This was in the recent Humble Bundle. I picked up the bundle mostly for this, and also Neoverse which… I don’t think I’ll end up playing anywhere near enough of to review.

It’s a card-based RPG in the SteamWorld Universe. Not a universe I’m super familiar with, the only other SteamWorld game I’ve played is Dig 2, which was pretty good. This is a bit of an older game, but I do try to review everything I play. I like going back and trying things I missed from time to time, so here’s one that’s been on the wishlist for a while.

Not much else to talk about in the intro, so let’s go!

Developer: Image & Form
Publisher: Thunderful Games
Release date: May 31st 2019 on PC, April 25th 2019 on Switch
Platforms: Switch, PC (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Card-based RPG

You play as a team of the robot-like creatures you usually play in the SteamWorld games. Armilly is the main character who wants to join the Guild to be a hero, by following the teachings of the legendary hero Gilgamech. The Guild sucks though so… that’s weird. She’s joined by her friends, I forget her names, they’re very forgettable, as they find the army of The Void attacking their village. They’ve kidnapped the Guild members, so Armilly takes it upon herself to go save them with her friends who she just drags along. The group ends up finding out about what The Void is planning, and team up with a few extra people to stop them. There’s a pretty expected twist. It’s not a particularly interesting story and the characters are pretty bland, but it does the job.

So this is a card-based RPG. You go from chapter to chapter fighting enemies, finding chests and buying stuff from the shop. Each of the 19 chapters is a simple map, where you walk around “rooms” to the next entrance, until you get to the end. There’s minor puzzle-solving in some of them, and some rooms have exits that aren’t noted on the map (hiding some secrets). There’s a few things you can break with your sword to get a bit of extra cash, and enemies are walking around freely in these small “rooms”. Each room does just have set encounters, so there’s nothing random here. You can try to hit enemies with your sword to start the battle with a bit of extra damage dealt to them, it’s pretty pointless. There’s usually a save point or 2 in each level, activating it heals you, it becomes your respawn point, and it revives every enemy you’ve killed in the level so you can re-fight them for extra EXP. These levels… are all kinda boring. It’s just walking to the end, pretty much. If there’s a gate or something, it’s always as simple as just taking an alternate path to the thing that will open the gate. It’s pretty whatever. There’s chests hidden in each level and it does count the percentage in each level, if you care at all about 100% completion… it’s fairly pointless here in the early levels, because the stuff you’ll find in later levels (or just buy in the shop) will just be better anyways.

The combat is the more interesting part of the gameplay. You choose a party of 3 characters out of the 5 you end up with, and each character has equipment (1 weapon, which affects something else in battle alongside stats, and 2 accessory slots) and a deck of cards, which you can fill with up to 8 cards. Each character has a bit of a different specialty (Armilly is all about hitting things with her sword, mage girl does magic and barriers, frog dude does healing and buffs). On your turn in battle, you draw back up to 6 cards, combined between all the decks. You can choose up to 3 cards to activate for this turn in battle. Your team will act first, then the enemy (with some exceptions if some enemies have counter cards on). Some cards are free to play and give you 1 SP in the top bar, other cards require SP. SP remains after a turn, so you can stack it for big turns, or if you want to use a 2 SP card in one turn with no SP stacked, just use 2 “free” cards and then the 2 SP one. SP cards tend to be considerably stronger than basic cards, including some status effects and such. You can use cards from any character (they’re colored for easy identification, and the image tends to represent the character too), so a character can act many times in a turn too. If you choose 3 cards from a single character in the same turn, you also activate that character’s weapon skill. There’s a few different weapon skills per character, you can generally choose the one you want from the weapon selection in the store (there’s a few weapons in chests but they become deprecated pretty fast as you progress and the store stocks better things). For example, mage girl can either add a barrier to the whole team, do a mass fire attack that can burn or do a mass thunder attack that can paralyze, based on her weapon. It’s pretty much preferable in combat to focus on one character in a turn because of the extra weapon skill. Also you can discard and redraw from the deck, 2 cards per turn, for a bit of extra strategy/moving things around. Oh and in battle you can use healing items, which will take one of your 3 card slots. And you can analyze enemies to see what they’re weak or strong to, for free.

So there’s minor customization. There’s the equipment I talked about, you get good stat boosts there. You level up as you kill enemies, I assume the stat boosts are set for every level already. And you can change your decks around. As you progress through the game the store sells more cards, and you sometimes find some through killing bosses and such. You only have 8 cards to work with for a deck, so it’s kinda hard to change that much around. The store also allows you to upgrade your cards with materials you either find or buy, mostly just adding extra damage. Since you have 5 characters to choose from for your 3-character party, you have a bunch of combinations and card choices. I’m sure people have figured out really strong combinations.

My issue is mostly that this game is extra easy. My final party was the 3 starting characters, using almost all the same cards they started with (some powered up a bit). I switched a few around, but I’m pretty sure I could’ve finished the whole thing with the starting deck, without much chance to lose. Also it’s pretty much TOO straightforward, because other than the colosseum there’s no side content. You CAN 100% each level but… why? What you’ll get in the few chests you may miss (because largely they’re all really easy to find) is not gonna be worth replaying a level for. There’s no side dungeons or anything. And it requires pretty much no grinding, I’ve only done a few extra fights in the whole game because I used a save point and respawned enemies that were in my way going back through a room in a level, pretty much. Unless you want to beat the colosseum, that will require a few more levels than the final boss since the last cup is all high HP bosses. Once you beat the final boss… that’s that. This game has nothing else.

Overall

This was fine. A bit too easy overall, too straightforward, not a lot of side-content (just the colosseum). Despite the fact that it gives you 5 characters to choose from to form a party of 3, I don’t feel like it gives you much reason to experiment when the starting party with most of their starting decks is good enough for the late game. Sure you CAN experiment… but why?

It’s a game that feels like it’s almost great, but it falls short overall. I feel there should be more to it. I like the combat system mostly, but I wouldn’t mind a bit more depth outside of the combat.

Very middling recommendation on this one. There’s better card-based combat games out there like Slay the Spire.