I recommend this game, but with some pretty hefty caveats. They're big enough that I waffled a bit on the recommendation, but everything that makes me hesitant are things that could be fixed with time, and hopefully they do so. Also the bugs did not prevent me from getting ~10 hours of gameplay and that's already a decent deal for the current sale price ($14).
+Positives
+Art and theming are very strong, especially the art for the cards and the pixel art for the characters.
+I like the difference in the way the characters feel due to the dice and base abilities, it does help to give a different feel for each.
+The half card design is smart, essentially you draw 5 cards, but if you draw a half card another half card will be drawn to make a whole card slot. It's like adding card draw to cards but not as consistent, which is a good and interesting design.
+Decent spread of designs for what roll each card needs based on the die type of the character, and each card can upgrade in two different ways, which is a design more deck builders are using and I really like personally. Most of the choices aren't game changing, but are significant choices. Do you choose two uses of the card as is or get a stronger single effect? Or you have to choose between more uses or the card becomes half size with the same effect. Lots of good things to think about.
?Mixed
?You can get alternative base powers for each character, which is cool, but the requirements to unlock them seem a bit too novel, IMO. Like 3 will be easy and one you'll have to purposely go for (for example, have 2k gold in a run at some point). So I'll beat a run, have 3/4 of the requirements to unlock the card, but the 4th requirement will be a much more niche situation that just doesn't come up as often or is harder to trigger multiple times per match.
?The characters aren't as unique as you might expect in their card base, and all of the equipment you can get (essentially relics) are the same across all of the characters. For example, the Lion paladin has a lot of the designs you'd expect, but he has has stuff like sacrificing health for doing damage or big defenses. Not only does that feel a bit out of place for what I expect from what appears to be a holy paladin, all 3 classes have this same mechanic. In other deck builders I've played it might vary by what resource you sacrifice to get the benefit, but here they all sacrifice health, and that is what I'd expect for the warlock, but even for the rogue it feels out of character.
?While I've definitely lost runs, the game overall is fairly easy to get into a broken build very quickly, and some of the buffs are two strong. For instance, there is a buff that just subtracts from all damage you take and it is permanent per battle. I had a paladin run where I was ignoring 25 damage from every damage source in the first 2-3 turns, and combined with armor not falling off in this game, it mostly trivialized it, especially because the cards where you sacrifice life to do more damage/armor actually do damage to you so are also mitigated by this buff. It's fun to be OP, but there doesn't seem to be ascension levels, so the game doesn't seem to have the ramp up that a lot of other games do.
?It uses the Slay the Spire standard of maps with nodes on different paths, but every map pathing is the same. It's reused for a reason, but it can add to the sense of staleness, because it's clear the map is an afterthought.
-Negative
-Consistent, wide ranging bugs, to such a degree it's kind of shocking they made it in to a shipping product. I haven't encountered any gamebreaking bugs that I'm aware of, but it's things like when you're selecting a card reward and pull up your deck to view it, one of the cards will float on top, blocking some of the cards. From what I can tell it's not a specific card or card slot, but there is always 1 that floats in this way. Also, there is like a shadow highlight on cards when you mouse over them, but some cards it just doesn't highlight. While that may seem just like a polish thing at first, I realized I wasn't sure if it meant the card couldn't be chosen, and it made me less sure that I did have the card highlighted. Also an annoyance is that eventually each regular and elite encounter becomes a choice of three options after you beat the first few bosses, and the two options besides the normal play are a tougher version with some bonus (upgraded cards, a second pack of cards, etc), and a non-fight option that varies from stat manipulation to paying to go to one of the shops. While you are picking the encounter, you are not able to look at the map, which can be very frustrating at points if you can't remember how soon the next shop is.
-Enemies are arranged to the right of you, but when you hit one, they will rearrange their own order. However, this isn't a mechanic that I'm aware of and can lead to you hitting the wrong enemy if you're playing quickly, and they also seem to attack in the original left to right order that they start the turn in, which is just very confusing.
-There simply isn't enough information displayed to the user in basically every situation. For instance, there is very rarely an indication of if a buff/debuff ticks down or is just permanent for the fight, so you have way more memory overhead remembering what everything does when making choices. Compounding this, when selecting card choices there is no way to look at the upgrades. This is especially bad since every card in this game upgrades in two separate ways! There's also a lack of consistency in the language of the buffs and debuffs. For instance, you can get a stack of Ignore Attack at the same time as you have a stack of Retaliate, the only difference between the two being that Retaliate reflects the damage back. The obvious question is what happens when you take damage while you have both? The answer is I think the least common sense one of you lose a stack of both buffs and the attack takes damage. These games already tend towards a lot of cognitive load of all of the effects interacting, but this game has some (to me) baffling choices of how those interactions resolve that amplifies the lack of clarity for a lot of the effects. There's even some issues with the consistency of how effects are worded, which have been very frustrating to me at times. Especially in weird cases like what happens if we both have stacks of Retaliate and one of us attacks.
-There are some things that the game just straight up never explains. That sounds similar to the last point, but the last one is more like there's not enough information given. There are other examples of you just never being told about mechanics. For instance, there is a minimum deck size, so if you get a card reward, it normally lets you upgrade a card, remove a card, or duplicate a card, and at times it will tell you that you don't have enough cards to remove one, but never tells you what that threshold is. Adding to that confusion, you can remove below that limit at a shop. I've also started fights where I am debuffed and I have no idea why. I think it's that I chose to fight against a buffed enemy, but there's nothing in the description of the fight that says anything about me starting at a disadvantage and there's no animation of the enemy like getting a first strike to apply the debuff, and nothing on the enemy explaining that it might have that mechanic. Honestly this could be fixed with a wording change of the fight description if my theory is right, but there's just nothing as it currently stands.
-This is related to the point above but is so egregious to me I'm giving it a separate call out: there are some enemies that resurrect when you kill them the first time and there is nothing that tells you that they're going to do so. It's not just one enemy, it's like 3 different ones that I'm aware of.
