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| This game is great and very addictive by Rafiki 03/11/2018, 10:47am PDT | ||||
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| This makes TWO early access games I've liked.
There's 3 levels with randomly generated maps that look like this: 
You can see from your starting point all the way to the boss, so you can pre-plan your route to optimize what you want to get out of it. You don't get to keep any cards between runs, so every run has you building a new deck and you're a little bit at the mercy of the RNG in terms of what cards you get to choose from, but you can pretty much always put together a decent deck of cards. Since there's only 3 levels and 3 bosses the game is brutally difficult. Out of like 15 runs, each taking about an hour each, I've beaten the game once. Sometimes losses can feel kind of cheap, but most times I wind up realizing I made retarded mistakes in choosing cards and relics (relics give you innate bonuses, like getting an extra action point every 3 rounds). There's 2 characters, one you have to unlock, and I was surprised to find that they have completely different cards giving them different play styles. Even for a single character the variety of cards allow you to take different approaches to combat. There's a refreshing amount of strategy, and it's really intuitive and doesn't require you to have a robot brain capable of holding a 500 page D&D manual in your head to compute your next attack. The other nice thing is that things like missed attacks and failed plays don't exist, so you always know exactly what your cards are going to do. The UI is damn near perfect. Cards display how much damage or block they're going to do, and if you have modifiers that raise or lower the amount it's automatically reflected on the cards themselves and colored green or red to let you know if you're doing above or below the base amount. Relics that trigger after certain events, like every 3 turns, 10 attacks, or 6 plays, helpfully have counters attached to them. Each turn, you can see what an enemy plans to do (attack, defend, buff, etc) in a little icon over their head so you can plan accordingly. If you want to know what a buff or debuff is on your or an enemy, just mouse right over it and a clear and concise tooltip will explain it. Whoever designed this UI deserves an award. If I could make a single change, it would be to the damage modifier for vulnerability. Vulnerability makes an enemy take more damage, and to see the damage increase you have to drag a card and hold it over the appropriate enemy to see what the effect will be. I'd love to just be able to mouse over an enemy and have the cards auto-update, although I can see why they did it the way they did since you can sometimes have 10 cards in your hand which crowds out the ability to see the effects of all of them. The artwork and presentation is simple, but it's fine. You're not going to really remember any enemies or attacks, but you'll be focusing on your hand anyways. The upside is you don't have to sit through 20 minute Final Fantasy animations. The cards are where the bulk of the artwork went and they look good, and the cards for each character have completely different visual styles, which is really nice. The music is good and doesn't become grating after repeated playthroughs. It's early access and I don't know if they plan to add more content, but it's very polished and worth $16. It's very easy pick up and play, and is one of those "one more round, I think I can get it this time" games and next thing you know it's 3am. |
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Slay the Spire by 01/14/2018, 6:39am PST  Gimme a link by 01/14/2018, 9:04am PST This game is great and very addictive by 03/11/2018, 10:47am PDT I forgot to mention a few things about HOW GOOD the UI is by 03/11/2018, 10:53am PDT |
