here isn't just how aggressive this system is. It's that so much meaningful stuff is paywalled, there's almost nothing left for me to actually do for free.

Essentially I can play the same character over and over, increasingly aiming for one of a handful of viable builds, to grind for ranked tickets via slower and slower progress on the free season pass. When I can play ranked, my performance is rarely strong—the game is accessible but not easy, and I'm regularly matched against players with the kind of shiny borders and "Founder" titles that suggest they've already been invested for months. Their greater grasp on the game's nuances frequently sees them obliterating me in seconds.

When I'm not being wrecked by veterans, I'm running afoul of real money characters and items. I'm not experienced enough to say whether there's truly a pay-to-win element here, but I can certainly say it sucks having my ass kicked by seemingly very powerful things I'm not able to use or experiment with myself.

Once I limp my way to the finish line, my reward is a few chests if I'm lucky. Each contains a paltry amount of gems, and a minor cosmetic. These always seem to be slightly animated portraits for existing items—but to add insult to injury, they're frequently items I can't use, because I haven't unlocked the relevant character yet.

Buyer beware

The resulting experience is brutal, struggling against a tough learning curve with no sense of progress or reward. Even levelling on the free track of the season pass has already slowed to a pitiful crawl, and after over a week of pretty regular play, I'm still 90 crystals off even unlocking my discounted first new character—remember, getting another after that will take at least three times as long, and then even longer for any beyond that.

It'd be less of a slog if my ranked results were better, there's no doubt about that—but there's no draw to invest the time in learning and improving when I'm simply doing the same thing over and over with the same content I started with.

The monetisation feels aimed at milking an already invested audience of closed beta players—that's distasteful enough on its own, as the community's strong reaction has illustrated. But there's also so little here to give anyone not already in that diehard playerbase any reason to jump in and stick with it. I'm not opposed to putting some money into a game I'm enjoying, but I need to feel like I'm getting something out of it already before I take that step. Here, it feels like a total of $20 a month is mandatory before the game will even begin to let you make meaningful progress.

That's a real shame, because there is a good game at the heart of this frustration. The slick core experience has been compelling enough to keep drawing me back for one more run, and though that can sometimes feel like just one more pull at the slot machine of randomised items, there is genuinely engaging and interesting strategy to play with here. In the way it makes a complex and sometimes intimidating genre into something approachable and charming, it lives up to that Blizzard inspiration. With the right structure around it, it's easy to see how this could become the defacto autobattler gateway drug.

But as it is, by the time I end a run I'm always left frustrated and disheartened, swearing it'll be my last. Whether that's because I've hit a brick wall of opposing builds I can't match without a clear path to doing better next time—or worse, because I've actually done well, and the game's incapable of acknowledging it unless I pay for the privilege.

On the one hand, this is an open beta—improvements may be on the way for the monetisation system, and some of my troubles may be down to limited content in the initial offering. On the other, you do somewhat lose the benefit of the doubt of a beta when you're already asking for $20+ a month from players, and given the bad feeling The Bazaar has managed to generate in just over a week of being accessible to the public, any u-turn it makes at this point will need to be fast and dramatic. Thus far, there's little sign of that.