Recent reviews by Valex

First off, make sure to get this game installed, logged in, account made, and logged in fully with that account, within the next few weeks before the game gets pulled from Steam, if you want to be sure of being able to keep it after that point.


That said, this game's an absolute trainwreck and I'm legit not sure how it wasn't pulled sooner. Character appeal alone?

The account creation system (external, browser) is super glitched, and it took me several days of trying to make an account before it didn't prematurely time out during the process. The game then loads a "do you want to edit settings before continuing", which is great, because the game's been blaring loud, poor quality music at me. But then the load-up cutscenes ignore my volume settings. Great.. then the tutorial keeps janking, where it wants me to go to the next part of the tutorial before continuing with anything else, but it does so by loading through the main menu first, before the next tutorial step, and it keeps hanging up in the menu. Also great.

The insane amount of technical issues aside, the game's main problem is just that it's.. absolutely terrible to play. Worst smash clone I've ever seen by far. The gameplay's clunky to an absolutely insane level, the hitboxes erratic to work around, the control scheme seems to have been made by someone unfamiliar with games altogether, nevermind arena brawlers, and the whole thing's just.. awful. Just thoroughly, abysmally awful.

Like, gods, the roster is amazing, but is that where 100% of the development effort went to? Well, other than what went into live-service gimmicks, which do seem quite extensively developed? (Because of course they are..) Because everything else is absurdly trashy. This is less game with live service gimmicks, and more live service with fanservice with some shallow mimicry of gameplay tossed in to tie it together.

Again, not sure how it lasted as long as it did, considering. Yech.

A rather remarkable piece of rubbish. Despite putting in the effort to give the game a strong foundation, it's amazing how unfinished and underwhelming the developer left this game.


Foremost, the game doesn't attempt to do anything different from the civilization games (perhaps most notably, Civ V) that it mimicks. The card game mechanics are well implemented but barely change anything, and no other part of the game attempts to be anything past Civ. This, of course, means the game can't help but being compared directly to Civ, without any wiggle room for being considered from any other perspectives.

Second, the game only offers a victory point+game length based win condition, but it's set to an extremely low cap (30 rounds or roughly equivalent VPs), it's poorly balanced, it doesn't fit the gameplay, and it feels like an artifical way of cutting the game short (even moreso than usual for a VP mode). It basically ruins the game outright. You can find countless comments requesting the developer introduce a more properly implemented game mode from years back, but it appears the developer is content to leave the game half-finished, with an artificially tacked-on, poorly implemented, forced win condition.

Third, the game has a ridiculous amount of lingering polish issues. Take in the tutorial, where the game gave me an introduction on "scouts can gather resources from the tile they're on", but then didn't let me move the scout or check the tile for more info, instead forcing me to gather the resources. Not a big deal, right? Just a tutorial? Except, that inability to check the tile for more info seems to stick into the actual game as well, in that there doesn't seem to be a way to check a tile for resources if a unit is on it.
Similarly, if you've got more than one unit- or even just one unit in some cases- on a tile, good luck targeting it with effects- the game gets super jank about it, requiring multiple tries to apply a unit promotion or sometimes simply not working at all. Tooltips take forever to load up, even important ones like resources, so you're better off just leaving the resource overlay on all the time. Though even that doesn't convey info as well as it should, namely in not always displaying info on added resources.
There's maybe three dozen of these issues that I encountered just in the tutorial and single partially played skirmish match after, ranging from UI issues to technical issues to display issues to poorly implemented functionalities. None of the issues are particularly huge (other than the weirdly fast unit strength escalation, which comes across as a rather confusing balance issue), but the sheer quantity makes the game a bit exhausting to play, and when you consider that the game is completely uninteresting in terms of originality and actively sabotages its ability to be played as the unoriginal, casual civ clone it intends to be... that's enough. There's just no reason to play a game that was clearly abandoned by its developer in an unfinished state.



