Eslabong launches into Steam Early Access today, giving players the chance to take charge of a mercenary club, recruit a team of fighters, and hopefully turn them into champions.
Developed by solo developer shirowita, the roguelite mixes fast-paced arena combat with team management, simulated leagues, a constantly changing market, and hundreds of abilities to experiment with. You can even decide whether you want to get involved in the fighting yourself or leave your carefully assembled team to handle things without you.
Build Your Club, Then Head Into the Arena
The basic idea behind Eslabong is pretty simple. Win fights, earn gold, recruit better mercenaries, and gradually build a club capable of taking on the strongest teams around. Actually doing that might take a little more work.
The Early Access version includes 50 mercenary classes, around 100 champions, and more than 500 different abilities and spells. Fighters can be bought and sold through a simulated market, while randomized stats, evolving rosters, and changing opponents mean each season gives you different decisions to make.
Once your team is ready, you can put them to work across structured leagues and tournaments against 30 handcrafted rival clubs and their leaders.
There’s a Codex for scouting those rivals and keeping track of your own roster too, which should come in handy once you’ve accumulated enough mercenaries that remembering exactly who does what starts becoming a challenge of its own.
You Don’t Have to Watch From the Sidelines
Where things get particularly interesting is the combat. Rather than being a pure management game where you put together a team and watch the numbers do their thing, Eslabong lets you take direct control of your captain during arena battles.
Abilities need to be aimed, positioning matters, and you can move and react in real time while the rest of your mercenaries fight around you. If you’d rather concentrate on building the team, though, you can step back, set your tactics, and let everyone autobattle instead.
That gives you two pretty different ways to approach the same club. You can personally help drag an underperforming squad through a difficult match or find out whether all that time spent putting together the perfect roster was actually worth it.
Leagues Aren’t the Only Place to Fight
There’s already quite a bit beyond the regular league system too. Chaos Cup tournaments throw teams into free-for-all battles, while Allstar events offer another way to test your fighters. Defend the Iron Gate provides PvE with rotating weekly floors, and the Challenge Tower adds asynchronous multiplayer against other players’ rosters. Local co-op and Steam Remote Play Together are supported as well.
Shirowita has also been steadily expanding the game ahead of today’s launch. A recent demo update introduced dozens of new relics, improved AI team building and combat tactics, and made changes to the free-for-all tournaments.
Some players have apparently already spent hundreds of hours with the demo, which has been receiving updates almost daily during development.
There’s More Planned for Early Access
The current plan is for Eslabong to remain in Early Access for around three to nine months, with community feedback helping shape what happens between now and version 1.0. The core experience is already close to what shirowita ultimately wants to deliver, but there are still several areas due to grow. Plans include finishing the Dungeon Complex, expanding asynchronous multiplayer, introducing more playable classes, and continuing to add abilities and spells.
That makes today’s Early Access launch less about waiting for the main game to arrive and more about expanding something that already has a surprising amount packed into it. With infinite seasons, hundreds of abilities, dozens of classes, and an entire mercenary market to keep an eye on, building a championship-winning club could keep you busy for quite some time.