[h1]Overview[/h1]
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[*]A turn-based tactical board game with cards. It is more about the board than the cards.
[*]Campaign with 6 missions, and a skirmish mode with 20 more missions. Singleplayer only.
[*]Each mission has its own scenario and board setup, which offers different objectives to achieve.
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[h1]Art & Graphics ★★★☆☆[/h1]
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[*]Artworks on the cards draw parallel to MTG; not too bad.
[*]Graphics quality of the game engine is excusable for a 2010 game.
[*]The visual aesthetic is ugly, but the style is nonetheless cohesive.
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[h1]Music & Sounds ★★★☆☆[/h1]
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[*]Epic music, making use of orchestra and war drums.
[*]But it gets repetitive with the small selection.
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[h1]Plot & Characters ★☆☆☆☆[/h1]
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[*]"A day in the life of a warrior king."
[*]Goes anywhere, starts a war.
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[h1]Gameplay ★☆☆☆☆[/h1]
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[*]Pacing of the game is painfully slow, with slowmo animations and long pauses in between player actions and phases of the game.
[*]The card aspect of the game is drastically downplayed from what a real card game should be. There is no deckbuilding. There are no mechanics that interact with the deck, hand and the opponent's. You draw cards, pay the mana cost, and play them. That's all there is to cards.
[*]The cards are just there to add some RNG influence to the board game and make it more unpredictable.
[*]This randomized availability of minions and spells could be presented not as cards and it'd still work.
[*]For example, minion cards could be shown as reinforcements that arrive each turn—chess pieces that can be dragged and dropped from a sidebar onto the battlefield. Spell cards could be presented as an action bar at the bottom of the screen, with new options popping up each turn as the battle progresses.
[*]The board aspect of the game is much better developed and comes with quite a bit of depth.
[*]First of all, the board is divided into staggered square tiles, which is another way to render hexagons. Each tile represents a different feature of the world — there are plains, hills, swamps, villages, castles and more.
[*]These various land types can be synergistic or antagonistic to different unit types. Plains favor calvary, while hills are advantageous for ranged units. Forest cover provides damage reduction for defenders of any type.
[*]When units enter a tile to attack, they are subject to its combat characteristics and rules of traversal.
[*]Units who lost their trades are required to retreat, while the victors are granted with stat boosts from their battle experience gained and given the choice to advance. There is a constant tug-of-war going on to occupy the most beneficial plots of lands.
[*]The tutorial is terrible and just dumps out paragraph after paragraph. And yet, some key mechanics are still left out. It is never explained that a unit who has moved cannot use its skills even if available, and vice versa. You will need to do more reading in the in-game manual to fully understand how the game works.
[*]There appears to be discrepancies with game rules and what actually happens on the ground. For instance, Mountain tiles are supposedly impassable, and requires a spell or special skill to enable a unit to occupy it, and yet I've encountered an adjacent enemy who doesn't have such ability and still able to enter and attack it. Here's another one: Castle tiles reduce Command Phase damage by 2, but when I did a Command Spell which dealt 2 damage splash to all units, my unit garrisoned in the castle still took 2 damage.
[*]The game balance is poor.
[*]There are some blanket spells that outright force the opponent to give up a phase of a battle, or calls off the fight altogether without refunding the used spells. You could just hit Pass every time the opponent plays a buff/debuff, and then nullify everything when the stack looks big. All for just 7 mana (a minion costs 8-10 mana on average).
[*]Stealth units are broken with really high attack and can't be damaged during Command Phase if they are in stealth, i.e. if you want to take them down you must face their high damage. Rolling siege vehicles push garrisoned enemy units out of their castles without a fight and with no counterplay. High HP skeleton mages heal back to full each turn for free, and can heal an ally for 4 HP (units have Max HP averaging 7-10) at the dirt cheap cost of 2 mana and with no range limit (global cast).
[*]Add to the fact that the enemy already outnumbers the player in most scenarios and still has access to such potent healing, and is still able to summon more units. The playing field is never level.
[*]Losing a fight and the enemy unit getting stats upgraded makes it very snowbally. Damage values getting halved as a standard procedure while HP values are counted fully doesn't help either. Once a unit gets onto an ideal land, it becomes increasingly difficult to drive them out.
[*]Mana costs are too high especially with the mechanic to buy card draws using mana. Card sacrifice mechanic which discards a card to deal more damage / reduce incoming damage is too crucial to skip out on. This means that you need a full hand of cards to play normally *and* cards to always sacrifice in every fight, making it mandatory to use mana to draw cards.
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[h1]Controls & Interface ★★☆☆☆[/h1]
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[*]Unable to see how many cards the enemy has. No card play history.
[*]Cards not overlapping in hand is a nice QoL because you can view all your cards at a glance. Mouse wheel to set the zoom level, MB2 to pan left and right with a hand cursor.
[*]Unit models are reused but names aren't shown on the board until you mouse hover over them and it is very confusing.
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[h1]Verdict [/h1]
[quote]Guardians of Graxia is an old game, but it is by no means the first PC game with board and cards. The title goes to Sanctum, released in 1998. As a matter of fact, this game seems to draw heavily from Sanctum but did a poor job of copying other people's homework:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hokCeJHP0PA
It is bewildering that a game preceding it by 12 years can have more fleshed out gameplay and a deckbuilder, which Guardians of Graxia glaringly lacks. If you are interested in board + cards gameplay, do yourself a favor and skip this one and try out Duelyst, Faeria, Shardbound or Mahokenshi instead.
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