Posted on: July 23, 2017
Fuzzypickles
Games: 65 Reviews: 1
Unexplored potential
This game has a lot of ideas with great potential, but disappoints in how it never explores the most interesting parts of its own mechanics. Children of Zodiarcs is a mix of cards, dice, and strategy RPG. On each turn, you can move each unit and have them play a card from their hand, which corresponds to typical RPG actions like attacking and healing. Resolving each action involves rolling dice which add effects to the resolution of the card. Mixing these genres offers lots of interesting possibilities, but Children of Zodiarcs frustratingly constrains options to the point where you don't get to explore the system. The player is allowed to customize two aspects: which cards are in their deck and what symbols are on their basic dice. The problem is that most of the player choices are too simple. For example: does your mage want an AOE spell that hits enemies for over half their health, or a spell that will reduce the enemy damage by 10% for three turns? Similarly, there are only 6 possible dice symbols you can craft, and some of them are clearly superior to others so the main limiting factor is grinding for dice materials rather than making clever choices that match your deck's goals. The cards available to you is also decided entirely by your character level. You get access to new cards as you level, and your old cards will be upgraded in predetermined ways. The upgrades offer some interesting quirks on each ability, like giving bonuses under certain conditions, but since these were fixed by the developers you don't get to play around with it much. Using something like booster packs or allowing players to customize the card upgrade process would give many more options, as well as offering replay value since your characters would be different each time. The fun of deck building games is discovering strong combinations of cards, but Children of Zodiarcs doesn't give you this feeling since all the meaningful choices have been made by the developers. The actual combat is just okay. I'm disappointed in their choices with the AI: it's a game where the enemy always outnumbers you, but due to the poor AI you can win fights. Enemies will cast healing spells that will affect you because they're sloppy about targeting. Enemies are often scripted to pass their turns until you get sufficiently close to them, which means most fights are about figuring out how the enemy is scripted or when additional enemies are scripted to spawn rather than actual tactics against a competent opponent. This is a relatively common choice in grid-based RPGs (unfortunately), so I can't hold it against the devs too much. "Hard" mode makes it so the enemy levels are always a couple above your highest level character, but in practice this means you are incentivized not to do any extra combat and rush through the game to stay at a low level. You also are forced to carefully share XP to prevent one character from getting too high leveled since it'll make your other characters useless. It's more tedious than difficult, since some characters naturally get more XP than others. All this said, the game isn't awful, but while playing it I can't help but see how the game could have been so much more. As is, Card Hunter explores the cross-over of CCG and SRPG much better.
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