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[i]Second Second[/i] is an interesting new roguelite deck-building card game involving strategic planning and battles. The game is in Early Access. It involves deck-building but there is no card-drawing element at all. The game is mostly strategy as you build your deck based on how you wish to play, you know exactly the order of your cards because you can arrange them however you wish. Your active deck only has 15 cards total, so it's very easy to manage. Overall the system is fairly unique and very interesting, and works well in this case.
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
The game is based on RNG creation of individual maps that puts you in a starting location and you have to decide how to tackle this map. In order to progress, you need to make your way through the boss on this screen. You have to progress along nodes on the map in order to reach the boss, one step at a time.
There are some rather confusing parts of this game, and even though you get a brief on-screen explanation every time you start the story mode on restarting the game, you still need to play to figure out what all of the parts are. Nothing beats learning from experience here.
The basic mechanics show a turn-based strategic battle in the nodes with enemies, each turn comprising of 1.0 turns. Each card you have in your deck takes a certain amount of your turn time, and with any amount of your turn left over, you can play any card, regardless of your time left in your turn. If the time needed concludes on your opponent's turn, your card effect/ability/etc will activate at the appropriate time. (This took me a while to realize that to optimize the turns and times, to be able to play a few card effects in your opponent's turn is probably the best way to go about it.) There are some specialized nodes too, such an treasures, events, and labs.
The strategic parts are not just in the card battles, because there is also a component of deciding how you choose your steps in each sector before getting close to the boss. The paths are often not completely linear, and if you want to access the treasures, labs, and events, you will cause an elapse in time. The elapse in time doesn't seem all that important, until you mouse-over the time-elapsed part of the map screen, to realize that time-elapsed equates to additional HP for all of the remaining enemies left in the sector.
You can look at a log of all of the cards played in an in-game log that you can access for each battle. Your designated cards will be used in a straight forward cycle in the order you chose. They will cycle through in order, but each card has a designated number of charges=uses, and the card is exhausted for the battle once all of the charges are used up. If you have a slot open without a card available, either by exhausting all of your cards or by not having any cards in that type at all, the game will give you an infinite-use card for that slot.
Each time you finish an event or complete a battle, you will increase your deck level. This has nothing to do with your active deck or your inventory, but at each end-battle juncture, you can choose to print some cards based on your deck level or to wait and to gradually build up your deck level. High level leads to better cards, so depending on your need and want to have rarer cards, you have to choose when to collect your winnings.
You can edit your deck to have up to 15 cards, with a total of 5 card slots, and up to 3 cards in each slot. You choose the order of appearance of your cards, so none of this is up to chance at all. It is almost strange why a deck-building card game forms the basis of such a game, when card appearances and deck content is determined 100% by the player, with nothing being up to chance at all.
Because the deck-building is completely up to you, you have an inventory and an active deck. All of the cards are designated by type of card, with quite a few types possible. You have five slots and you can only have up to five types at max. This significantly limits the cards that you can use that you have built up in your inventory. Fortunately there are certain lab nodes were you can change the type of your slots, to change up the cards that you can use. There are other nodes that are also possible to combine two different cards to change some of their characteristics. The logic behind these are not necessarily clear up to this time of me playing, hopefully I will find out in the future.
There is a story mode and another standard mode. The story mode has five different chapters, each with a character and a starting deck. As you progress through the game, the story mode can actively change, because you can unlock different starting decks for each chapter through the achievements that you can get in-game. Each locked deck within the story mode chapter tells you which achievement you need to unlock it.
The initial playing of the story mode can serve as your learning mode to get used to the different intricacies of the game, and then the standard mode can be the actual game that you play for continuation afterwards. While the story mode offers a brief story, with each chapter being a different part, they are really loosely tied. There is no need for a story mode, you can just play on and ignore the story. The fun is in the game anyway. Plus the game is in Early Access, and the story mode could get more fleshed out. But the different starting decks in the game's story mode is pretty refreshing too.
[h1]Controls[/h1]
The entire game can be easily played with a mouse. You can use designated shortcut keys for the different cards too, but this is not really necessary.
[h1]Graphics[/h1]
Graphics are pretty nice, it's a layered 3D environment with well-designed sprite designs. There are some different perspectives for the battle sequences that are shown, perhaps at random.
[h1]Positives[/h1]
+Neat design, unique
+Well thoughtout system, with nice balance
+Graphics are nice
+Simple controls
+Heavy strategy, light on luck
+Nice that the story mode has different decks unlockable for each chapter
+Choice decisions regarding deck-building required, due to small deck size and limited slot types and numbers
+Overall very fun
[h1]Negatives[/h1]
-A bit confusing to learn in the beginning
-The on-screen display explanation shows up with each launch of the game
[h1]Conclusion[/h1]
[i]Second Second[/i] is a new and unique roguelite deck-building card game with no drawing-phase, and the entire deck order is determined by the player. It offers a heavily strategic experience and less randomization. It is very interesting and fun, with a story mode to go through, with variations in starting decks unlockable to be able to give you replay value there. Plus the standard game is more complex, involved, and longer, once you decide to move on from the story mode. Even though the game is in Early Access, it has quite a bit of content and is really very fun. I would definitely recommend this game.
The following video is my blind first-look at the game, and it involves a few failures, before I managed to make my way through the first chapter and the first sector of the second chapter of story mode:
https://youtu.be/tEygQ-axaqg
[quote]I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.[/quote]
