None Shall Intrude

I want you to imagine someone came up to you and said, "Here's a finished product." And you looked at it, and it was a sandwich with no bread. Just a bloke holding some ham, going "that'll be ten quid." That's this game. That's what we're dealing with. Let's start with the visuals, because apparently nobody else did. It looks like an early-2000s Flash game — you remember those, you played them at work when you should've been doing your job — except those were free, and made by one teenager in Ohio, and they had an excuse. Now the combat. This is the tragic bit, because the ideas are genuinely there - terrain manipulation, grid targeting, elemental interactions. Lovely. On paper. In practice, almost none of it matters unless you've collected the specific relics that switch the mechanics on, like the game's core features are DLC you pay for in luck. And the relics themselves are balanced like a seesaw with an elephant on one end. Some of them I couldn't activate if my life depended on it, for effects that wouldn't scare a pigeon. Others activated automatically every single turn and wiped the entire field while I sat there doing sudoku. And the bugs. Oh, the bugs. My Rage meter - a core mechanic, the tutorial teaches you about it, other systems interact with it - just wasn't there. Gone. Cropped out of the UI like someone did it in MS Paint on their lunch break. I assumed I hadn't unlocked it yet, because I'm an optimist, which was my mistake. It's a known bug. It's a decent proof of concept wearing a full-release costume. There are a billion games in this genre that actually meet their own design goals. Go find one of those. This one's still finding itself.

Currently the game UI is rather buggy and I couldn't even get through the tutorial- there was literally a looping info glitch and when I skipped (what I thought was just that piece) it skipped the WHOLE mission. The second mission of the tutorial started fine but then it got to a point where it just stuck and wouldn't let me end my turn. I can only imagine how the main game must be super buggy if the tutorial doesn't even work right. It looks like it should be fun, but its currently unplayable for me. I will wait and see if future updates will improve my opinion...

sooooooooo the game is a great concept and fun, but it feels souless, it feels like theres missing sound effects and missing assets boss battles seem to have no music for whatever reason? heroes dont really have a lot of their own sound effects, over all lots of sound effects just outright missing from the game i turned the volume up to see if this was just me but its not there are just sounds that are missing from the game it just kills some immersion if you are going into a epic looking boss fight and its nothing but quiet

Buggy, clunky. From cards being hidden on top of each other to simply not having a Rage bar, this game has the bones for something fun but not great and is further brought low due to shoddy bug fixes. First game I did after the tutorial I had no Rage bar the entire game (somehow won still), music kept quitting on every boss fight (quitting to menu sometimes helped, but less than half the time)... every time I kept getting into the swing of having fun something happened to take me out of it. Let's not forget how the different dragons aren't really different. Don't recommend at this time, and it's a shame because being the boss with my own Phase mechanics felt really cool whenever it kicked in.

Игра, не смотря на бета тест, так и не стала более оптимизированной. Многочисленные баги, по типу невозможности выйти из пещеры, дерганные анимации карт, частичные и кривой перевод. Все это было на бете, и с выходом игры абсолютно ничего не поменялось. Добавилось еще зависания на экране выбора боссов. Из плюсов забавные синематики с некоторыми героями. Вечер посидеть можно, но дальше играть, и что-то перепроходить желания не вызывает.

I got really hyped by the trailer and idea, but game is buggy (can soft lock you in the middle of the game) the cards are quite boring (no exciting new ones while you progress) and it feels quite repetetive. On the good side: idea, the combination mechanic for environmental effects.

Completely embarrassing to call this a finished product. Visual design looks generic, to the tune of those early 2k's flash games with one actual character design surrounded by half-assed enemy units. It looks second rate even by mobile game standards. For some reason the unstylized menu text in the settings was hazy and pixelated even after adjusting my resolution, making it hard for me to read even with my glasses. Sound design is flat and uninteresting, and I only actually noticed three different songs (one of which was generic soft angelic choir crap as a boss fight theme). The game was also completely muted on first boot for some reason, which technically isn't a *problem*, but it's bizarre. The terrain manipulation and grid-targeting mechanics made my hopes much higher than they should have been for the combat, where it's very clear that almost all of those mechanics are completely irrelevant unless you get specific, sometimes multiple relics to enhance them. Even then, the relics are very badly balanced and I found myself struggling to activate some of them for completely mediocre effects while others activated completely automatically every turn and outright wiped the field for me. The random-target cards like Sirocco and Meteor Storm sounded fun until the seventh time in a row that they hit absolutely nothing on a field that's halfway full of enemies, and several cards simply won't perform the elemental interactions they're seemingly supposed to. Other cards simply don't tell you all of their effects, like Pyroblast having a base attack value despite the card text only saying that it does an amount of damage per lava tile. It's so blatantly clear what the "right" cards, abilities and items are to pick when you've seen a few already, and that creates the effect where you either struggle to get through normal encounters with careful decisions, or you easily breeze through even without a synergistic build or good draws just because your relics/boss abilities are that strong. Worst of all, the bugs in this game are downright shameful. My Rage meter was missing from the start of my first run after I got out of the (bad) tutorial that told me how it's used, and I optimistically assumed that it was just not unlocked yet because I wasn't far enough in the game. But no, that's a known bug; a core game mechanic that other mechanics interact with, completely gone with no explanation like someone had just cropped it out of the UI in MS Paint. You can't have a math-driven, thoughtful deckbuilding game where basic features just refuse to function and where important functions/definitions are obscured from the player! I got this game in a bundle for less than two dollars proportionally, and I still wish I could refund it. Find another game; there's a billion in this genre that meet their design goals better than this one.

5.5/10 would grab on deep sale - card that says inhale and draw a card, never once drew a card for me

I've noticed the lack of reviews that were backed by fair amount of playtime, I'll scribble my own things down now that I've completed the game entirely In the shortest form NSI is a niche rogueli-k-t-e deckbuilder that requires field management aside from the deck, this alone is what makes it feel different than other roguelike deckbuilders Generally gameplay representation looks a lot different from any other by design choice, for example you conquer some map regions in this to progress, and every X fights intervals you face a core boss, but technically it's actually pretty same with any other deckbuilder mapping system, just visually served differently, I think it was a nice change of pace. You begin your runs as a big bad dragon with massive health pool and absurd damaging cards, you have limited healing sources throughout your run and your goal is to refine your deck and maybe get some relics before facing the last boss to conclude the run, this part is pretty familiar, right? Then comes the field management system. It's not mandatory to play into this, but I can easily say this is the intended way to play the game. There are some elements, each dragon (there are multiple!) has some extra unique element too, and whenever you cast your abilities on any portions of your battle field, you leave traces of these elements, and when multiple elements are merged magic happens, be it shielding, area damage, poison, burn, you get it. Playing in this fashion, it requires more of the active 'thinking' as you are required to keep up your management during the fights (this may feel overwhelming to some) and more often than not it'll be you instead of rng that decides the fate of your encounters. Now the cons: Can get buggy at times, it's not horrible, but can be annoying time to time There are several 'cheese' builds you can follow, these will likely trivialize the need of field management part of the game Meta-progression is a necessity to use in order to succeed in higher difficulties Overall it's a nice and different game, if you are one of roguelike deckbuilder addicts, you should give it a go, but be warned, field management requires active thinking so it might not click with everyone

Still in the tutorial, 5 bugs already encounter. I guess the dev of this game just move on.