Shadowplay: Metropolis Foe

Cards are complex and varied enough to keep the combat interesting and it is enjoyable to play but sadly it's hard to want to continue in a game that really isn't going anywhere as the developers lost funding, had to pull out early; patching bugs and open ends while delivering only half of the content.

Cost the price of a movie ticket and lasted 10 times as long. If you enjoyed Slay the Spire, you will enjoy this game, two arcs completed, rewards give replay value, but unfortunately it has been abandoned. So it is incomplete. Still I enjoyed it enjoyable and a game experience worth having/ recommending. Hope the devs will complete it one day or make a similar game again.

Shadowplay: Metropolis Foe is supposed to be a card-based combat game in a dystopian cyberpunk world. However, the lack of documentation and some translation oddities, plus visual glitches, immediately let you know that the game, with pretty good visuals, were not really designed for the Western market at launch. The result is pretty much unexplained mess that leaves you to figure out the play mechanics, and while the basics do make sense, the nuances that gives you an edge in combat were not explained at all. The backstory is pretty basic... Argus, the grand AI, has summoned you and 3 other characters to "train" in his sims in case any crisis occurs in "Starcity" (yes, that's how it's spelled in the game). Each character has his/her unique cards, and you can unlock more as you go along. You can also encounter some other characters with their own cardsets as you play. As you enter the (virtual) city, you are given a bunch of nodes that you can travel to, in a graph pattern. The nodes may be exposition only, a choice that can buff or debuff you (choose X to gain X but lose Y, or make a different choice), take a chance on something (choose to participate in a game or chance or not), a merchant where you can buy stuff (equipment or card), a sanctuary where you can rest and upgrade, or a battle vs enemies. The tutorial level (training) has no time pressure, but in the next fight, you are suddenly shown "red zones" which will grow and push you toward the enemy HQ similar to FTL. The mechanics of how this grows was never explained, nor were any mechanics on how to slow down the red zone growth and such explained either. The battles are card-based and turn-based where you play cards from your entire team's "library" (deck?) where you can put up armor or attack, or buff, or debuff, and a bunch of other stuff. You are limited to certain amount of "action points" per turn, and some cards you play can influence it. Some cards require more than 1 action point to play, and some cards can actually REDUCE some card's AP to play. Some cards build up a bonus like attack or defend, but there were little discussion on how that affects gameplay. There are special cards that double your armor, or attack with your armor rating, or draw new cards, or discard your cards, or even cards that create "temp cards" (that disappear at end of your turn). There certainly are lot of variations. Different characters have different decks. After the simple tutorial level, you're expected to assign a leader and his lieutenant, which seems to affect card availability in the fight, but that wasn't explained either. But the basic combat is simple enough... You block his attack with your armor, and he does the same to you. You have 100 hp, and your opponent may have more or less. You win when you reduce his HP to 0. It's that simple. Though sometimes you have to clear the map since spawned enemies may or may not survive their boss getting deleted. One thing that makes things difficult is YOUR HP can only regenerate at a sanctuary, and does not heal on its own. If you're out, you're out. And a tough boss fight can make the rest of the level difficult to complete. It's clear that every "map" has additional difficulty levels to unlock, but HOW that's done was not explained well either. During a battle, your opponent may also spawn additional enemies, which can spawn even MORE enemies. For example, a boss can spawn hacked cops, which can spawn police drones. That can mean a lot of targets, but you also have some cards that deal group damage, or damage all enemies at once. Each enemy decide if it wants to attack you, or do some sort of debuff where it makes you less effective somehow. However, this part wasn't fully explained like which icons mean what. You're shown icons like a fist, a shield, and so on, but other icons like what appears to be a heart were not explained. There were glitches in the game where the game displayed Chinese text instead of English, and most tutorial screens have illustrations still in Chinese. A very large amount of mechanics were left unexplained. Like how do I equip my equipment? Do I buy different equipment for each, or only the leader? How do I customize the deck? And so on. The game only seem to have spent 2 versions in early access (last version was 0.2) before abruptly released recently as 1.0, and the dev team declared the game fully baked and no more work will be done. While this game shows a lot of decent concept, as it does marry a lot of concept together rather successfully, the serious lack of documentation (there are ZERO guides on Steam for this game, but there may be some guides in Chinese I've yet to find) other than minimal tutorial screens that doesn't cover basic stuff like icons and statuses, makes this game BARELY playable, and not really enjoyable.