As with so many games on Steam, this game could have easily been recommendable (though perhaps not at the full $20 retail it lists at, given its underwhelming amount of features/uniqueness) with just a bare minimum of additional effort. As is? Honestly plays more like a free game than anything else. As someone who's always hard up for 4X/sim games (and card games, though thankfully we're flush with those post-Slay-the-Spire-success) I don't have the highest demands on games of the genre, for scratching my itch.. but this game just doesn't feel playable.

Like, to my mind, Civ V was one of the weakest entries in the series, so if I'm going to have to play a dumbed-down, unpolished, somewhat user-unfriendly version of that, I'd rather just go back to playing Civ VI, which was (from my perspective, at least) basically just a more polished version of V. Nevermind all the other, better Civ clones out there, or the various 4X or 4X-adjacent games out there with more compellingly original gameplay (eg, Terraformers). Again, the card mechanics here don't really change or add much. They're a fun gimmick to a card game buff like me, but not one that in any way changes anything as far as the Civ mechanics the game imitates.

Other than trying to speed up Civ games- forceably, in the case of the terrible win condition setup- there's just nothing this game attempts to offer, that you can't experience to completion within the game's short tutorial. The game does appear to have a demo listed on Steam so, yeah, just go play that instead and then give up on this and go play a game where the developer cared enough to reasonably finish development or invest into the gameplay design.

And, who knows, maybe this rushed, superficial approach to Civ is exactly what you, reader, have been looking for in a game, jank aside, and the demo'll help you figure that out. But for a typical 4X fan? I just don't see it. Like, why go for a janky, incomplete Civ-lite when you can go for so many better things? Especially now, given how Civ VII has just released as I write this?


Dev, come on. At minimum, put in the extra month or two of solo development this game needs as far as basic polish and addition of core features (eg, proper selection of win conditions). Then, definitely consider adding in some more originality or customization options (eg, as it relates to map setup, map selection, available civs/leaders) after that.

Or, if originality's too difficult, given the game's overly strong (even plagiaristic level of) imitation of Civ, then at least mimic Civ's originality better- like, maybe add in barbarians or similar Civ design staples? Yeah, it doesn't fit into the "quick gameplay" fixation your game seems to have, but that's the joy of game customization options: They can be set up to cater to the unique tastes of any given player.


At the moment, it feels less like you've made a game for market release, and more like you've made one for your own personal tastes, got bored after playing it enough, and then decided "well, that's good enough" and left the bugs/UI issues unfixed simply because it was a game you personally were not playing anymore.

Like, it's hugely frustrating seeing a game this close to being feature-complete, being left in a clearly abandoned state. Especially when it's a game that money has been spent on..




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(As a counterpoint, I'd like to note that much of what other negative reviews have stated about the deck design feeling restrictive on gameplay seems to be tied to them having missed key elements in the tutorial: Namely that it's key to utilize gold to draw additional cards in a turn, and to "burn" [remove from deck in exchange for resources] cards from your deck when the cards are no longer needed.
I don't feel the deckbuilding really offers anything truly unique to the game or affects the Civ-like gameplay in any way that matters, but it doesn't seem to be poorly implemented either. The lack of originality past that and lack of polish and lack of feature completion are the real issues in the game, *not* the implementation of the game's core conceit, which is reasonably well done.)

The gameplay itself is good and recommendable. There's some polish issues to be addressed, especially when it comes to poorly explained elements, badly structured English, and UI shortcomings, but the gameplay itself is good enough to readily make this a "Recommended" despite those issues.

Or it would be, if the game wasn't a complete disaster of terrible optimization, game bugs, and game crashes. Those are all bad enough to make it a Not Recommended- except, thankfully, the game does have auto-saving. Thus far I haven't had any bugs persist through a relaunch and game load, and several even fix just by going into the menu and back into the save, so the existence of auto-saving marginalizes the stresses of the game to the point where it's readily back up to being "Recommended". I do have concern over what'd happen if a save file does ever end up retaining a game-breaking issue, so I can't guarantee the game won't ever lose you hours or tens of hours of effort, but thus far none of the stresses have been persistent enough to fully undermine the recommendability of the game.

