A clever idea to spice up what seems to be a popular variant of solitaire often found online (sometimes called "Golf" solitaire, I think). Traverse maps with your "hero" and alternate between clearing boards and "doing battle", where building combos and paying attention to the "suit" (color) of cleared cards can make all the difference. Over time, you'll gain "power", collect wildcards. "buy" stronger actiion cards, and other power ups, for a little bit of RPG-like flavor. Don't expect a full-blown RPG experience -- there's a small amount of (skippable) story narrative, but no role-playing involved -- but the character/deck-building aspect is satisfying enough. Not especially difficult once you get the hang of it, but a novel twist on the genre, and fun enough to fill a bit of time with. And unlike the many "free" online variants of this sort of solitaire game you tend to find littering the internet, there are NO IN-APP PURCHASES. Meaning it's a fairly balanced game from start to finish.
I really wanted to like this. The game is simplistic, yet strangely addictive, and I spent many hours trying to enjoy it. But in the end, there are too many ways to fatally gimp a run, and too few choices that actually work. The economy is beyond tight, there are no "respec" options. I can only conclude the devs actively made design choices to cut off all but a single (undocumented) style of play. For example, the game offers you a wide (semi-randomized) choice of interesting troops. But very limited garrison space, Did you experiment with troops that aren't cutting it? Dismiss those guys (and throw more overly scarce gold away. Or reload a prior save and replay more of the game yet again. Also, a zero-troop-loss policy from the very start is pretty much mandatory, or your character's chance of progressing beyond the first few islands is nil. If you don't research it first, you're apt to lose a fair few hours to that discovery alone. But ok, one more restart later I was having fun tackling a no-loss run. And that worked great until, with only harder enemies left gating access to lands beyond, my troops weren't cutting it on the healing/resurrection front anymore. But never fear! I may not have had any Paladins (better healers, but troops you can get are apparently randomized for each run), but I did find a scroll of Sacrifice. Expensive to cast, and would take careful timing, but if I could pull off a Summons (summoned troop casualties don't count as losses), followed by a Sacrifice, that would recoup the extra casualties. Except it turns out you can't Sacrifice summoned troops, not even troops summoned by other Sacrificable troops (as opposed to your spells). There's no logic to it. It's just another (undocumented) way the devs chose not to let me play. I'm done wasting my time here. But if a meta-game of, "Guess the devs minds, and play their way, or else! (meaning it's reload/restart/try again time)" is your thing, have at it, I guess?
Overall the game is great -- a very fun combination of strategy, tactics, team & roster-building. I'd give it five-stars, hands down, even in terms of story (for what the game is, I think the main characters and bits of story development are quite well done). The one disappointment is that the PC mouse implementation could have been so much better. And yes, the main menu screen warns you, use of a gamepad is recommended. But if like me you prefer Mouse and Keyboard the controls are actually pretty good -- I'd give them five stars too, except that the implementation of mouse clicks is just plain buggy. For lack of a better way to put it, the "hitboxes", the live regions in whch a mouse click is recognized as applying to a particular menu option, character, grid square, etc., feel lazily done. It feels a bit random as to when this issue raises its head -- it feels like sometimes mouse clicks fail to register your actual intenton as much as half the time. While this causes no permanent issues (as long as you're playing carefully and paying attention), it' can be frustrting to have activated the "Move" action, and then have no clicks on the highlighted available grid sqaures actually move the chacter til you cancel back to the main action menu and select "Move" oncd again. This also comes into play elsewhere, for example, when changing a character's primary class, or learning a new spell or skill. Te confirming click will sometimes inexplicably exit the menu instead. (Here is one of the places, if you weren't paying careful attention, you can also get stung later on in combat, if you thought your change was applied when it wasn't.) A minor annoyance at first, these issues are more bothersome as they occur literally hundreds of times over. Yes, it's well worth playing anyway. But with just a little more forethought and attention, the controls could have been flawless, instead of being the annoying hit-or-miss cause of recurring irritation that they are.
I really want to give this game a decent rating, but I can't. I bought it at an 85% discount. For that price, it's not terrible -- so far -- but it is still needlessly annoying. There is NO excuse for any modern game not providing adequate in-game documentation and feedback, such as: (a) info about the game basics, features, menus, icons, etc. There is a "tutorial" of sorts that pops up ONE TIME, By the time you need that info, and don't quite remember which cryptic symbol represents what, YOU CAN'T RE-ACCESS the tutorial data. Ridiculous. (b) Tooltips! Seriously, folks -- this is the PATCHED game, apparently with many IMPROVEMENTS, and it's clear the devs have been hearing about this from day 1. Sorry guys, but you cannot get even a neutral 3-star rating when your interface doesn't even show what a skill will do when you hover over it, or what a cryptic icon I guess we're all supposed to have memorized after one glance at a tutorial page means. This game feels like it could be pretty good. It could be worth a good bit MORE than $4.25 I paid for it. But if the devs haven't been willing, after more than enough feedback, to provide basic quality-of-life features the player has every right to expect, even from indie games ... sorry. The game currently gets a POOR rating. I might not ask for my $4.25 back. I'm going to give it a couple more hours investment and see if the overall experience can overcome the sheer thoughtlessness of the interface. It seriously wouldn't have taken a lot of effort on the developer's part for the game to feel worth the investment at twice the price or even more. But as it stands ... I feel like I probably overpaid. As I said, the experience seems like it COULD be so much better.
