Slay the Spire

Slay the Spire is an addictive, turn-based, deckbuilding strategy game. I've put over 200 hours into the game, yet I keep coming back to it. There are four characters, each with their own unique cards and relics, as well as character-agnostic cards and relics which keeps each run of the game fresh. Additionally, the game's difficulty is highly adjustable, with a Hard Mode setting which ranges from 1 (slightly more difficult than the base game) to 20 (bone-crushingly difficult). There are also dozens of modifiers which you can apply to a run, which can make the game easier, harder, or just more wacky. Overall, a fantastic game, I would recommend it to anyone who likes turn-based strategy games.

I don't generally write reviews but I was surprised by the number of negative ones on here (as opposed to Steam where it has something like a 97% overwhemingly favorable rating). Negative reviews seem to be: i) one star, it doesn't run. Don't know what I to say to that, it works fine for me. Possibly a problem with earlier more buggy versions (pre 2.0) or having a cack computer ii) I keep losing. Well, I'm no genius but I got to act three on my second go. I think if you rush this game and just spam out all your cards with no method you probably will lose a lot. You have to play with a bit of strategy Anyway, it's a great game; simple yet with a lot of depths. Random aspects, different characters and huge choice of cards give it tonnes of replayability value. Easy to pick up, hard to put down.

It's a very engaging, well - balanced deckbuilder, with 4 very distinct characters, tons of different card combinations, enough randomness to keep things fresh and enough strategy to always be fair with your chances to beat it. Building your deck from what you can get in any given game is a great way to force you to constantly rethink and optimize your options and prevents you from keeping a predetermined strategy in mind. It feels a little bit like a rougelike, and is equally engaging. On the other hand the graphics are pretty ugly and animations are almost non - existent in this game. But if you can look past its ugly shell, you will fond a real pearl inside. I, personally, love it, and despite its ugliness I'm rating it 10/10.

The title says everything. It's a drug: once you begin to play, you would try and try and try and try again, and try another time, and another, and another, and so on. Good characters, each one with a very charateristic deck (don't know if he's OP... but Defect surely has the most powerful cards), simple mechanics and enjoyable gameplaying, graphics and music. The bad thing: as such as most of this kind of games, you need a great quantity of luck to get through the dungeons. Luck for cards, luck for relics, luck for which boss or elite you will enconter. Every time you die, every replay, you find yourself hoping to find the cards and the relics that you need, And it's properly this mechanism - a flaw - that makes this game so addicting: it's a struggle against the chances. In the endless mode, the luck problem is well diluted and here you can enjoy yourself a lot more: on the third round, you can easily have a perfect deck and all the useful relics. In the "arcade" mode... well, you arrive to the heart boss making do with the poor cards and relics you found and hoping they're enough. Probably they aren't.

I have finally got around to playing Slay the Spire (StS), and I must say it's a decent game. I've been drawn to card-battler games over the past year, and many people have said that this one is foundational to the genre. After playing for several hours, I can see its influence in other games. However, at this point, there are much better games available, even if they are inspired by StS. In essence, these kinds of games follow a gameplay loop: start with a deck of cards, use them to fight battles, get more cards that make you slightly more powerful, and do it all again in hopes of making a little bit more progress than last time--and to unlock more cards, of course. Done right, the loop can be quite addicting, as games like Monster Train and Ring of Pain have shown. However, to me, StS lacks lasting appeal for a few reasons. Although it is simple enough to get into and understand, runs are very similar, and very few of your enemies are memorable. Also, after the first spire, the difficulty jumps significantly, to the point that the game becomes an obvious grind. At that point, I was not sure if my losses were a matter of RNG or predetermined by the game program itself. Also, some will like the nonsensical characters and art style of the game, which seems to be an appeal to very young gamers and the Dr. Seuss crowd. I found it merely tolerable and not enough to keep me playing after the difficult spike on the second spire. At this point (mid-2024), StS is like the grandfather of card-battler games: still recognizable as an ancestor of the genre, but a bit old and outdated. To put it differently, it's a good checkers game, even though all but the most casual players have long since graduated to chess. I got this cheap ($6), so I'm not really disappointed. Anyhow, I can now say that I've played StS and given it a chance--before promptly uninstalling it and going back to higher quality fare such as Monster Train, Ring of Pain, Trials of Fire, Forced Showdown, etc.