Hey guys. From the looks of things I'm the first to review this, and I'll do this service as games like this tend to get lost in the shuffle on Steam. To begin:
This game is a WWII card game which officially goes by the name WWII: Stronghold. I expect they've genericized the title on the store for copyright reasons. It's free to play and over the past 2.4 hours hasn't given me any unexpected negative surprises. An excellent game based on mechanics and flavors, though I can see the simple graphics as being a potential downside. You can skip to the bottom for the final scores, but allow me to go in-depth with the next few paragraphs.
Gameplay: Starting with the meat and potatoes. There are 3 general types of cards: Units, Equipment, and Orders.
Units: Infantry, Armor, Aircraft. They have some special abilities and each possess both attack and HP, similar to Magic: The Gathering. A personal favorite change is how "Trample" in MtG has been renamed "Brutality" in Stronghold.
Equipment: Weapons, supplies, tactical equipment, etc. These provide permanent changes to units, such as the camo nets which can keep your units away from the fighting in a "sniper" sort of role.
Orders: Inspiring speeches, tactics, and so on. One-time boosts for your side or penalties to your opponents. From my experience this will be something which modifies stats, such as concentrate fire which deals 3, 6, or 9 damage to any target based on how much you pay (see below).
The Process: The way all of this works together is actually pretty fluid and diversifies it a bit from the Magic comparison. While you play units and they have to wait a turn before attacking, they are deployed to one of three "lanes" in the rear deployment zone and move up to the attack zone at the start of the next turn. From here your unit attacks the first enemy unit in its lane, dealing its damage and taking return fire, typically. When there are no units in a lane, your opponent takes direct damage (and I expect it hurts like in Yu Gi Oh...). Ultimately the field set-up means you can only have 6 units on it at a time. You might think this would cause serious stalling in the game, but you'd be wrong. Units can be promoted and the diversity of cards is great enough that combining these two facts meant I passed my turn without spending all my resources a total of once over 20 matches. One last thing of note is that each card costs only 1 supply to deploy. The units are tightly balanced for this reason, though the above-mentioned promotions for your units will cost different amounts and the abilities of orders can be improved by spending extra supply for their activation.
Your Deck: Your bread and butter, what will lead you to victory or defeat (or possibly ragequitting if you brick out. My sympathies...). Early on you'll have enough cards to build a custom 30-card deck containing a combination of all the above card types. At the start it might be best to use the recommended option because it seems to give pretty solid results. During play, any units and equipment you don't play as well as any card which needs discarded will be sent to the discard pile. Once the cards run out, the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck which you can then draw from. Pay attention, as this is very important: This is a positively genius system. It means that the more units and equipment you have on the field, the fewer you have in your deck and the more likely you are to draw orders. So essentially, your deck more or less modifies itself according to your needs. That's gorramn shiny, as everyone's favorite sci-fi mechanic would say.
Score: 9/10. I didn't drool, but I wanted to.
The Story/Flavor: One essential of a WWII game is, of course, the war itself. At the start of each 10-level stage a short comic book-style cutscene plays to give you a bit of a story. A handful of dialogue boxes during the levels do so as well. It's obvious, however, the focus was on the game. The awkward grammar can be a bit disappointing, but for what it is it's still pretty good.
History With A Twist: The campaign looks, at the very start, to follow an American army as they face the Nazi threat I think. However, the units you and your foe deploy look to come from a melting pot mix of Russian, U.S., German, British, and Japanese units. Other than cosmetics and the fairly decent flavor text though that doesn't seem to affect gameplay.
Score: 7/10. It's pretty interesting to be sure but I can definitely see a lot of people (say, the ones who still play win95 Axis And Allies) wanting a bit more. I do find the mechanical balance of each faction as well as their flavor text equitable, however.
Music: Taking a breather with a short one. The music is pretty basic and I haven't noticed too much variety. I do however see a lot of potential with playing your music of choice in the background. During a "Survive!" mission I played Nickelback's "How You Remind Me". My taste in music aside, I found it a magnificent combination.
Score: 5/10. It does the job, though "Viva La Vida" by Coldplay is much preferred IMHO.
Graphics: Meh. Another hard one. The pictures are pretty neat though a bit basic, and you don't see much "going on" in-game besides the basic stabbing noises, gunfire, and pained grunting (And now I'm going to send you to the Shadow Realm, herr commandant!). The level select map looks pretty neat and I appreciate the little models, however.
Score: 7/10. Again, adequate. An extra point for the changes of scenery from level set to level set. Some of the cards are also quite fascinating, like the Ushakov flying submarine.
Microtransactions: Sigh. And now for the vegetables that nobody likes even though it's good for them. The knowing, not the using. Okay, bad metaphor. Microtransactions are generally bad, but this being a free to play game it pretty much has to have them for economic reasons. But how does this game handle them? Actually, pretty well. It's easy enough to get the premium currency for crates (think "card packs") through regular gameplay (at least during the first few hours). As for pricing, the facts are as follows:
A single "card pack" (I refuse to say "loot crate" again under ANY circumstances...) is 250 gold for basic, which contains 1 guaranteed rare and 4 random cards.
The lowest amount of gold you can get at a time using IRL money is 750 gold for 4.99 USD.
In essence, a pack of 5 cards costs ~1.67 USD. This is a low cost-per-card median between Magic (at 3.50 to 4 USD for 15 cards) and Yu Gi Oh (at 3.50 to 4 USD for 9 cards), meaning that it's closer to but more reasonable than Yu Gi Oh but a sight less so than Magic. And almost identical to Pokemon, now that I think about it.
Unpaid progression is among the best I've yet seen. I was able to grab a rare Avro Lancaster Bomber card with little effort using the challenge rewards. In keeping with the Candy Crush comparison though, there are purchasable "boosters" which help you out a bit, though I've been breezing through fairly easily with an auto-deck. The difference between the two is that luck plays less of a factor and skill and deck-building more of one than Candy Crush, meaning I don't need to flog myself for spending 2.4 hours playing it (phew...). There is also a variety of things you can do to pick up free stuff, so you feel like you're actually getting something done instead of just waiting for the bus.
Score: 7.5 out of 10. Decent microtransactions? Jeez. Strange times we live in. They'd be rated a 9.5 but I removed 2 points for the crime of *being* microtransactions. In my infinite and wholly unbiased wisdom.
TLDR:
Gameplay: 9/10
Story: 7/10
Music: 5/10
Graphics: 7/10
Microtransactions: 7.5/10
My highly biased final score: 7.1. A very good game with the potential to be excellent with a bit of extra time spent on the atmosphere. As it is though I'm returning to this before I'll return to Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Champions. Rate the review if you care to! :)
