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heads up! this post contains spoilers for the first couple hours of beastieball, so if you care about spoilers about this game, consider not reading this, lmao

So the way I heard about this game, is from a friend that was very invested into the game itself. She heavily recommended the game to me, and I was like “why not!” so I proceeded to download the demo, and play it, and being honest here, I wasn’t expecting to like this game that much. I heard the words “turn based gameplay” and “creature collector” on its Steam page description, and I was expecting to have a bad time, because I always tend to associate any creature collector game with Pokémon, and I really don’t like Pokémon. I also really haven’t had much fun with other turn based games I have played before, especially if they’re RPGs. But Beastieball just has the sauce, it has that fun appeal I’ve been missing from games for a long while. The soundtrack, the character design, the fact that the beasties are actually so happy to play beastieball with you (I am assuming that is what the sport is also called) all comes together to make one of the best games I’ve played recently. The gameplay is pretty good, like it just feels so right. You can tell that it is an early access game still (you sometimes encounter minor bugs here and there, some beasties have some very rough sprites sometimes), but for the most part everything tends to work. They also offer a demo of the game, which is fucking awesome actually, and allows you to actually try the game before you buy it.

So basically in this game, there are these creatures, and these creatures are called beasties. They like to play a game with a ball, and this game is called beastieball, and the beasties themselves actually like to play this game, and unlike the Pokémon games, where you kidnap Pokémon and force them to participate in what is essentially dog fights, beastieball matches are significantly more friendly (idk how to describe it, lmao), the beasties themselves are willing to be on your team, and are even more willing to compete, too. The game is mostly you competing in tournaments and exploring the open world in order to get enough rank to make the overseeing body of the sport of beastieball to not build a stadium where your town’s nature reserve is. The game also hints at how commercialized the sport is now, with the fact they want to destroy the nature reserve for another stadium, or there is a whole section off the map where a whole forest was chopped down, to plant rubber trees, and said rubber is harvested for the balls themselves. You can also tell that the game implies that the sport isn’t what it used to, with the lower ranked teams often smothered out by the higher ranked ones, and most research into beasties essentially stopping because of the fact the Beastieball league pulls all scientists away from that research. Anyways, you start off in Rutile, and from the moment you start the game, you can tell the game was made from the same developers as Wandersong, like it has the same kinda dialogue style of the game, among other elements. Anyways, you defeat the coach of Rutile, you become the new coach of your town, and then finally you’re able to explore the open world (if you have the full version, that is, lmao, the demo ends after the coach is defeated).

The open world in this game is a series of paths and corridors where you need to carefully walk around, unless you want to get involved into yet another game of beastieball with the beasties roaming around. You make use of jerseys as like the way you recruit these creatures onto your team, and to actually recruit them, you pretty much have to fulfill a requirement while in-game (like dealing a certain amount of damage to one of the beasties, or like, doing some sort of play, using some sort of move) and after this is done, they will want to join your team, and if you have a jersey, you can go ahead and add them. Occasionally, you’ll find coach-less beastie teams roaming around, and if you play against them, you can get a lot of XP from said encounter (also sometimes absolutely curbstomped, lmao). In these same paths, you’ll find some gatekeeper beastie teams, which are beasties that are intended to block you from progressing, and these are higher level compared to everyone else, which helps regulate the process flow a bit, so you can’t just go straight to the final boss, lmao. The more XP you get, the more you level up, and the more powerful your team becomes. Eventually you’re able to evolve (the game calls it “metamorph”) your beasties into more stronger versions of themselves. The more you play, the more moves you learn, and when used properly, the resulting damage is insane.

The way the sport (beastieball) works, is like it is kinda like volleyball, but it only has 2 players or beasties per side, and your goal is to either score 2 or 3 points, or knock out your opponent (which will count as 1 point, or can count as an instant win¹).

From what I understand, beasties has different attack stats, and there are three attack types, these being mind, body, and spirit. I am still not exactly sure what any of this means, since I am still working out my team, and still trying to get a feel of how everything works, the only thing I know is that some beasties have weaknesses against certain attacks, so you pretty much need to keep an eye peeled for any exploits you are able to take advantage of. If your beastie gets knocked out, they will feel wiped, which means they, for the most part, cannot attack or do anything², which means you should probably tag them out with another beastie on the bench. Also they do eventually recover in like something like 4 turns, but they’ll be sweaty, and lose stamina per turn. The way you lose a game, is either the enemy scores 2 or more points, or they instakill one of your beasties. If that happens, you often have either campsites or railhouses, which are places where you can rest up, recover stamina, or heal.

While attacking, you can do volleys that give your ally additional stats that may help you, you can also give certain effects to enemies so their attacks are less effective, there is also effects that affect the playing field itself (like an earthquake effect that damages the enemy team per turn, or spikes that damage those who are getting tagged in and out from the field). Certain beasties have traits, for example, there is this beastie I have called Fetcham who can catch the ball and allows them to immediately hit the ball without the need of volleying. There is another beastie called Illugus that places a spike effect that damages those who are tagged in, and there was another UFO looking motherfucker that has a tractor beam that prevents the beastie affected by it from moving.

