Mori Carta

English below ------------ [h3] Um was geht es? [/h3] "Mori Carta" ist ein Kartenspiel, welches optisch ein wenig an "Hearhstone" erinnert. Die zugrundegelegte Mechanik ist aber vollkommen anders. (Fast) jede Karte ist in der Mitte geteilt und verfügt je Seite über verschiedene Aktivierungsmöglichkeiten und Kosten. Innerhalb des Spieles muss stets entschieden werden, ob man die linke Seite der Karte verwenden möchte, oder die rechte Seite. Das klingt simpel und ist es im ersten Moment auch. Aber dadurch müssen sehr viele bedeutende Entscheidungen mit größeren Auswirkungen getroffen werden, was viel Spaß bereitet. z.B. muss man sich entscheiden ob man 6 Energie (/Mana) bezahlt und 3 Schaden zufügt oder ob man lieber 2 Energie bezahlt um 2 Rüstungen zu erhalten und die Karte für die nächste Runde aufzuwerten. Oder ob man lieber jetzt einmalig eine hohe Energiemenge erhält, oder lieber einen Marker setzt, so dass man jede Runde beim nach rechts wischen 2 Energie dauerhaft erhält. Das macht das Spiel sehr spannend. Die Kartenanzahl ist enorm. Und je nachdem welchen Boss man mittels Karten besiegt hat, gibt es am Ende verschiedene Arten von Belohnungen. Hierzu zählen z.B. Kartenverbesserungen, "splits" (also das Teilen der Karten in der Mitte), das Entfernen von Karten, "Quick/Slow" (sollen Karten am Anfang oder Ende der Runde erscheinen), neue Bonuskarten, neue Karten in common, rare etc., Freischaltung von mehreren Charakteren etc. Die Atmosphäre des Spiels ist gut, das Design insgesamt stimmig. Aber nicht auf einem "Hearthstone"-Niveau. Die Musik scheint hingegen nur einen Track zu haben, der zwar nicht sehr aufdringlich ist, aber irgendwann doch stört. [h3] Con [/h3] - Musik ist eintönig - Schwierigkeitsgrad ist für manchen vielleicht zu herausfordernd - keine Cloudsave (schlecht für paralleles Spielen über Steam Deck) [h3] Neutral [/h3] o Artstyle ist stimmig, aber es gibt seltenere Ausreißer [h3] Pro [/h3] + Schnelles Gameplay + viele Entscheidungen in kurzer Zeit + Entspanntes Spiel + Auf dem Steam Deck spielbar + Demo + Interessantes neues Spielprinzip + Preis-Leistung angemessen [h3] Fazit [/h3] Ich habe die Demo recht lange gespielt und hatte viel Spaß damit. Die Vollversion bietet mehr Möglichkeiten und bei dem Preis von rund 14€ bin ich sehr zufrieden. Die Runden gehen schnell, das Spielprinzip ist frisch, die Kartenanzahl ist enorm, die Belohnungen sind erstrebenswert. Tolles Game. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [h3] What is it about? [/h3] "Mori Carta" is a card game that is visually reminiscent of "Hearhstone". However, the underlying mechanics are completely different. (Almost) each card is divided in the middle and has different activation options and costs per side. Within the game, you always have to decide whether you want to use the left side of the card or the right side. That sounds simple and it is at first glance. But this means that a lot of important decisions have to be made with greater impact, which is a lot of fun. e.g. you have to decide whether to pay 6 energy (/mana) and deal 3 damage or whether you prefer to pay 2 energy to get 2 armor and upgrade the card for the next round. Or whether you prefer to get a high amount of energy once, or rather set a marker so that you get 2 energy permanently every turn when you swipe right. That makes the game very exciting. The number of cards is enormous. And depending on which boss you defeated with cards, there are different types of rewards at the end. These include, for example, map improvements, "splits" (i.e. splitting the cards in the middle), removing cards, "quick/slow" (should cards appear at the beginning or end of the round), new bonus cards, new cards in common, rare, etc., unlocking multiple characters, etc. The atmosphere of the game is good, the design overall coherent. But not at a "Hearthstone" level. The music, on the other hand, seems to have only one track, which is not very intrusive, but at some point it gets annoying. [h3] Con [/h3] - Music is monotonous - Difficulty level may be too challenging for some - no cloudsave (bad for parallel play via Steam Deck) [h3] Neutral [/h3] o Artstyle is consistent, but there are rarer outliers [h3] Pro [/h3] + Fast-paced gameplay + many decisions in a short time + Relaxed play + Playable on the Steam Deck + Demo + Interesting new gameplay + Value for money reasonable [h3] Conclusion [/h3] I played the demo for quite a long time and had a lot of fun with it. The full version offers more possibilities and with the price of around 14€ I am very satisfied. The rounds go fast, the gameplay is fresh, the number of cards is enormous, the rewards are desirable. Great game.

