For The Warp

its okay but clearly thing are not balanced out

I want to start by saying that For The Warp is a game that I don't hate, rather, it's a game that I want to love. The art is gorgeous and I also enjoy the music, I also love that the mythic rarity cards have full art and animations. Clearly, love was put into the game and it's a shame the potential doesn't quite seem fully realised in my opinion. There appears to be very little variety in each run, the number of events you can encounter are miniscule, to the point where you'll encounter the same events multiple times per run. In addition to that, the events aren't particularly interesting. For example, there's one event that is pretty much just the question of "Do you want to heal 20% HP for free?" With a Yes/No response.. with no doing nothing special. There isn't a chance for it to be a saboteur who will instead deal damage to your ship, it's just a completely flat event with no reason to ever choose "No" as a response. The card balance is also all over the place. I'm going to assume inspiration was taken from Slay the Spire, as the base ship has what are essentially "Strike" (Deal 6 Damage) and "Defend" (Gain 5 shields) cards. Unlike Slay the Spire though, there aren't really any interesting build archetypes except for maybe Boost, but even that is flawed. For instance, there are cards which cost zero energy, and instead lower your boost points, but they can also be played when you have zero boost points?! and there's also a card that is supposed to consume all you boost points and give you a drone for each point spent, except.. it doesn't use up your boost points at all. There are several weird inconsistencies like this, and also several cards with text that is ambiguous or weirdly written. An example of this is a card called Void Box, a 2-cost rare card with the following description "Get a random card in your hand, gain energy equal to it's cost" If you're like me, you will have read this and assumed that this card is meant to duplicate a card in your hand and give you energy to use it immediately. (Which would actually be an interesting card idea in my opinion.) The actual effect is that it gives you a completely random card of 0-4 cost, and provides the energy to use it (Which in effect is pretty awful, especially for a 2 cost rare since it'll give you a 0-1 cost common most of the time). For clarity, the wording would be better as "Add a random card to your hand and gain energy equal to its cost" Now back to synergies themselves.. where are they in For The Warp? In Slay the Spire, you play cards which work together and try to form a build, and you progressively get stronger. There's massive replayability since the card interactions are essentially a huge web, where you might come across an unexpected interaction that you haven't seen before even after 200 hours of play. In For The Warp, there are synergies.. ostensibly. A card may have the words "Ignite synergy", but it isn't explained what this means at all. The interactions between cards are limited, only a handful actually seem to have any real synergy, and for those that do, it's usually a flat damage bonus if you satisfy a condition, and it only gets applied once, meaning that you might have a card that does 6 damage, it now does 12 if you satisfy a certain condition. If you satisfy that same condition twice, it still only does 12 damage. This means that the game feels very flat compared to Slay the Spire, where the synergies and interactions cascade beautifully and uniquely and often lead to one run feeling very unique from another. This leads us onto the combat. Battles in For The Warp feel flat as a result. You either get common cards that deal chip damage and don't scale too well, or you get busted overpowered cards that deal massive damage AND disable a ship for a turn and prevent it from acting. This leads to the combat getting old fast and becoming repetitive as you're not really building a deck that synergises well, you're just picking cards that are good while avoiding the cards which are bad. You don't get the satisfaction of carving your deck into a nice synergistic balance of offence and defence. In addition, the enemy variety is also extremely limited, this game has the problem that later areas have the same enemies just with more hp and more damage, sure, they're reskinned and look cool, but a missile cruiser is still a missile cruiser no matter which faction it belongs to. One final neutral point I want to mention is that equipment slots (Ship modifiers which affect the run) are limited to 3-4 usually. That can work, and it absolutely does in FTL, but it can also further limit replayability, especially when interesting card interactions are also absent. Overall, the game feels weird to me. The art, animations, music, references, the general style of the game is so nice, but it feels like the developers got worn out in the marathon that is game development and only made it 80% to the finish line, and didn't game nearly the same attention to the balance, gameplay and flow of the game. I write all of this not to stomp on the game, but because I care enough to want to see more. A DLC was added somewhat recently and that gives me hope that the developers are still watching. The bones of a great game are definitely there, but, I'm afraid, only the bones right now.

Great pixel card builder. Love the animations and flow. Very replayable.

It's not a particularly complex game and there aren't any systems to upgrade your ship or starting equipment but it is a very competent roguelike and well worth the price.

DELIGHTFUL STUFF

I really enjoy this game, so much so that I am planning on getting the DLC on day one. I usually do not buy DLC. I feel like some strategies are easier than others, and that might be the source of some of the gripes. I have found one that I really enjoy with the blackhole ship and shields. I will probably branch out with some other ideas the more I play and after DLC for sure. The space theme is fun, the graphics are good, the cards are clear about what they do. I do not have anything negative to say right now.

Pros: very goon graphics, music, vfx Cons: wtf guys! bus on basic logic, such as menu and stuck on cutscenes!