Hello everyone, Piroct here! This time I'll do a little game review of a game that got me hooked recently and I wanted to talk about it now that I had a really fun time beating all of its challenges (for now) yesterday.
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Let's get right to it!
Slay the Spire, a roguelike where you try to build a deck of cards that represents your attacks and skills while you make your way out of dungeons filled with treasures and monsters, went into Early Access on Steam last November and has since been slowly winning over unsuspecting players who go into it with low expectations. I am one of those recent converts.
The joy of a roguelike is cobbling together a winning strategy out of the junk you find lying around on the side of the corridors in this murdertower full of monsters. The joy of a deckbuilding game, whether a physical one like Dominion or a videogame like Hand of Fate, is in building something greater than the sum of its parts.
Developed by Mega Crit Games, Slay the Spire takes RPG dungeon crawling and remixes it around modern card mechanics. At the beginning you’re presented with a map of different rooms connected by meandering and intersecting paths. You choose where to start and then follow the path from one discrete room to the next.
In Slay the Spire your character is your deck. While some cards are individually more powerful than others, simply accumulating strong cards isn’t enough. Various mechanical themes run through the card sets (there are two characters in the game currently, The Ironclad and The Silent, each with their own set), and they clearly direct you towards building decks that synergize, that combine effects to multiply their impact. If you like playing Magic: The Gathering, you'll find this experience really interesting!
After each fight, you select the next room to enter, which might contain treasure, a merchant, or just more things to fight. Throughout all of it, though, you’ll hopefully be accruing newer and better cards to make you stronger, all with an eye to being ready by the time you have to face the map’s final boss.
Each turn you draw five cards, and at the end of the turn you discard your whole hand. This mechanic makes it much punchier than most card games, there’s no planning for next turn, or sculpting your hand. There’s no sensation of powerlessness when you draw a hand you know is very weak, it’ll be gone next turn.
Combos are both satisfying to pull off and fun to figure out. Slay the Spire isn’t easy by any stretch though, so recognizing the patterns that help them to emerge, but during combat and while building out your deck, is a necessity. In other words, you can’t brute force your way through obstacles by simply loading up on potions and grinding until your character can simply overpower whatever it comes across.
One thing that the game is woefully short on, though, is animations. The characters just sorta jiggle around on the screen, but at $15.99, it’s also blessed with a decent price point. Low enough to get you in the door but, one hopes, enough to keep the team behind it fed and watered until the game is completed. There’s not even any microtransactions. Just pay them their money and you get to come along for the whole ride.
New cards, special items, and extra game modes are expected in the coming months, while Mega Crit says it will start looking at porting Slay the Spire to other platforms once it is out of Early Access.
Check out the STEAM PAGE of the game and support the developers if your like the game!
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