Claymores of the Lost Kingdom

Disappointment - is a good word to describe this game. It is one thing to be a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game, it is a higher crime than that to be a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game with a good core. For a sandbox game there is simply nothing to do. So that part was a lie. Then you have the game's world. Is it inhabited by unique and dangerous beasts? Nope, just hordes of the same 5 men copy pasted around every corner (with approximately 3 background images) and every town's guard across the continent is the same female human soldier. There is no gameplay variety either. You could try different builds, but there is simply no point to it. The only correct build is Elf alchemist's apprentice max int, max wis ice mage. (I appreciate a lot, but this is just too much.) Best racial ability, best card selection, best survivability, a ton of passive damage, you even get to generate completely overpowered demon cards by taking crack (mithril dust). Why even bother playing anything else if you actually intend to beat the final boss. Any other stats just needlessly ♥♥♥♥ up your card pool with unsalvageable junk. Strength and constitution are completely worthless. Their cards are just as expensive, but you have fewer ways to generate mana and the resulting effects are just outright weaker. And what is the secondary effect they provide? Carry limit, completely pointless, as you don't need to try to play the market, just doing the quests generates hundreds of rations that you'll have a hard time spending. Agility provides a good secondary effect in higher starting mana, but its cards do nothing to regen mana, so you are just as ♥♥♥♥♥♥, but a turn later than the other losers. This is pre-beta of a (good) game, being sold as a complete product. (How is this legal?) Don't misunderstand, base combat is fun and deckbuilding is engaging, but it is just super incomplete.

TLDR: Game's a lot of fun for the price tag. Great art, a lot of replayability and git gud. I love the art of the game. The enemies look intimidating and at the start they also kick your ass. The card art is honestly the best part of this game and kept drawing me back in trying out all the different builds to see them all. The map was crafted with love and you can tell. Depending on which parts you focus on you benefit your build in different ways. The combat is pretty straight forward but not too simplistic with plenty mechanics that have you manage your health, defense and mana. I certainly had a lot of fun 100% this game. That said there are of course some downsides to consider: Not all decks are created equal. Some Atribute combinations feel vastly weaker than others. I have beaten the Boss with almost all the decks, so it's definitely possible but with some there is a good amount of luck involved. As for the Legend ending, I can only really see a handful of decks accomplishing that which honestly is fine for the hardest boss. Getting the right cards can be a nightmare. Every level up you get to choose between 3 randomly selected cards. Any other card drops are rng from the game side and quite expensive at the start. I had runs with next to no card purchase options and some with one at every stop which is frustrating at times. There are no re-rolls that you can acquire anywhere for this and you can get cards from stats you havent leveled ever in the run. There are no ways to confirm a card drop from a specific stat, which makes leveling up in several stats self crippling. To prevent this I usually leveled up one stat to the max to build up a good base and then supplement one other stat. If the devs want to allow branching out into 3 or more stats for a run I'd suggest making re-roll's purchasable or being able to buy boosters that only draw from a certain criteria (only hybrid cards, or from a specific stat or even type like ice and fire) as well as making card purchases more consistent. Enemy variety is definitely low but honestly this didnt bother me. What is however a bigger problem is the differnce between the strongest elite battle and the final boss. Making one more class of mini bosses that bridge the gap would be a good idea. You could make these availabe as map events. Ration economy is lobsided. At the start I struggle to get from quest to quest buying almost nothing and at the half point I am so rich that money is irrelevant to me. I usually end games with 1000 left over rations. Dropping the trading prices to make it available earlier and also less of a money cheat later would be a good start. Also some effects are not properly explained (for a long time I thought frostbite gave my ENEMY armor), curse has no tool tip and neither does the wisdom map ability. Not having a library of discovered cards means having to memorize at what level and which stats what cards dropped, which can be tedious for subsequent runs. Also you cant look at the pretty card art whenever you feel like. Overall I had a blast with this game for such a small price tag and would recommend it to anyone who likes a more difficult card builder with lots of freedom.