This is actually an interesting implementation. I'll start with the pros: 1. Overall art style and theming, this game made one of the most interesting cyberpunk presentation. It's not even coming from any compelx tech or anything, just well-drawn background, a 3d city map that is properly obscure and leaves for imagination, and really nicely animated portraits. The sharp parts, exposed cables, high-tech/low-life atmostphere and many techno vfx is just ON-POINT. It's amazing to have such final result for limited budget. 2. Character and team building. The game did try to address this problem of other card-building games by mixing characters in a 4-man team, and each character will give you access to items/card choices. And the narration will be kept to the captain. This is brilliant -- tho it inflicted some really serious balance issues that i'll mention later. 3. Some music is weirdly interesting. The bar music makes me think about life somehow. Okey those are the aspects that made this game interesting. However the core gameplay part is....very chaotic. Let's put a list of cons here: 1. Annoying bugs U will not be able to use ur cards on enemy properly, period. This is the very text-book definition of a game-breaking bug. 2. Poor UI/wording, or simply, poor readability. Lots of info is hidden and for u to remember -- for example, after chapter 3 u totally lose track of ur items. There's 8 of those items, and they are normally hidden during battle, and if u want to inquire what item/effect u have, u have to hover over the character, and review - TWO - at a time. I mean....why? why can i only see a quarter of my items when their UI totally don't confict to showing all 8? And lots of this kind of poor choice in their UI design. Enemy hints are not very clear and it's not fun sometimes, the game tells you "the two enemy like each other" but it didn't tell you if u kill one of it first, the second one straight up just kill you with 5 noise cards. Like....i can't seem to find consistancy over those hints, can u either make it clear what the enemy will do, or make the impact of those hidden mechanics less lethal? 3. Balance Poor balance, so this game has this item: A. for any character that's not Null, every corresponded card used will refund 1 energy. and B. a card, that will reproduce itself when used, gives either dodge or shield, the card costs 1 energy. So....infinite shield in one term when u have this combo, like---INFINITE SHIELD, if i didn't make it clear. I think the designers is not capable or doesn't know how to design a card game. This may sound offensive but don't get me wrong. These designers are terrible at designing card games doesn't mean they are not good people, it's just that they are unable to make card games and not fit for their job --- well of cuz it doesn't meant they are not bad people or anything but my point is that: THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE/BALANCE CARD GAME. Anyways, to sum it up. If this game is on 45 pounds i'd not recommand it. But for current price u get a lot of value from it. I mean c'mon, if 鬼谷八荒 deserves any popularity, this game is like times better.

Bugs galore. Uses 20% of my cpu? Da fuq? Screen tearing. Not very intuitive or even original. Translation is pretty subpar. Not even worth the 8 or they're charging.

Unfortunately the game is too buggy to be playable. I don't regret giving my money, but I certainly can't in good faith recommend this game. It's such a shame, it has so much potential. Someone needs to pick this up or make some sort of spinoff, it has so many good ideas.

Whatever fun I initially had with this was ruined by losing almost every dice roll. Translations were spotty at times. Some menus were untranslated until I exited and went back. Text is also cut off in some of the dialog boxes. The combat was all right though. But it doesn't help when you go into it handicapped because you failed a dice roll to hack in a story section and took damage for whatever reason. Also seems the game will no longer get updates. There are sections in game that say "coming soon" which is obviously a lie.

This game is quite good for being in early access. The visuals are well done in a cyber-neon style. It can be a bit hard to understand at first. The symbols don't really give you much of a clue what they do. Fortunately their definitions can be found in English buried down with the card listings. Once you read those it becomes more apparent what the effects do. There are several ways to go when building your deck. Each of the leaders provides a unique set of cards to your starting deck and each different member of your group adds their own unique cards as well. There's a lot of possibilities, offering a lot of replay value.