As far as the gameplay itself, it's pretty much what you'd expect based on the previews. Place rooms, manage students. While woefully incomplete for any specific (eg, event result, confusing card text) clarifications, there's still enough fan information online to help work through general gameplay questions or strategies. With that as a supplement, the gameplay's pretty smooth and relaxing and enjoyable, creating a good "just a bit more" vibe.

Wow. What hot steaming garbage. The start of each round is a complete disaster of poor pacing and hectic management of UI that's insufficient for the task, and then there's the most monotonous, grindy, repetitive, dull, poorly balanced ****show of a game once you get past that.

Like, if the start of each game is you struggling not to lose because the game is badly developed in terms of balance and polish, then the game past that point is you struggling not to lose out of sheer, self-sabotaging boredom, as you try to squeeze the exact same actions into very narrow time-windows over and over again against otherwise completely non-challenging gameplay.

Also, the events are more random than traditional choose-your-own-adventure results, they legitimately just detract from the game rather than adding anything to it.

There coulda been a good game here, but it's left purely to concept. The actual gameplay is abysmal.



At a minimum, the game should have had a game speed slider in the menu- given that each second on the timer is only taking a half-second to actually process, it's clear the game isn't handling timing properly, so it'd have been nice if a game so reliant on timing would have had some sort of measure for working around the game's apparent lack of polish. Adding that slider wouldn't make the game *fun*, but at least it'd help with the hectic imbalancing the game has, especially at the start of the game. Then again, something that'd make that sleep-inducingly draggy later game even slower? Ew.

Of course, if you could edit it more freely, you could slow the start of the game and speed the latter part of the game! ..or maybe the actual developer could actually do the job they themself chose to take up, and implement proper speed balancing themself- wouldn't that be novel.


Really, there's no part of a good game here, beyond the concept. If this is what this developer believes a feature-complete game release is, then I really would hope that they'd limit themself only to releasing this game and no others. Moreover, at least then we could have assumed something had happened to them that had prevented the full proper release of this game.

Because, really, this game is just another trashy half-developed, abandoned Steam release that fails to meet even the minimum expectations of the older flash games it's imitative of. Unfortunately, it seems they have indeed had other releases. I guess the biggest surprise is that the developer hasn't tried spamming keys for the game for trading cards yet. Definitely seems to be what they were aiming toward.

Edit, Feb 2025: Game is apparently NOT abandoned, given a developer post on January 30th. That said, there've been no updates since early December, despite everything still being in a hot-mess, unfinished, unfun state, and they haven't even released any new promo codes or social updates until the aforementioned post.
Frankly, it'd be bad enough releasing a non-live-service game in this state and leaving it sitting like that for so long (seriously, at the very least, fix the absurd load periods between any action in the menus) but the developers just don't seem to at all be up for handling the demands of a live-service game. Given how demanding pvp online card game consumer bases can be, and the current lack of support or lack of indication of future support for single player, there's just no sign this game will ever be able to properly appeal to any consumer base it may have. Also, the devs keep brushing off negative feedback, rather than addressing it, which is.. very much also not a good sign things will ever improve.

Original review:
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Game's rather unpolished, in a "needs Early Access labeling, even as a F2P game" way.


In fact, even before considering polish, if we simply go off available content, the game'd be hard-pressed to hold above water even as an EA labeled title- three repeatable free PvE match-ups and a single real-world-money-only PvE content purchase, and similarly sparse PvP offerings make for a monotonously grindy (and bafflingly uninviting experience).

Please consider doing things like reworking card phrasing, rearranging the menu UI (especially the whole "promo code activation in the mailbox", noone is going to figure that out naturally), add tooltips to things (No, really. Basically every part of the game desperately needs tooltips, from menu elements to store purchase to in-match mechanic sections), and add standard card game QoL/convenience features such as (no timer in single player matches) or (unit activation reminder on turn end).