If you like roguelike deckbuilders, this game is worth a shot, but don't expect something of the same caliber as slay the spire. It has multiple things going for it: 1. A huge amount of cards and combos to explore. 2. Absolutely gorgeous artwork. 10/10 love the style. 3. A very satisfying "weight" when you play the cards themselves, which is likely due to the animations used. You really feel the hits you give and take. 4. A dark-souls esque level of difficulty for the final boss, which feels very rewarding to beat. However, it's hampered from going from a good to a great game by many facets: 1. There are so many important bits of information that are not clearly nor cleanly conveyed, leading to unnecessary confusion. A wiki of cards, effects, etc would go a long way. a) The top two rows of attributes are locked. The game never explains why in a normal playthrough. Instead, you have to click on "achievements", where it'll then explain how they work (namely, surviving/winning with a maxed-out stat) b) What various status conditions do, specifically. It seems to be expected that you'll do the math and figure things out yourself. E.g. enflamed enemies give you +1 energy per fire hit, and refresh the enflamed condition. To this moment, I'm still not sure how long/when that condition drops off. In-game, it just says something along the lines of "provides energy when hit by a fire attack", which lacks all the critical detail you need for such a technically-focused game. c) The fact that in the mid-to-late-game, you need to click the "give me food for bandit heads" button a second time, in order to get bounties to kill the "Leaders" that serve as mini bosses in this time period. If you don't, you'll just wander around killing elites, wondering why the game is so easy. d) What the purpose of trading for goods is. Outside of [spoiler] mithril dust [/spoiler], which you can use to [spoiler] bribe dust-addicted [/spoiler] mages for cards, the amount of effort vs money is just never there. e) That quests exist, and you really, really need to do them in the early game if you want to have enough food to live. In-game, I didn't notice the tiny exclamation mark in the center of the city menu for quite a while. f) The game doesn't smoothly take you into the event you landed on, following a fight with anyone, leading you to often forget to click back into your current location to get the event, forcing you to move back and waste time. g) The world map is hidden from you. You can also see close-nearby areas. I cannot express how frustrating it is to know that "the leader is at X location" and then have to spend 10 minutes traipsing around that corner of the map to try and find it. It's a cool map, but since it's static, please don't make me feel like I need to hand-draw my own map in order to play this game correctly. h) I still have no idea what the "class" ability you get for getting Wisdom to 14 is supposed to do, and the lack of in-game help means I don't have a way to figure it out, even having used it. i) The reputation system is unnecessarily difficult to keep track of. Make a tab that shows all the groups you even can ally with, and what your current reputation with each is, please. Turns out, you get a ton of XP from reputation (and especially becoming a full ally), so managing this is important, but tedious at the moment. 2) The runs take too long. The initial deck-building is reasonably challenging, but if you survive [spoiler] one guy who comes and tracks you down to fight you [/spoiler], then there seems to be a lull until the end game boss. The one exception being if you fight a Leader who randomly rolls a massive counter to your deck (e.g. +75% resistance to fire damage), but since there's no way of knowing these adjustments before fighting enemies, you can just end up dying with a good build after wasting a full hour with not much to show for it. I'd greatly shorten the time between the spoiler-fight above and the final boss, and keep the more aggressive level scaling from earlier, and I think the game would feel much more time-sensitive, dynamic, and interesting. 3) The runs feel so long, in large part, because there is a distinct lack of enemy diversity. There's only 5 types of enemies, and while they can have unique modifiers added to them, it doesn't do enough to keep it fresh if each run lasts 1-2 hours. Add more enemy types, or allow multi-enemy fights, or cut down on the number of fights per run. Otherwise, it grows stale. a) This is exacerbated by the map always being the same each run. A dynamic map isn't required, but could be interesting if it led to noticeable differences in play. 4) To unlock new attribute levels, you have to survive to the end. However, for the first few times you reach the end, you have to make what is honestly a very poor, un-fun choice: Do I try and have fun with this deck I built, and fight the final boss? Or do I run away instead, and never get to see how my deck would do? You only need to do this ~3-5 times to get all the level 17 attribute levels unlocked, but still, it's massively disheartening to have to do this. If my character made it to the boss fight, that should be good enough. There is no difference in skill or understanding between a deck that fought and died to the boss vs one that walked to the get-away portal. Overall, I've had a lot of fun with this game, and find myself continually theorizing new builds, but I just hope that the developer takes some time to adjust the pacing of the game, provide more in-game help and information (or just set up a wiki!), and make this the amazing game it truly could be. For <$20, it's absolutely worth giving it a shot.

Avoid! The same recycled enemies over and over and dreadful deck building mechanics make for a really un-fun game.

