Recent reviews by Fjarun

GIT KRUMPIN' YA ZOGGIN' GIT

This is something I found through Steam Interactive Recommender searching for niche titles, and it's probably the best game I've found that way so far. At the asking price, fully recommended even without a sale. If you only expect to like either the card game or the story seperately, take the risk during a sale and it will most likely surprise you.

Now, into some actual game detail:
The game has two distinct parts, one is the story / world and lore exploration, which is largely done through talking to the characters, and is built like a visual novel. I don't have a huge amount to say on this part, it's good. I would put the split at around 60 to 65% story, 30 to 35% card games.

As a bonus, if you don't like reading and want to get straight to the card games, you can skip the text and jump straight to the next duel on the map screen during phases of a chapter. I wouldn't recommend doing so, as the story was quite enjoyable, but the option is there for those who literally just want card games.

The second part is where your card game aspect comes in, as the magic conflict/fights are resolved through throwing these eldritch cards at each other.

The card game design itself is really good, actually, though its more like a HEX story mode style card game, where the campaign has duels that reach such a high enough difficulty on the standard setting (Not easy mode) that you will be adapting most of your deck to beat them. I would say there were maybe 5 fights, give or take 1, that I got stuck on for a while and required upwards of 10 retries. Finding a solution to those decks feels a bit closer to a puzzle game than a card game, but it was still quite enjoyable IMO.

In that respect it is not a Yu-gi-oh or similar card game where you have, say, your 20 cards you always play for your deck theme, and then a draw engine of however many cards to find the ones you need for your win condition, followed by the rest of your deck rounding out with general counterplay cards or specific ones if you know what you're against.

You might be able to play your favourite theme exclusively like that on easy mode, but I didn't touch that, so I have no idea. The card game itself is not particularly complex.
it uses keywords for most cards so most effects are easy to figure out immediately. Again, this is not Yu-gi-oh - in a good way - there are pretty much no cards that will need an hour long reading session and/or PHD to determine the effect of. There is maybe one or two effects that could be improved text-wise with a keyword added,

Example:
'they who devour' ramps damage of the same card in your deck 1 per kill - the effect isn't overly long but could be shorter. A similar card exists in the very final fight which I will not detail, but could creatively use an 'Empower' keyword the same as They who devour, if one was added.

The only real complaints I have for this are like that, very small QoL improvements that could be added. The game is still great without them. If the devs wanted to make a standalone card game version next which was cheap or a monetised free to play, similar to what happened with Gwent from the Witcher, these little bits of polish would be more important as the card game would be the entire experience.

I would play that if they made it even without those tune ups though, the card game is entertaining regardless and the QoL's I mention are largely unimportant bits of polish that could be added.

For the other reviews, there are a handful of negative ones. I won't question their legitimacy, but do read their complaints. They are largely themed around either not liking the visual novel aspect, or wanting to be able to play this as a card game where you build your deck archetype and then change the support structure around it as needed.

As mentioned above, you will struggle to play this way on the non-easy difficulty mode here, so it might simply be a case of this game is not what they were looking for. You regularly edit your deck in this to an almost total extent.

tl;dr If you like both reading new settings / lore / etc and card games that can actually challenge you, buy it full price. If you like one or the other but not both, take the risk and buy it on sale. Judging by the Dev/Publisher listed here and what I've read, this is a smaller effort that was self published, and I'd highly recommend supporting them for it.

Starts off much slower than Shadow of Mordor IMO, as most quests for the first half are psuedo-tutorial styled. Though it does ditch a lot of the junk in mordor i.e collect the plants, kill some bats.

Orcs also feel a bit too "classified" with all the various things that pile on to them, (status type i.e poison, tribe i.e feral, class i.e beastmaster) which sorta overshadows the personality comedy of the first games Orcs. It's still present mind, just not as high quality for every single dude you'll fight as it was.

The story when it's done with the slow wind up is pretty damn good, although Talion seemingly retains and even expands his weakness from the first game of leaping to aid any female characters in a five thousand mile radius regardless of reason and or circumstance.

The post-campaign sequence and Online Conquest are good fun as well, on top of being surprisingly cheater free - only encountered a single orc that seemed obscenely powerful on the way to the captain achievement.

Baranor DLC content is worthwhile, if short. Get that cheap.
Skip Eltariel content. Seriously, they'd have to be paying me something absurd to get me to play that again, I would have ditched it part way in if I didn't want 100%. Only buy that if its a bundle that makes the entire package cheaper than if you skipped it.

Overall probably a low 8 out of 10, down to high 7 if you won't touch online content or post-game.

Play before Phantom Pain for it to make more sense + so you can export save to it and gain a few things, generally cosmetic gear and staff throughout the early game.