I should also mention is that the enemy can (and often does) do the same thing, they can make use of special volleys, set certain effects to destroy the effectiveness of your team, and the enemy also can have certain beasties with traits that will make it harder to play the way I tend to play, which is just focusing on damage and nothing else. By playing this way, there has been times where I just got devastated. So I did what I always tend to do for RPG games: grind. Grind and grind until my team would become unstoppable. I eventually got to the town of Jasper, where you fight Kaz, which is the first real ranked coach you get to fight. And his team gets wiped the fuck out, and the match barely lasts like, what, 3 or 4 minutes? It was insane. Anyways, while the “kill them as fast as you can” strategy often works against low level enemies, I started to realize that relying on this strat does not work all the time. Once I got to Begonia, the beasties that I played against all started to have some fuck shit moves, and that relying on damage alone wasn’t as effective against teams of the same level as me. One of these fuckers had an ability that allowed it to steal attacks that was intended to another beastie, and this asshole often activated that one power every time there was an attack heading towards the one teammate that was one smack away from getting wiped out. There was another one, whom on their defense turn, they would make themselves or everyone almost invulnerable to damage, others would cast some sort of spell that will make my beasties unable to attack, along other very annoying things to fight against.

I quickly realize that relying on damage alone does not work at all, and that if I wanted to reach the peak, I would most likely would need to figure out different attacks, volleys and support moves to get the perfect lineup that makes best use of the strength of every single beastie on my team. For now, I did figure out an attack combo that does a lot of damage: Bandicraft has a volley that is called Demanding Set, which is a volley that gives additional POW (aka, more attack stat) to the beastie receiving it, in exchange for the negative effect of feeling stressed and tired. Usually this is an issue since tired beasties cannot do much at all, but Fetcham has an attack called Relentless, which can be used in the event of being stressed or tired. This does a lot of damage, and I’ve seen damage numbers up to the 300s, lmao, lmao. Basically all the strategy of this game is based of experimenting and seeing stats, viewing which attacks are effective against the enemy team or whatever.

But why do that when you can grind the fuck out of the game? I love it when in an RPG, you can end up making your team so powerful, that a boss that you are meant to fight in the early game is now suddenly a walk in the park. There is this one beastie called Illugus that went fucked up and evil, and it was intended to be a boss of sorts, and you pretty much need to play against them to exhaust them, thing is, that this boss was like level 18 or so, meanwhile my beasties were like level 29 to 32, lmao. Kaz, Reese, Riven and Celia were pretty much easy fights because I was so high level, and the game itself seems to not have much protections against someone who his gameplay style for RPGs is just, “grind”, lmao. I think the goal for this gameplay will be to be so high level, even the final boss is like defeated in 4 attacks, but I think it doesn’t work that way, since from what I can tell, the level of the beasties themselves scales alongside your own, which prevents you from breaking the game, lmao.

Anyways, I think I should also talk about the game’s art style. It is a mix of 2D sprites moving around in a 3D world, which kinda reminds me of like another game I cannot remember the name of. I really really love how the character design looks, and I really love how the beasties look like. Like they all have big "little guy" vibes to all of them, like actually.

Anyways, the camera is fixed into one plane, and you can’t really move your view anywhere else, which kinda makes it tricky to advance in some sections. For example, some areas have these switches that you need to flick on, and the way you do this is by throwing a ball at the switch itself, which can be tricky because the camera is locked to a single position, and you have to line your shot carefully, which can be tricky when you only have a single point of view. I kinda wish I had free control of the camera in some situations, but for the most part, the game does a good job of keeping the camera where it is required. The UI in Beastieball is also really great, and I really really like it. It has the SPORTS vibe all over it, and it makes use of different colors and gradients to make screen elements just pop out the screen.

It also makes good use of logos around the gameplay, as a way to help describe what is happening on screen. I also like the screen that you see when a beastie is knocked out, and this is done together with haptic feedback from the controller, which makes you somewhat more immersed into the gameplay. Despite how good the UI is in the game, there are times where it can be overwhelming. There have been times I tried swapping out a beastie, and i ended up picking the wrong one, which can be annoying, and even devastating if the beastie that was tagged in is low level. I should also note there are still unfinished sprites, which to be fair, the game is still in early access. I like how sometimes the game switches from a fully finished sprite, to a doodle, which is something you encounter in the later levels. Also, there are times where the game freezes for a couple of seconds while it figures out the damage to be dealt to the defending team. While annoying, this issues aren’t game breakers, and the game is still more than playable, actually.

Anyways, I think this is a good introduction to the game. Like my experience has been so fun, and I am glad I decided to try the game instead of avoiding it like the plague because it was listed as “creature collector”, lmao.

page updates:

• 2026-04-05: page was created.

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1. not all the time, in matches with guardian beasties or those that are in a team, there is no knockdown win at all, lmao↩︎

2. there are some moves that can be done while wiped, but it is kinda risky keeping wiped beasties in the game since they can get destroyed by the enemy team.↩︎