Firstly, I would like to mention that this is a fantastic game which I thoroughly enjoyed, and this is coming from a person who usually dislikes card based combat.
As the saying goes, ‘I came for the fap, and stayed for the amazing gameplay’ ;)
Now, for the actual game review time!
The AI Art: I am one of those ppl who kind of gets ‘fake-ish’ vibes when looking at AI art, but in this game, those feelings are minimal. The art itself is very neat and pretty, especially since the proportions of the monster ppl look quite realistic. There is also quite a wide variety of character art and landscape art.
All in all, great art :) a 9/10
The Combat Mechanics: I usually don’t like card-based combat games, but this game got it just right for me. As to how it managed to do so… I don’t really know, my best guess would be that every part of the entire system, from the 3 action points with a hand of five possible cards per turn at first to the different types of damage, damage negation and all the other special effects, works really well together.
Superb combat mechanics ^^ , solid 10/10
The Deck-building Mechanics: Very good, but I feel that only ppl who play for a long time would know how to fully utilize this to get a good card deck. For example, the different types of battles you can have: Red, yellow, green and bosses. It took me about 5-7 battles to realize that the type of cards you get depends on the color of the battle you are choosing. It then took me a few replays of the whole game to realize bosses give better cards. And then I only just recently found out that there is an insanely overpowered card which you can purchase from the common cards section of the shop, which is the ‘gain an extra 5 max health’ card. In my past replays, I was always stopped from progressing cuz my max health dropped to 1, but now I can continue playing the same save for a longer time.
Great mechanics, solid 9/10.
Possible improvements: Mention such things in a tutorial and maybe add a card gallery so newer players know where to get what cards and it would help facilitate them in building a stronger deck.
Gameplay: A fantastic game which was a lot of fun for me to play through. Great replayability, and allows for a few different playstyles. What I really enjoy is that you can get quite a broken deck if you want to or you can have a relatively normal deck and enjoy a struggle, by choosing what kind of deck you build, you can kind of choose the difficulty of the game. However… the poison damage side of the game is kind of… useless, for lack of a better word. Right from the start you are given a physical damage deck, so to transition to a poison damage deck is very difficult cuz you need to get rid of the physical damage cards and replace them with poison damage cards before you can start improving your poison damage deck. But if you just stay on physical damage, you can focus on improving it from the get go. And the poison damage deck doesn’t seem really better than the physical damage deck. I’ve tried about 7 poison damage runs and I have only beaten the 1st boss in 1 of them. But for the physical damage runs, all of them, except my first 5 games, I have been able to make it to at least the 3rd boss. All of this could be due to my play style, but a poison deck feels really weak to me.
Superb Gameplay, 10/10
Possible solutions: You can make different starting decks and give players a choice of what kind of starting deck they want to make the poison deck more accessible. You can also buff the poison cards
Questions:
I noticed that whenever I reach the shop space, I get to see the nice little alcove where the shop is situated in first, before I have to press the shop to access it. Are you planning on adding more buildings to the alcove where the shop is?
Would you ever let your discord server go public? I feel that much of the player base aren’t subscribing on patreon, and that it would be good for the game if you let the rest of the players in so that you can properly develop a community around your game to increase popularity
Thank you for reading my review 0w0 , I hope that my critiques weren’t too abrasive and I hope that you aren’t overworking yourself coming up with the monthly updates. I truly enjoyed your game, keep up the good work! >w<