Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four

You can see where it wants to go (or believe it should have gone) in many aspects but just falls flat as much as it succeeds. The overall gameplay and UI is fine. Not great but enjoyable/functional enough. There's a decent strategic element for deck building, but not so much for the actual battles besides what to mulligan (to be fair, a lot of tcgs have this issue). It's interesting to find ways to beat things while "underleveled", but it just makes it harder to grind when you need to. And you will almost certainly need to. Decent 3d graphics (for its kind) and "free" roaming but probably been better to just be sprite and grid or node based. There's no point for the 3d, and the limited timing puzzles just aren't worth the annoyance and time waste from the movement. Especially in the tavern. Having to run or fight the boss right after you complete a level might seem exciting. But when you want to challenge it or even just check its stats, you'll need to go through a full level first. There's a reason why save points are located right infront of a boss room. You can absolutely cheese the bosses with the right creatures and equips but then have to deal with much harder normal enemies as there's no way to go back. Plus you can't change decks to fight the boss. You have to use the last deck you just used.

This game is great fun. Very nice feel. Neat theme. Well executed. I particularly like the artifacts, inter-dimensional pub phase and the random effect pick ups. I'd love to see an expansion with more cards and other content, maybe a twist or two on the main theme. It would make the combats more exciting and less predictable if the damage was random. Maybe a game option slider that sets damage variability on a range of 0% to 100% in steps of 5%. That way, by default, the value would be 0%, allowing no randomness, same as now. But then I could set it as wide as 100%, allowing a range of 0 damage to double damage. Or for just a little randomness, I could set it to 20%, for a range of 80% to 120% damage. I'd love to see the game keep track of some game play statistics, such as how many times I get killed, what killed me, how many runs I've made, number of items found, etc. It would help when choosing cards to show the card costs on the thumbnails in the spell book. Some filters or sort options could also be helpful when I have a lot of cards and I'm trying to build a particular deck. Unfortunately, I don't like the arcade style real time chase with the boss. I wish there was an option for a different way of handling the bosses. Just a personal preference. Not a flaw in the game itself. Great game. Well worth it!

A great little deckbuilder with roguelike exploration elements and lots of monsters, items, and upgrades. I appreciate that it's a much different game than Slay the Spire and it's knockoffs as that formula has become a bit tired for me. The art and level design are great and can run on lower end computers thanks to an option to do so. I can happily spend hours playing. Much recommended!

I'm not really understanding the negative reviews, especially for the price of the game; however, I do see how some people may feel the game is grindy. I've been playing for just about 10 hours now and am on the third tier (boss). The plus side to the grinding is always leveling up your gold (ability to play cards) and finding artifiacts. The fact I can grind and be unstoppable is a fun aspect in my opinion, and it doesn't seem like it's taking forever to achieve that. The level of strategy this game requires also makes it very fun! I highly recommend if you like strategy card games with rougelite elements.

good indie game but grindy to kill bosses