Recent reviews by Kira

2024 GOTY. Nothing has exceeded it. Nothing probably will.

Game of the Year 2023. No contest. No argument. There is nothing better.

Create an 8 hour portal experience and fill 70% of it with the worst, most frustrating, boring bits of portal and then you have Portal Revolution

Despite almost 5 years this game is still nowhere close to being ready for prime time.

A great game absolutely ruined by mistaking bad game design with "hardcore difficulty"

I mean just look at that playtime. Need I say more?

It is deeply sad that this game fails to be what it could have been, what it should be.

Between the far too tightly tuned time mechanics, massive RNG dependence, the game also fails miserably on the UI front, missing the kinds of quality of life features a game of this caliber should have.

The shop should allow you to sort ingredients, the options you do have for sorting in the potion making menu should be greater, there should be some mechanic to save potion recipes. Ultimately it becomes impossible to keep track of everything without it being a massive chore. Every little interaction seems to take too long or should't be there at all(switching between the floors of your shop, or switching between cauldrons for example). These are just a few of the terrible UI/QOL failures.

Every single mechanic plays off each other in such a way that you quickly find yourself with no options. This costs gold, that costs ingredients, this costs potions. Everything requires such careful and deliberate planning days in advance or your're screwed. And once you're screwed it's a game over. Reload back and try again.

Sadly the actual card battle game play itself also misses the mark and once again feeds back into the impossible interconnectivity presented by the game. If you don't block well enough, you accumulate stress. If you accumulate stress you start drawing "curses". If your hand is full of curses you can't achieve good results in your haggling and you accumulate more stress. How do you deal with stress? Spending a unfathomable amount of your preciously limited time, putting you even further behind in all your goals.

They missed the mark on balancing the cult management and the rougelight dungeon crawling. Neither aspect is good enough on it's own to be a compelling game. Together they makes the perfect mindless experience. Sadly you get to the end game of cult management far before the dungeon crawling and that end game has no purpose. It does not help you in the dungeon.

Ultimately I am left feeling empty and incomplete for the time I spent on this.,

Yugioh is a terrible card game for terrible people. If you haven't got a PHD in Yugioh deck archetypes and card interactions then do not bother with this.

While they stuff Gems down your throat at first they have a cap on gems and any you earn above that shortly expire so you can't just stockpile. This is unforgivable game design. Completely expected from a company like Konami. Once you have all of those early gems good luck getting enough for anything. The rates seem very low for the long term.

Also unforgivable is that you get nothing for surrendering no matter how long your game went. With turns that can last 10+ min as your opponent endlessly masturbates themselves with card after card and effect after effect that pass by too quickly to ever read or understand matches that only last 1-4 turns can take over 30 min and you probably lost at the draw. But if you want your meager consolation prize you must wait.

There are "secret" boosters which have some arcane unlock system yet appear to only unlock for 24 hours? Like what were they thinking with that?



The good:
They have a disenchant system. Useful for turning the useless cards you acquire(and are forced to since you can just save gems until you know what you actually want) into better cards. It's at a rate of 3 to 1 which is not too bad. You also get crafting currency in other ways(mainly the battle pass).

The deck builder is close to perfect, only missing some UI element telling you how much crafting mats you need to finish a deck as well as a craft all needed button.

The game works. Despite the thousands upon thousands of cards and untold numbers of interactions the game handles it all which really makes you wonder why WotC has dropped the ball so hard on magic arena.

Conclusion:

If you play yugioh this is great for you.

If you do not play yugioh, this is not the way to get into it. There is no way to get into it. Just don't. Everything you have heard is true and worse.

The game feels too unpolished to recommend. It looks pretty but is mechanically rough.