Eslabong

Developer/Publisher: shirowita · Platform: Windows PC (Steam Deck compatible) · Early Access, released 24 August 2026

Two games, welded properly

The pitch is deceptively simple: real-time arena combat on one side, mercenary club management on the other. What makes it work is that neither half is a garnish for the other.

The combat is genuine action — positioning, timing, aimable skillshots, abilities you can whiff. You can take direct control of your captain and fight in the thick of it, or set your tactics and hand the match to auto-battle. Crucially, both are real options. Auto-battle isn't the lazy path; it's a diagnostic tool. Set your formation, your posture, your target priorities, then watch the fight play out and see whether the plan you built in the menus survives contact. Half my best tactical insights came from losing an auto-battle and rewatching what went wrong.

The management half has the bones of a proper football manager sim. A rotating recruit market. Gear. Training. Form. Injuries. An academy so your reserves aren't a liability when your starters are wrecked. Contracts and stamina and schedules. Leagues and cup tournaments that run season after season with persistent progression underneath them, so a good season compounds and a bad one hurts for a long while.

And then you go down onto the sand and swing the sword yourself. That collapse of distance between the spreadsheet and the fight is the whole game.

Absurd depth, sanely delivered

Fifty playable classes. Roughly a hundred champions. Over five hundred abilities. On paper that's the kind of number that signals bloat — a content dump papering over a thin core loop.

It isn't. The classes are differentiated enough that a roster feels like a set of arguments about how to win rather than a collection of stat blocks, and the build space around abilities is where the community has clearly been living. The genuinely ridiculous combinations people are surfacing on Discord every week aren't degenerate exploits; they're the game working as designed.

Backline safety is a lie, incidentally. Dashes, leaps, hooks — your ranged fighters will get reached. Build a response, not a wall.

Beyond the league table

There's more here than the seasonal grind. The Challenge Tower pits you asynchronously against other players' rosters, which turns club-building into something closer to deckbuilding-with-consequences. "Defend the Iron Gate" is a co-op PvE dungeon and a genuinely good reason to drag in a friend. Local co-op and Remote Play Together are supported, controller support is full, and it runs beautifully on Deck.

The verdict

95/100. Eslabong takes two genres that have no business fitting together and finds the joint where they lock. It's deep enough to lose a month in, generous enough to be readable in an afternoon, and made with obvious care by one person who clearly loves both halves of it. The Steam reviews sit at Overwhelmingly Positive and they are not wrong.

Buy it now. The only thing you lose by waiting is seasons.

Developer support

shirowita is doing the thing every Early Access buyer hopes for and rarely gets. Updates land constantly and read like someone playing their own game: point hotfixes for AoE projectiles misbehaving near arena walls, draft-mode ability slots failing to save, targeted buffs to individual abilities — the small, unglamorous stuff, not just headline features. Launch alone brought sweeping balance passes across classes, healing, lifesteal, projectiles, summons and status effects, substantially smarter combat AI around positioning, blocking and ability usage, and improvements to performance, stability, controller support and audio. There are 57 achievements and support for eight languages, the latter credited directly to community help. The stated plan is to keep shaping the game around player feedback while adding fighters, classes, competitions and systems through Early Access. On the evidence so far, that's a promise being kept weekly rather than a roadmap slide.