A mission based, deck builder, with random maps that must be modified by placing tiles to get through. That is it’s main hook, with you needing to build paths, destroy walls and rotate tiles to move between sections of the map. On the campaign maps, you will find campfires (healing), chests, creatures and other things which you can try and interact with or just avoid. Your tiles are limited so you usually can’t go everywhere. Complicating matters is a dungeon master that will steal your tiles and play them on the map, blocking your path or allowing creatures to get to you. Battles are vanilla deck builder card battles, bringing nothing to the table, and in fact not matching even the weaker card games. There are some items and a party system which tries to add some interesting twists, but they really didn’t add much. Each map also has win objectives and side objectives, which are typical things like kill a certain creature, open a chest, etc. There is also another mode (The Pit) which strips away the story and is more roguelike but I didn’t play this mode.
The positive is the uniqueness of the campaign map interactions. It is a pretty cool concept, but it’s not enough to hold up the game and is more of a gimmick. Building out a path and dealing with the dungeon master isn’t particularly fun or anything, but it is at least interesting and new. Graphics and sound are decent enough. Unfortunately, that is about all that I would call a positive.
The biggest negative, is the very lackluster and unfun deck builder portion of the game. The cards are boring, with most just doing damage and some usually some minor effect like reducing defense for a turn or two. There is healing, and eventually some things like giving an extra action point but almost nothing else. And there aren’t really any card synergies or good combos either. Just do damage, heal and buff your or debuff the enemy. That is it up to the half way point in the game where I ended up giving up on the game. Also, the cards feel unbalanced with many of them seeming pretty useless or just other cards being flat out better. What makes this even worse is a hard limit of a 24 (or maybe it was 20) card limit and no reshuffle mechanic (without taking major damage anyway). So, all your cards are basically 1 use except for your weapon card which is weak and reuseable. There are a few cards that can help with this by putting the last 2-3 cards played back into your deck but it is expensive and kills your momentum. And then there is a difficulty spike at around the place I stopped (halfway through the campaign) where you are fighting 2-3 enemies with 300+ hps each, many of which can summon, do area attacks or heal. You end up running out of cards and just using your weapon over and over or just killing yourself by reshuffling your deck. I guess you are expected to go back to easier levels and grind card upgrades but the game just isn’t good enough for me to want to do that (though I tried for a couple missions), and the card upgrades aren’t even that great either. Maybe it could get better eventually but I really doubt it, and if it does, it was just very poor design to wait so long to add in more interesting cards.
This is a pretty hard, not recommended game. It is a deck builder, with bad deck building, and a mostly gimmicky campaign map building mechanic. It is one of the few games I started but gave up on as I just didn’t consider it worth my time. There are tons of deck builders, many of them really good, just go play a different one and forget this one.