Lotta bugs to deal with as well- like one where an unselected monkey activates for an attack when you had in fact selected/drug the attack marker from a different adjacent one (this does only seem to happen between the bottom two placement slots, and only infrequently, but it's still a good example of the overall unpolished vibe the game has). Also, show active target indicators for monkeys when placing the attack marker over enemies, as the monkeys can look too similar in some cases (eg, standard dart monkey and triple dart monkey) to know what they can target without hovering to confirm what monkey it is, so you end up wasting targeting if you mistake what kind of "tower" you've selected. (And it's sort of important to be able to make quick and accurate decisions when playing with a turn timer, after all.)


But, I mean, even after that... really, the game does a suprisingly good job of converting Bloons to card game format, the problem is where the game extends into general card game formatting and.. there's just not been enough consideration given to making the game appealing, balanced, or fit to standard expectations in that regard. Like, the AI is terrible, which isn't atypical for multiplayer-centric TCG games, but really hurts for a game that is clearly going to rely heavily on its single player as a foundation (despite the bizarrely lacking free/freemium options and the bizarrely overpriced paid options the game has at present).

It's like someone saw images of a CCG/TCG card game and decided to adapt this to match, without having ever actually played a game in the genre themselves. Again, surprisingly good job, regardless of circumstances, but there's a weird disconnect compared to any other card game released within the past decade or so. Add in how underdeveloped everything feels and.. yeah. Not one that's going to be recommendable any time soon, in any case.


And, good grief dev, optimize the game. The actual matches are usually fine, but every single click in the game menu does not need to lead to a short loading screen. That's just.. weird.

Well, the game's not terrible- this'd be a neutral review upped to positive for the sake of generosity if the game was marked as EA AND clearly promised massive upcoming content additions but, yeah. Between the lacking content and the lacking polish, it's not really a fit-for-launch title yet- nor will it be for any time remotely soon, given the substantial overhauls and additions it needs.


Props to the audio designer, though- the game's music is surprisingly well-done, and with a decent variety.

TL;DR: Game launcher is super broken with several issues (and the developer is well aware of it but not willing to fix it, with one major issue being introduced only as recently as 2023) and going off internet discussions your game has a seemingly fairly high statistical chance of not being playable. If purchasing through Steam, definitely test it before the refund period is over. ..likewise, probably best not to buy it elsewhere, if possible.

Do also note that Windows 10 doesn't seem to be supported for the game, in favor of Windows 11. The developers note specific versions of Win 10 as having issues, but in practice, based on further comments and context, they don't seem to support any version of Win 10 at present. So be especially wary of potential issues if you're not using Win 11 to play the game.


- - -

I've had plenty of games over the years that haven't run (almost always due to Denuvo or another major, infamously jank DRM/anti-cheat software, like RedShell). And I've had games that were literally unplayably buggy.

I've never seen a game like this where the developers have openly and, due to excessive instances of the issue, in extreme quantity openly acknowledged the Arkham Knight port level of technical issues while simultaneously noting their complete lack of intent to resolve the issues in any way. In fact, going off various threads, a large portion of the issues were introduced by the developer back in 2023, and could simply have been reversed following.

Ultimately, the game plays out as a crash simulator, with every action breaking the game during the initial launcher phase, most often just by simply not launching the game and then leaving the launcher and anti-cheat processes idle in task manager, but sometimes in utterly ridiculous ways, with multiple crash sequences and error report prompts that themselves crash when interacted with.

Honestly, it's a marvelous display of willful developer incompetence- again, based on their own admissions on the nature of the issue and their own decisions not to ensure their game is playable or that introduced technical issues are resolved. They have admittedly gone so far as to add a "launcher workaround" in the Steam Beta branch to try and bypass some small amount of these issues, a rather incredible acknowledgement of both the issues and their unwillingness to directly address them. Yet, again, that workaround seems to only work for a small minority of issues/users.

The list of things to check and run through is exhaustive, due to the flagrantly long list of issues the game has and the dedicated attempts users have made to work around them (thereby really giving a Bethesda modding community vibe there, in the developers expecting the consumers to do their jobs for them) and yet, based on the responses in the many threads on the topic, the full list of fixes still leave plenty of game owners unable to play their game (with that being the case for me, as well).