TL:DR Incredibly innovative, incredibly difficult. Probably the most unique and innovative game in the roguelike deckbuilding genre since Slay the Spire. However the difficulty in this game feels honestly unfair and losses are unbelievably frustrating, often feeling like you had no recourse and the loss was practically scripted. What makes this feel worse is that you cannot quit to retry a fight like you can in most games of this genre, meaning that a single mis-swipe can often lose you a 2 hour run. There is so much to love about this game. The mechanic of shuffling your own deck together with your opponent's is a fascinating concept that naturally incentivizes building a thicker deck and actually engaging with all the cards instead of skipping 95% of them like you do in most deckbuilders. Boiling down the gameplay to the binary choice of swiping left or right on each card creates a massive amount of constant strategizing about resource management. You will be mentally engaged in this game every second you play of it. Unfortunately, that brings us to the negatives. This game is what I would describe as... too difficult. I'm the type of person who loves a massive challenge in games like this. I play Slay the Spire on ascension 20 because nothing less than that feels worth my time. About 6 hours into this game I got my very first win (outside of the semi-scripted run), and I'm not going to lie, it felt FANTASTIC, like I had overcome the twelve labors of Hercules. The game truly feels that unfair. I don't know how much this is veering into conspiracy territory, but it really feels like this game as an algorithm to figure out the hard-counter to your deck and pits you against that enemy every time. And by hard-counter I do mean HARD-COUNTER. Most enemies feel designed to instantly kill a certain type of deck, such as one that removes all of your shield and deals damage based on the amount removed, or another which forces you to spend all your excess mana, or another which builds up an insane amount of damage the longer you stay in the fight. Sometimes you can play around these, especially as you gain more experience and start recognizing certain enemies, but more often than not you will build up and extremely powerful run only to have your hopes dashed by a random normal enemy, not even a boss or mini-boss. Losing does not feel fun or deserved in this game as the things that end up killing you feel unavoidable, and often down to RNG as to what order you draw the cards in. The negative of the aspect I previously praised (shuffling your deck together with the enemy's) is that it makes a MASSIVE difference whether you draw an enemy's card or your own. All in all it is a great game and very fun and addicting to play. If you're a fan of this genre it's worth checking out. Just go into it with the mindset that you will lose long (2 hour) runs. A lot. and often due to no fault of your own.

The foundation of this game is brilliant, but the execution leaves much to be desired. I learned of the game from TrumpSC, the Mayor of Value Town, someone who is really good at card games but really bad at reading tutorials. His playthrough looked interesting but hard because he didn't realize that you can tell when an enemy card is at the top of the deck. This was pointed out in the comments, blowing Trump's mind and making me think maybe the game isn't so bad -- maybe all the negative reviewers made the same mistake as Trump. Nope, not the case. In a nutshell, the tutorial IS a lot of fun because it teaches you the fundamental tools you need to survive in the game. After the tutorial, however, every enemy is designed to deprive you of those tools in some very heavy-handed, brutal ways. No matter how cleverly you've built your deck, each class has limitations built into its card set, so there's only so much you can do to mitigate the evil that awaits. Further, while the game is built around the "swipe left/right" mechanism, giving the gameplay the illusion of player agency, in reality most decisions are extremely straightforward. Once a deck is built, there is actually very little you can do during combat to make yourself feel clever. Even if you habitually think of the big picture and plan ahead, it's often impossible to make small short-term sacrifices without ending up dead. You cannot set up a future payoff if you have no future. The thing I hate most, though, is being asked to swipe left/right on the "map" to choose my next enemy. This implies that I need to do some metagame homework to figure out which enemies my deck is capable of tackling. THAT SUCKS. A well-built deck should be capable of overcoming every opponent in the game through smart swiping in combat, but that is definitely not the case here. Some enemies are literally unbeatable for the class you've chosen. I guess the designer considers it part of the game to know when that's the case, but I say that's a lazy excuse. It's much harder for a designer to create opportunities for the player to shine in combat against a tough opponent, but that's what makes games fun. Metagame flimflammery is NOT. Graphically, the game features some nice art, but the visual effects are overly simplistic and lack polish. Further, the iconography is not up to the task of describing the myriad effects contained in the game. Even after you've seen a given effect several times, you'll still have to rely on the tooltips to understand what the non-basic cards do. (This makes me think a mobile version would be hugely annoying to play.) I actually had to sleep on this decision after 110 minutes of play time, but I have decided to refund. The difficulty spike after the demo feels weirdly dishonest, and I see no reason why the designer would choose to create so many "feels bad" moments by swatting down every strategy the player can come up with. I'm not convinced the game can even be saved, short of burning down every enemy deck and redesigning everything from scratch -- and doing so only after learning what makes a game enjoyable in the first place. A good gimmick is not enough.