There are some really cool ideas in this game for a roguelike deckbuilder, but unfortunately they are not executed well. If there was a middling option I would pick that instead of negative because it's not *that* bad. There are just better games out there

I'm asking refund unfortunately. Store page says it's a merge of roguelike deckbuilding and RPG *progression*. I expected it´d have a long deckbuilding game with skill tree and the sorts. It happens each run is very short, much shorter than other deckbuilding games, so short there's not even a save! On my 1st run I died before I could earn any money to pay for rest and recover HP. Then I looked on forum and found a thread with ppl talking about it and confirming that there's no progression passed thru runs. Not worth for me.

Combine a bit of rogue deck building, a cup J.R.R.'s greatness, a Vault otV dash of flair, a tiny pinch of ST Spire and you have "Claymores of the Lost Kingdom." (Pros): Re-playable with multiple characters and stats. Shout outs to so many old games and creators of RPG. Game is still updating. Came is mostly compatible with a controller. This is a content based game! (not a graphics-based game.) When I started this game, I couldn't stop for 5 hours. :) (Cons): You need to understand multiple mechanics. I.e. It takes time to learn this game. This game has a very steep learning curve. You need to have played some form of D&D in your lifetime. I do not see a "how to play section yet." Some builds are OP. Mages are a very weak class. Humans are weak species. (This is very odd to me as they are supposed to be balanced.) No mention or shout out to "Quest for Glory" series. (Please add a "Maltese Falcon) No idea how to unlock new species or classes. No overall map. (This is very odd to me. I made a written map.) Checking "achievements" resets your screen resolution. No auto detecting screen resolution. What the game auto sets as your screen resolution causes things to be off screen. I beat the game using dexterity. I cannot figure out a mage build at all. There are a lot of bugs. There are a lot of placement errors for buffs/debuff's ect. (In some cases the numbers do not match.) The game is not finished. There are only human and undead enemies? (No creatures?) Do the Devs plan on updating? You cannot message the Devs in game to give them code regarding a bug or feedback? (Let us get honest, no one reads through forums that often.) I have played D&D based computer games since the original "Quest for Glory" and have played many card tabletop games (like Gloomhaven), but I am confused by the game's mechanics. This needs a lot of work.

Loved what i played so far, despite the Harbinger being a big bad meanie. Assigning points to stats and thus receiving different cards keeps every run fresh and there's a bunch of mechanics in the background that i still have to figure out. I can heartily recommend this game, coming from someone that usually stays away from deckbuilders due to being absolutely terrible at them. You will die, you will curse, but every lost run was some sort of learning experience, which made it great. Also runs perfectly fine on Steam Deck.

The battles are fun but always 1 on 1 with a limited variety of enemy types. There is a nice RPG feel (card offers are based on primary stat choices, which feels like choosing levels in a PC class) but most deck combos lack sufficient defense. The map and travel mechanics make it difficult to recall where you've been and how to return to areas you've already explored. Ultimately, this feels like a Beta version that still needs a lot of work. 2 out of 5 stars for me. Could be a really fun game with more work.

Fun little game. I wouldn't pay 30 bucks for it, but it is priced quite appropriately. The enemies are quite limited, sometimes some keywords are missing from the keyword explanation for cards, there are a few readability issues, the whole "go back to a town once your rep is high enough" isn't well thought out, and the world map UI is extremely unintuitive. It's a personal opinion but a specific "quest" doesn't have the payoff it deserves. It's a NG+ thing, with a specific build, so that requires a ton of setup, and you only get EXP and Renown out of it. Another player thought it unlocked a special ability but no, that's the normal Wisdom ability. Also, the Dex ability is just bad. Tucking away progression in the Achievements tab is also not good. We're also missing a lot of QOL features. Like being able to view the cards you already saw once, or checking the decks of your hall of fame playthroughs, that kind of thing. That being said, the few enemies we have are good. One require on turn damage, one requires out of turn damage, one really punishes not wearing armor and is extremely weak to Grudge effects, one requires you to be offensive, one rewards piercing/blunt damage. There is more than enough variety here for a good gameplay loop and makes the game enjoyable even with the limited number of enemies. I really wish there were more things to do, hidden goals, etc, but maybe I just didn't find them yet. All in all, wishing there were more to a game is still a positive and a marker that the game is still a pleasant experience. Recommended.