Let's not even get into the fact that one of the recommended fixes was "implement exceptions for AntiCheat into your windows firewall and if that doesn't work disable firewall" which is, uhm. No, while other firewalls are a bit more open, Windows Defender is something a developer very much needs to work around. If you're not going to implement your AntiCheat properly (nevermind using an infamously troubled brand of such), then that's on you and you alone.

Like, good grief. FatShark, you are an EMBARRASSMENT to game development and company responsibility to consumers. If this is how you're going to approach things then, despite how starved for L4D-likes we are, it's still better that your company doesn't exist in the industry. You're doing far more harm than good, and with the same sort of insincere disregard that Forgotten Empires exhibited when they responded to reports that Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition had a bug- I believe specifically related to modding- that could lead to complete hard-drive wiping, with what was essentially "Oh, yeah. We're aware of that.", full stop. Even admitting the error was a gross incompetence on their part that shouldn't have happened (they had set targeting to C:\ in a place where it made no sense to do so), yet still not being apologetic about it.

Like, sure, you've been a bit more "Oops, sorry." in your replies in discussions and less outright toxic (nevermind automatically winning by comparison for, y'know, NOT wiping harddrives), but come on. If your game has that many issues, and you're not willing to deal with them, then you should put a warning on your store page. Anything short of that is, rather obviously, scammy behavior. Like, it's nice that Vermintide 2 improved on the gameplay issues of the first game to a degree that exceeded expectations but, I mean, what does it matter if we can't even load the game? Cart before the horse and all that.

(@Developer: To be clear, I'm not using any of the affected Windows 10 editions you inexplicably don't provide service for [already awkward- again, you should note that on the store page, it's so scammy otherwise], and I don't seem to fall under any other of the many premises you've mentioned for how you've left your game broken. Maybe, I dunno, outsource your launcher development for future games? It's rather clearly not your company's forte.)

Game never gets mechanically interesting or involving in any way, is thoroughly superficial even within its genre, is terribly balanced start to finish, is absolutely brimming with bugs, and apparently can bug into an unplayable state by the game's end-game (ie, preventing prestiges).

Not that you'd want to prestige in this game because, gosh, there is nothing good about it. They took a passing concept and immediately turned around to make it into a game without any actual thought as to how they wanted to form that concept into a workable game framework, grabbed a passable artist, and then forgot about doing any actual designwork or post-development.

It's very much just a shallow concept held together with lazily written, barebones, slapped-together code and some artwork, with no actual game design hold it together. It's a thoroughly awful mess I wouldn't recommend to anyone under any circumstance. Seriously, effort put into the artwork is a thousand times that of the effort put into game design and programming, and honestly, the art isn't exactly memorable or complex.

Out of the dozens and dozens of idle games I've played over the years, this is easily one of the worst developed I've come across to date (by offhand recollection, being surpassed only by the thoroughly insipid Idle Monkeylogy and by the very most barebones numbers-go-up [and nothing else happens] offerings- but hey, at least none of those games had bugs to worry about. Even if that was mostly just for not having anything TO bug. :P).

Well, who knows, maybe prestiging can salvage the game, despite its dull gameplay, lack of any kind of depth, and teeeerrible game balance. But how would I know, when the game's biggest, best-developed feature is bugs?

At least the fact of being an idle game helps avoid any real mechanical frustrations, but there's never any payoff for playing, and what the game does offer is really unsatisfying in just about every way.

Effectively, it's the old free-to-play Monster's Den flash games, but with tactical dungeon exploration swapped out for Slay the Spire style map progression and gimmicks. It's an incredibly underwhelming, unpolished, monotonous, imbalanced, half-hearted, barebones, lazily made offering.

The biggest issue of the game is the simple fact that- unlike more notable Slay the Spire inspired games like Monster Train- it doesn't try anything unique or interesting to distinguish it from its inspirations.

Beyond that, the constant polish issues are a massive downfall for the game. Rather than lose due to skill, mistakes in decisions, or RNG, you're simply going to lose due to game sabotage, every time. The gameplay without sabotage is repetitive and tedious within each run, across each run, but can at least be viewed as a relaxing monotony, similar to JRPG XP grinding.

