Monsters Auto Battler

A small arena and a placement puzzle

Monsters Auto Battler is exactly as small as its name suggests. Before each fight, you place a handful of mercenaries around a compact arena; once the fight starts, you don't touch anything again — the battle plays out on its own, and the outcome was decided the moment you stopped arranging units. Soomka Games, credited as both developer and publisher — and reachable, per the store page's support listing, only by a personal Gmail address rather than a studio site — frames this plainly in its own store description: "it matters who and where you place before the fight. Planning is the most important part of a fight."

That framing is doing real work, because it's the one part of the pitch that separates this game from a coin-flip idler. The store page describes opponents with distinct behaviours rather than a uniform wall of stats: some attack only at range, some close to melee, some detonate when they reach your line, some heal their allies mid-fight, and some spawn additional enemies as the battle goes on. If that's implemented with any consistency, it turns "where do I put my tank" into an actual read on the coming wave rather than a formality — the kind of small, legible decision space that makes cheap auto-battlers worth returning to even when nothing else about them is ambitious.

The storefront's own screenshots back that structure up more concretely than the marketing text does. One shows the staging phase itself: a bounded placement zone, a hand of unit cards each with its own gold cost, and enemy squads already visible and clustered across the map before the Start button is pressed — so the read-the-board-first idea in the description appears to be a real, separate phase rather than a turn of phrase. Another shows a level 41 encounter with dozens of units filling both sides of the arena at once, which suggests the early few-mercenaries-on-a- tile-floor skirmish shown elsewhere does scale into something considerably larger later on, even without a public source confirming how that curve feels to actually play through.

What the package actually contains

Beyond that central loop, the documented scope is modest. Steam's category tags list single-player only, with no online mode, co-op or leaderboard mentioned anywhere on the store page. The achievement list — five entries, all of them level milestones at 5, 15, 25, 35 and 50 — is the only formal progression system Steam has any record of, and it reads as a simple experience curve rather than a build-crafting or unlock system with real branching. The community tag list (Auto Battler, Real Time Tactics, Isometric, Strategy, Base Building among them) points to an isometric presentation and light base-building framing around the battles, which lines up with the "small arenas" language in the store description, but there's no roadmap, no post-launch update log and no official wiki to confirm how much of that scales past the opening hours.

On presentation, the storefront's own screenshots show a compact isometric battlefield with a readable top-down camera and a fairly plain, function-first art style — closer to a functional strategy-sim look than to the painterly or chibi styles that dominate the genre's bigger names. Nothing in the available art suggests broken or unfinished visuals, but nothing suggests a standout either; it reads as competent and unremarkable, which is a fair description of most of what's assessable about this game from the outside.

The commercial side is the strongest part of the case for it. NZ$7.39 (US$4.99) buys the whole game outright, with no in-app purchases, no ad placements and no discount cycling visible on the store page at the time of writing. For a subgenre that includes plenty of free-to-play entries built around gacha mercenaries and energy timers, a flat, honest, one-time price with a single- digit achievement list to match is at least monetised in good faith. Soomka Games isn't a first- time storefront presence, either — the same account released "Shadow and darkness" on Steam two months earlier, in October 2024, so this is a small studio with an active, if very low-profile, release cadence rather than a single abandoned project.

The evidence problem

Here's the part that has to be stated plainly rather than hedged around: as of this review, Monsters Auto Battler has zero user reviews on Steam, checked against the full unfiltered history rather than any recent-activity window. Not "mostly negative," not "mixed" — Steam has not accumulated enough reviews, in either direction, to generate a score at all. That's an unusual position for a game to be in almost eight months after release, and it means this review has no player sentiment to weigh, no bug reports to cross-reference and no community consensus to either confirm or push back against.

The one other public dataset — Steam's global achievement percentages — is consistent with that picture rather than contradicting it. The Level 5 achievement sits at 71.4% completion; Level 15 drops to 14.2%; Level 25, Level 35 and Level 50 are all tied at exactly 7.1%. Those numbers are suspiciously clean fractions, and they're clean because the tracked population is tiny — 7.1% is almost exactly one player in fourteen, 14.2% is two in fourteen. Read generously, that's a game whose entire measurable audience numbers in the low double digits, with most of that group stopping well before the midpoint of the level curve. Read as a design signal rather than a popularity contest, the fact that the same fraction of players reached level 25, 35 and 50 alike suggests whoever got past the early game kept going all the way — encouraging for anyone who does commit, if not evidence of a broad audience doing so.

None of this proves the game is broken, boring or badly balanced — there's no negative review to point to for any of those claims, because there's no review at all. But a near-total absence of community validation is itself the single most important fact a buyer needs, and it's worth more than a guess at quality either way.

Verdict

Judged purely on what's documented — the store page's own mechanical description, its screenshots, its tag list, its price and its achievement data — Monsters Auto Battler is a small, coherent, fairly priced auto-battler with a genuine placement-puzzle hook and nothing predatory in how it's sold. That's enough to clear "competent." It isn't enough to clear much higher than that, because the pitch itself sits in one of Steam's most crowded subgenres without an obvious point of difference, the progression system on record is a bare level curve, and — the fact that should weigh heaviest for any prospective buyer — almost eight months on the store with no user reviews and an achievement population in the low double digits means nobody has publicly vouched for it either way. At its current NZ$7.39 price that's a low-risk curiosity for an auto-battler completist who wants to judge the placement mechanic for themselves. It is not yet a game anyone outside its own small install base can meaningfully recommend.