Tainted Grail: Conquest

I like when companies telling you in they EULA that they collect data and using EU blahblah rules to say oh this data we collect is anonymized and no connection to your real person is possible. Bull crap, I working in Digital Forensic an we can traceback most of anonymized data to the source. But the game is great :)

This game is good. It feels like it´s great for the first few hours and then you get bored (for me it´s around 50). I love rogulites. I adore meta-progression. It´s just that this game falls flat before the finish line in every aspect. Music: Perfect. Dark Nordic/Celtic/Slavic/pagan feel. No complaints here. Visuals: Aesthetic is great. Detail? Less so. Combat: Card battler. Heavy on RNG. While you unlock more ways to deal with that you also unlock more cards and passives making it difficult to have a focused build consistently. Classes: Some cards are common. Others are specific to a class (3 sub-classes in each). 2/3 mages are pure summoners (due to lore), one summons to power himself. Three archers, three warriors. Nice variety. Story: Great. A little bit disjointed due to the randomness of encounters. You may progress 10 quests during a run, or really none at all. You also can´t sit and play while listening to something else (if you enjoy the story) since quest encounters will appear relatively often. Some choices are permanent, others are not. Does the game tell you? Not really. Some outcomes are just better (like not leaving a null encounter that does nothing and just takes space in your future runs - just whyyyyy?) Meta-progression: Overwhelming at the beginning. There are multiple currencies and it will take you a while to buy substantial upgrades. Then they get expensive. Difficulty: You start at 1, 8 is the last handcrafted difficulty, beyond that it´s scaled according to some equation. Enemies scale well. You and your cards don´t at all (HP and DMG wise, you get more money for battles). I really wanted to like this game. And I do. I am just bored. Level 6+ difficulty usually feels like a waste of time if you don´t get a few good passives, cards or runes at the beginning. The game needs just a little bit more - a bit more polish, a bit more balancing, a bit more... everything. Perhaps I will get interested again one day and return to it.

Maybe it is not perfect. Maybe it can look too gloomy. Maybe can be harsh in start. But it has great art, good enough story, many ways to deal with enemies, and almost makes dying part of fun. It can be mastered easy enough to your comfort level, and it can offer wide spectrum of fun – from "just hack them all" to "i like to count just everything". I recommend it.

Out of EA the game still have a few issues, but nothing that ruins the great experience this game offers. - Great card game - Nice atmosphere - Good writing, story and voice acting.