The Amazing American Circus

音乐挺有马戏团那味了。一切为了看台观众“服务”。卡牌的马戏团玩法很创新。

Was really excited for this game, but was very disappointed. Ton of unnecessary game-play mechanics that are not properly explained. Way too much going on from the start. Felt like refunding the game after the first 20 minutes of the tutorial, but wanted to give it a fare shot. 1.3 hours in and its felt like an eternity.. would not recommend.

very good game

Overview A mix between Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, and Oregon Trail all wrapped up in colorful turn of the century circus tents. You have no prospects so you decide to run the circus your father left you, to try to win a circus competition. Quite the hook, but sadly this ain’t the greatest show on Earth. Audio/Visual The art is grounded and the animations can be stiff and repetitive. The same is true of the music which loops very quickly. The voice acting is stilted and lacks energy. You can add new characters to your circus, but each class only has one appearance. Gameplay There are two main attractions here, the card battles representing shows, and the resource management of the circus and its travels. Both acts dropped the ball, despite showing some promise. The card battles are drawn out, inconsistent, and poorly documented. The phrasing on the cards is awkward and poorly translated. Some cards or enemy attacks seem to have extra effects not mentioned, which may just be bugs. There is a lot going on even from the beginning, so sequencing is a very important skill to develop. The single worst part of the battle system is damage for shuffling the deck. When you run out of cards, you shuffle the deck and it deals 5 damage to all of your performers(Who start with 10 HP and don’t gain much more throughout the game). This means the best feeling thing in card games(drawing cards) is actually one of the worst things you can do. When performers reach 0 HP they are restored to 10 HP, but must exile one of their cards for the rest of the show. This causes extremely slow death spirals. If you are going to lose a show you’ll know several minutes in advance, but cannot forfeit. The show must go on, round after round lacking the tools to damage enemies or prevent yourself from taking damage. Losing energy to play cards with each performer who gets knocked out. It seems like performers and enemies are designed perpendicular to each other. Performers mostly have cards that deal damage and prevent damage, while enemies occasionally try to deal damage but most often put status effects on your performers or fill your deck with deleterious cards. From all the cards I saw while playing, I didn’t see any way to stop these status attacks, other than defeating that enemy. Between shows you travel to major cities of the frontier, using your money to upgrade your various tents that let you do things like heal, recruit, level up, purchase and cook food, etc. There was a lot going on, and most of it was paying money to increase or decrease your chances of random effects, or paying to remove all the negative quirks and cards your performers accrue. Most of these systems could have been cut or made more impactful. Conclusion The framework is there to make a compelling game, but the curtain falls on the design for now.

I had no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue what was happening

For all intents and purposes this is a combat game. All battles are reskinned as performances, and performers are fighters. This leads to a dissonance. All terminology is from circus, gameplay is definitely not. Even if you are not bothered by this, even familiar concepts such as hit points, damage, block etc. are called something entirely different and it takes some time before you translate and re-learn everything. This is by no means a dealbreaker for me, but feels off, and you will need to like both the circus like reskin theme, combat games and be fine with the odd combination to enjoy this game. Still, it's not the reason why I wouldn't recommend it. I got plenty of random crashes lately, so the game is definitely not created, optimized or even updated for win 11. Since crashes are random, you can just reboot the computer and try again. Annoying, but I haven't seed any blocker. And yet, it's not the main reason why I wouldn't recommend it. Instead, I'm thrown off by the death of a thousand annoying random punishments. You perform and every single of your performers can get a random negative trait for no reason at all. Sure, you can remove it, but it costs money. You can also decrease the chance of getting negative traits... But it also costs a lot of money... That you just spent to remove the traits in the first place. If you don't do that, your good traits will be replaced by the really bad ones. Also, if you perform, you get bad cards that litters your deck. No reason other than that developers thought it would be funny to give you a random pushment. If you are lucky, you will get good cards instead. Except that even good cards are pretty bad, and still litters your deck. So in this game even the rewards are punishments. And even if you are lucky, missing the most terrible random punishments, you will sooner or later fall for terrible random events that you get between cities. Events that will give you more random, unavoidable, permanent punishments. And because of the autosave at very specific places, it happed more than once that I got lucky with RNG, closed the game, and had to redo everything, but the good RNG was replaced by terrible one. It's just not worth it.

Я вот играю и параллельно прохожу игру и не могу сдержаться, чтобы не оставить сразу негативный обзор. Игра прям редкое дно, что доказывает % получения ачивок, у меня еще далеко не середина, а даже тут всего 6% игроков дошло. Создатели очень слабо понимают себе саму суть карточного рогалика - управление рисками (рандомом) в заданных правилах. В Цирке вам неизвестно, что вы выбираете, последствия пожнете потом, когда уже будет поздно: - заблочили в начале игры перса? можно тащить двумя (но опыта больше они не получают, увы), но потом столкнетесь с тем, что рекрутировать некого; - прокачали вероятность создания двух блюд? ну из 10 раз 2 раза прокнет, что делает этот перк абсолютно пустой и неокупаемой тратой денег, но деньги уже не вернуть - подумали, что чем больше карт, тем больше ваша колода? ага, карт у вас будет 5, вы просто вольны выбирать какие именно взять в колоду. Новые карты есть смысл брать только для замены шлака в колоде, в остальном - только улучшения. - не всегда понятно какие эффекты сработают, некоторые эффекты вообще непонятно как работают, внятного описания нет. И это только начало игры....