After its disastrous launch last year, I'm here to tell you that 2025's most promising auto-battler finally lives up to its potential

What was the worst PC launch of last year? There's no shortage of possible answers, everything from Monster Hunter Wilds' no good, very bad PC performance, to whatever the hell happened with MindsEye. But allow me to nominate another contender for 2025's most infamous award. The Bazaar is a charming, colourful auto-battler that, when it released back in March last year, managed to alienate almost its entire community—squandering its potential through a flurry of bad press and fan outrage. After a positive beta period and a smattering of positive streamer attention, its official launch introduced a bevy of microtransactions and monetisation schemes that soured its playerbase and made it incredibly hard to actually recommend.

Which puts me in a difficult position, because… it's really, really good. I think you should play it.

The Bazaar takes place in a sort of galactic marketplace. You pick your hero and visit a selection of shops to buy items that you place onto your board. Visit the weapon shop, for instance, and you might be offered a Katana that does low damage on a fast cooldown. Or maybe a cutlass, which is slower, but attacks twice and deals double crit damage—tripling its initial attack value. If you're lucky, you'll be offered a sharkray, which gains damage every time you haste something on your board.

At the end of each day, you fight another player's board. Here you watch as items automatically trigger until one player is declared the winner based on the strength of the board they've assembled.

Win or lose, a new day begins, with more shops and events that let you strengthen your board—refining, improving or pivoting to create the strongest build you can make from the options you're given.

The juice here is in how varied The Bazaar's many items can be, and the wild synergies they can unlock. Most shops only sell items from your hero's item pool, but despite that restriction there's still plenty of variety each run. Do you go for an ammo build, designed to deal enough fast damage to kill your opponent before all of your items run out of charges and stop working? Do you go for a poison build, which is slower, but can bypass any shield items your opponent may have? Do you focus on 'friends'—a mixture of aquatic creatures and robotic critters—to take advantage of some powerful late-game large items that buff themselves through the power of friendship?

As the days roll on, you'll access more powerful items, skills that provide passive benefits to your build, and even enchantments that can give an item an extra special effect.

Inevitably a meta emerges each patch—currently weapons seem a little oppressive, following a nerf to burn items. Despite that, my favourite way to play is to pick a hero at random and just figure out something based on what disparate items I'm offered. The best feeling in the Bazaar is when a shop offers up an item or skill that synergises perfectly with the set-up you're building. And when you eventually get to visit shops that let you buy items from other heroes, that's when things can really start getting wild.

Here's an example. In the above video you can see one of the most experimental boards I've constructed in recent weeks. It's day 15, when the builds you face have often been refined to the point of godhood.

My build is the one at the bottom of the screen. I will explain the items going right-to-left. Trust me, it's easier this way:

• Port: Large items are often the defining part of your build, because naturally they require the most slots on your board. Port is usually one of the more underwhelming ones. It reloads every ammo item on your board and also charges an ammo item, making it trigger faster. But as ammo builds are usually about killing quick and fast, it's generally not something you'd run.
• Nesting Doll: This little fella guy gives you a comically small amount of shield every two seconds. In the history of The Bazaar, no player has been saved by the amount of shield generated by a nesting doll. No, the reason it's here is because it's a fast cooldown ammo item, making it the engine that drives the next item…
• Ballista: This is the heart of the build. It's a nine-second cooldown item, which would be achingly slow if it wasn't for the port constantly charging it. And while it only does 375 damage per shot here, it gains multicast every time another ammo item is used—for instance a nesting doll. And because it's my only weapon and I picked up the skill Quality over Quantity, it also has lifesteal—so I heal every time it fires.
• Fiber Optics: An item from a different hero's pool, but one that can enable some absolutely wild builds whoever you're playing as. It's a passive item that charges up the rightmost item on your board every time you use the leftmost item. In this case my rightmost item is port, which is reloading and also charging all the other items, creating a loop of instant triggers.
• Atomic Clock: Also another hero's item, but one that here makes the whole build come together. It has a one second cooldown, making it even faster than nesting doll. But unlike nesting doll, its active effect is also incredibly useful. Every time it fires it increases the cooldown of an enemy item for one second. Normally that's balanced by its low ammo count. Dooley, the hero this item belongs to, doesn't have many ways to actually reload ammo. Vanessa, the hero I'm playing here, has loads of ways to reload items, including the port, which, thanks to fiber optics, is being charged every time the atomic clock goes off. That means it never runs out of ammo, which means my opponent's also very strong build just gets slower and slower and slower as my ballista gains more and more multicast charges.

These are the kind of synergies you dream of when you start a run of The Bazaar. It's a game that rewards experimentation and versatility—cleverly structuring its items and events in a way that promises big payoffs (or complete ruin) from a late game pivot into something new and inventive.

It's also absurdly slick—its sound design, its animations, its art, everything feels premium in a way that other auto-battlers struggle to match. It's a crime that it's not bigger than it is.

That it isn't is in large part down to just how badly developer Tempo fumbled the launch. Even after the studio had backpeddled on its monetisation plans, it still had a pretty bumpy period in the months following its official release. I stopped playing a few months after launch, at a time when Tempo seemed to struggle with balance, leading to some absolutely miserable metas that curtailed experimentation in favour of boring, easy-to-force builds.

I only came back on a whim, after hearing some rumblings that things were much better now, and because—despite all its early failings—The Bazaar has always had an abundance of promise, if only it could be properly harnessed. And yes, things are better now. New cards and heroes make it harder to force specific builds, encouraging variety and experimentation. And the monetisation is largely fixed: you can get a lot out of the base purchase and the three heroes you get with it, with three others available as (admittedly pricey) DLC.

It's even got matchmaking in ranked mode now, giving you a gentler onramp into the game's difficulty curve before you're haunted by the ghosts of players with hundreds of hours more experience. Yes, there are still frustrations—you will still build something terrifying, only to immediately go up against its direct counter. But despite any rough edges that still linger, The Bazaar now feels like the game it should have been at launch. And if you were put off by the negativity, or just never heard of it in the first place, I recommend taking a look now Tempo has had almost a year to recover from the fallout of the game's ill-fated release.