Once Upon a Galaxy

Pretty great little drafting game; very easy to lose an hour or two spamming runs. Multiply that by a half-year worth of nights, and suddenly you've put in over a hundred hours without meaning to.

No More 2D Card Games! I thought it would at least do something else

The game concept is fun and a very cool twist on autobattlers in that you can craft a deck for each specific Captain, who each have special abilities similar to Hearthstone's heroes. Once you play long enough, you realize this is, like most CCGs in the modern era, just a scheme to make you pay more money. Not only do you need to get each specific card, you need to get each specific card FOR EACH SPECIFIC CAPTAIN. There's something close to 50 Cpts and more get added all the time. So that means you need multiple copies of every card. Not 3 or 4, like other games, but around a dozen for niche cards and 30 or 40 for cards that are good in a large number of decks. On top of this, while the fact that I don't need to wait for a timer for battles to happen is cool, the fact that I'm playing pre-programmed decks that don't have live pilots adapting to my strategy is less than exciting. It's not really 'PVP' as much as "PV some other decks people at your rank made before you played." Overall, some cool concepts but some 'features' make the game less strategic and the money grab is brutal.

I used to love this game. The whimsical card design and the asynchronous battles have been a major selling point for me. It felt fun and refreshing and you certainly did not need to spend any money to be competitive. This made any pass purchase feel like you were supporting the dev team for a job well done. Unfortunately, the game is now at a state where multiple captains are dumped in the game every month, making this increasingly daunting for new players. As the, inevitably, imbalanced captain pool grows, f2p players will be stuck with considerably worse captains or a vastly diluted card pool, meaning their chances of winning diminish with every passing month. Worst of all though, and the reason why I am uninstalling, is because the dev team has introduced P2W elements in the shop in the form of reroll. This is an incremental benefit, as the captain pool is ever-expanding, but those who do not purchase the reroll system (which is per card set) are immediately worse off. I wish the game stayed more f2p friendly and less predatory, but unfortunately the trajectory the game has taken means this will only cater to whales. And there are more established card games for whales out there.

Horrible rng and balancing

I enjoyed this game for the first 15 hours I played this, but I reached a point where I'm just done with the game. Here's my journey through playing this game. First time you play this game it's clearly a mobile game interface but it plays similarly to other card based autobattlers. It's very easy to miss tutorial popups playing on PC and there is no way to ever see them again if you miss it, you just have to learn by trial and error if you miss the popup. Matches are quick in this game and it's very quick to start a new match, which is very addictive and probably kept me playing 10 more hours than I should've played this. 10 hours in, I learn that you can drag your card to the top left to toss it. Massive failure of the interface for me to learn this so late, way after hitting legendary rank. 15 hours in, I learn Captains (the character you choose at the start of each match) for some reason have a customizable deck. Cool, except some of them I couldn't make a custom deck for, and also you have to play games on the captain to unlock cards for it, and cards you unlock on one captain are not unlocked for other captains. Very grindy and made me think that playing some captains is a noob trap because you need to unlock cards for it and grind losses otherwise. I realized very quickly that some captains are just straight up better than 90% of the other captains in the game (when your goal is to get 1st place). I found myself clicking the same few captains on repeat (the captains that either generate mass treasures, buff treasures or generate captains that then generate treasures) which eventally led to every game feeling very similar. You also generally see the same few captains in each game at legendary rank which also contributes to stagnant feeling games. The randomness in this game is so insane that you can go from dying (losing all 3 hearts) by turn 5 to bad hit rng (can cause you to lose a full heart in a turn), to winning by turn 20 (games typically end around turn 13) only because you found one random spell/treasure that allows you to high roll and significantly improve your board too late. Matches usually end up as you hitting 3rd place because the top 2 players high rolled with stats 3x as large as your board or you hitting 6th place because you low rolled, scaled up slightly too slowly, or got 2 turns where you were hit for a full heart (bad hit rng). The game eventually felt repetitive, frustrating, and it felt like I was just cranking a slot machine praying for good captain and hit rng so I stopped playing at 2973 mmr. I enjoyed my time with this game but probably ended up playing it too much to the point where I don't want to ever play it again. It's a good game but definitely something you have to pace yourself playing. Surprisingly it's difficult to not just click the play button after each game ends. Very addictive game.

One of the most interesting Autobattler/Drafters I have played. Thanks LSV for your videos about this.