It's a great game, lots of cards, lots of interactions to discover, and a high skill ceiling to think probabilistically about the best decision to make at each point through a run.

Yes!

This game could be one of the best deckbuilders, since the core gameplay loop is cool and fun, and the mechanics are interesting and innovative. The problem is the extremely frustrating balancing, especially on the harder difficulty: 1) General difficulty feeling Playing a hard game is no problem for me, the problem in this game is that the difficulty feels so volatile. You can have one easy boss followed by an extremely difficult boss. Or you could breeze through all fights to immediately die to the next one. This leaves a feeling of getting wins stolen from you. 2) Unbalanced enemies Some enemies have really unfun stat check mechanics that often result in "breeze through or essentially die" with nothing in-between. The worst offenders in my opinion are "Pay energy or permanently pay more energy in the future turns" (Introducing exponential negative scaling) and "Kill in 3 turns or get massive damage". ("I do hope that your deck is stacked with attack cards to reduce my massive health pool") This is also often caused by unfair enemy cards, as an example I will give you the worst designed card in the whole game, a card that for example the final boss uses: It is a fast cast (Always on the top part of the deck in a random order) that decides a random resource and if you get this resource this turn, you reshuffle your deck and draw again. But a lot of cards in this game have the same resource on both sides, there are also lots of "get random resource" cards. So if you are unlucky, you might be forced to constantly reshuffle your deck and never ever see your non-fast cards, even worse for slow cards (Always on the bottom). It essentially feels like you are Dormammu and the enemy is Dr. Strange coming to bargain. This kind of stuff makes me want to ragequit my game, because I have to reshuffle like, I kid not, 20 times to finally get to play my slow card. 3) Unbalanced player cards I have not encountered many cards that I would consider overpowered, but I feel like there are too many cards that are bad on an unplayable level. For this point, I like druid the least, it feels like most of their cards are trash and the cards that are good are just so much better than the rest. And not only do you have a lot of bad cards, you also have so many cards that only turn good by random chance (druid has lots of "Trigger one of those effects, chosen randomly" cards). It is not fun to hope to finally get this 1/3 chance so that your card finally upgrades. 3) Character abilities This is more of a personal opinion, but I really hate it that some character abilities feel more harmful than helpful. The rogue and druid can double their card effects under certain circumstances, which is great. But this applies to harmful effects too, which often makes your life extremely miserable. It can happen easily that you get like 3 enemy cards after each other and now you get to take double the amounts of damage or negative effects that you would have taken, which can regularly ruin that fight on the spot. I don't understand the idea behind that, the difficulty should come from setting up that condition and not from hoping that the enemy cards come in the right order. And if only applying those abilities to positive effects is too strong, why not balance either the effect or the cards so that it isn't too easy. I think that this would be a better solution. Overall I would still recommend the game, since you can always play on the lower difficulty, where it is easier to overlook those issues, and the highs of the game are great after all.

Just like other users have pointed out, the game has a few poor design choices and no matter what deck or character you play the enemies can hard counter you so you will lose most of the time. Creating a fun deck only to see it get obliterated by most enemy decks simply because they play "X = you lose all mana/block/life or life equal to X" is simply not fun. crafting your deck is pointless since most enemies will just nullify your combos.

Overall cool game and neat idea, but I don't like that it is way more RNG heavy than other deckbuilders, not only is the shuffle order way way(way) more impactful, but several cards and enemies have random effects which can hugely impact the battle, including the final boss.

Sorry for my English, I'll try to write this review without any help. I really don't understand... how can there be people who write their first or second review and they are negative?... who are they trying to fool? They are fake and very bad people... very toxic. I've seen the reviews, downloaded the demo... after buying the game... and what I can say... is that it is a new and wonderful card game... original... very original and where you are the master of your decisions... right or left. Congratulations on the game and sorry for my English. Mocky

Really great game, only drawback is with the mechanics they are using it would be a perfect game to be able to remote play on your phone but alas I don't think that's an option. BUT IT SHOULD BE!!!