Card City Nights 2

The Good This game succeed in breaking the heritage of the first game, it was bold to move from the standard Triple Triad style game (FF8) to a chaining cards game with a single shared board. I was skeptical for a while and finally get use to it and enjoy the new gameplay. Before, an easy way to win was to attack opponent's cards, this doesn't work much now, instead, you have to chain cards as much as possible to keep the flow running and benefits from their effect as fast as possible while/or blocking opponent for connecting cards, which computer usually do. The overhaul game is great, code is well done with no issue at all, art style is again the lovely Ludosity style, you like it or not. And the musics are almost all nice to listen to. Almost cause they're all good EXCEPT the Lemon Diva theme (on purpose still.) The Bad Devs are unable to learn their lessons from first game (or others), and there is still the useless Unity settings menu, a useless "start" screen, then main screen, profiles screen, load, then finally we can play... could have been designed way better ! In fact, design is the biggest flaw in this/these game(s), game designer(s) just lame and never try to improve, enjoying repeating the same mistakes over and over, which makes me not so confident for the next episode. Hope they'll improve somehow otherwise it would be most likely bad. And the (very) Ugly There is no so called "smartness" at all for computer opponents, they usually knows which cards we have in hands and they block us most of the time, and cherry on the cake, they get their cards in a better order than us, making them pretty much 98 % unbeattable except when "randomness" finally helps us by accident. Our cards are dealt in such a way we've got either no or very few connection options and bad to worth possible order (angry chest at the beginning and cards with "activate a card" capabilities at the very end for instance, long delay cards dealt also near the end of the game usually), the opponent although got super combo at the very bets time (goddess Buster + Goddess of Explosions, or shield then "deal 2/3 damage" on effect on placement cards.) Another example is given with the Bazooka turnip card (gain shield), to get a heart after ! ("healing" remove shield :| ) A few characters have the lame excuse of mind reading but most of them don't and should not. The story also hold a hole in it, defeating card god, ok then what ? The game doesn't give you any hint... feel a bit abandonned. There is maybe something given as a casual chitchat sometime but nothing else, fortunately some user in the forum give the way. And there is the ultra-cheater Cardplaya to defeat in science wing without really knowing why we would do such. Character itself didn't give any clue. Potatoid prisoner is even more cheaty, it always got the best card at the best time to mess up with us (I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a prebuilt deck but pick a card accroding to our deck and what we play and how we play, this isn't mind reading, this is just cheap cheating.) Wihtout mentionning Cardplaya with cards we can't really beat. The undefeated also usually got simulacrum and plenty of "deal 2 damage" cards. All this cheating seriously sucks and ruins the game, it was already the same in CCN1 with the Card King especially. Ludosity, it's time to learn how to make proper algorithms to simulate smart opponents !