However, due to constant poorly explained, misleadingly phrased elements in the game, you can shoot yourself in the foot all too easily by being misled as to how an interaction or piece of equipment is intended to function. Game balance issues mean you have to favor specific characters and setups, especially given the extremely minimal difference in build possibilities that each run allows.

Progression has three different "styles" of opponents each section of map, but the game does its best to not explain how each area actually differs, making it a completely ignorable consideration unless you start actively doing poorly against certain opponents.

And that's about the only distinctive element of the game, failed implementation as it may be, as everything else is generic Monster's Den (if you haven't played that, you can lightly consider it as similar to Darkest Dungeon or Idle Champions, at least in the sense of being a game based in building up a trait-synergistic party to a beneficial placement configuration) style grid party combat and equipment use, combined with basic slay the spire events, merchants, etc concepts.

It's a game that is deeply unpolished, profoundly lacking in creativity, that interrupts its tedium only with frustration. While it's technically not a bad time-killer for those who are diehard about the genre and desperate for any kind of fix (though, honestly, you're probably better off checking for fresh mods for Slay the Spire instead), it's hard considering it a game worth any money (if only by the precedent of nearly identical games having been free, but also by way of the fact that it's hard to justify paying a developer who did the literal bare minimum in every facet of the game).

Add in the fact that there's now countless deckbuilding roguelikes out there, as well as several party-based roguelike dungeon crawlers, of which a certain percentage are very, very good, and to which more offerings are coming out in very regular releases... look, if you're desperate, pick it up for cheap, otherwise you're best waiting to try and get it for free. There's just no justification for paying money for this game, when you could easily get something much better, from a developer who simply cared more about what they were developing, for the same money.

Again, it's not even that it's a bad framework, or even that you can't have a passably okay experience for a few runs of the game- it's that the developer neither polished any aspect or the game, nor offered anything suitably unique to distinguish the game, nor offered anything to really set consecutive runs apart (beyond occasionally introducing a bit more equipment into the game's equipment drop pool).

So you have neither a relaxing, comfortable experience, nor an engaging, unique experience, nor any clear compulsion to replay the game. And if you have none of those, why would you go out of your way to play this game, no matter how tried-and-true its foundations may be, if there are so many other similar, more compelling offerings out there?

If the developer took the time to just fix one of these three issues, it'd be an okay, albeit still fairly generic game. As-is, it's just.. mildly annoying and otherwise forgettable.

Been trying to get this janky mess to work for years now, over countless attempts, and while updates have repeatedly changed what exactly causes the game to break in the loading process, the game still remains unplayable. Can't imagine the actual game would run any better, even if you managed to get into it.

All things considered, probably safe to assume this is yet another android game with a lazy, abandoned PC port, that you're better off trying to play with the supported mobile version instead. Or, y'know, you could just wait for Path of Exile 2 or play Grim Dawn or V Rising or something.

Don't be like me- don't give in to stubborn curiosity and waste your time trying to get a game with fairly mediocre reviews to run when there are so many better, far more recommendable options from the genre out there to play instead.

Obviously, multiplayer isn't a real consideration for this game anymore. And only one extremely short campaign exists. So while some challenge and drafting options are available, there's not much to offer here.

What there is, isn't very fun, either. Rather, it's extremely tedious, weakly polished, and clumsily put together. I can see fairly clearly why this game ended up failing. Even for a free offering, there's just nothing to recommend the game, especially in a landscape full of better single player card game offerings.

Sure, one could argue for the trading card format, but other than drafting, there's not actually anything available here as far as unlocks or deck utilization that really play into the strengths of a CCG/TCG format. Nevermind that, obviously, any multiplayer trading elements aren't a consideration anymore as well.

Fundamentally, you're getting a poorly presented single player card game done in a generic lane TCG style with limited features and no compelling reasons to play it. Literally the only recommendable point is that it's free, and, well.. there's still probably better things you could be doing with your time.

Mind, it's not BAD, in any clearly detractive way, it's just never fun, it's full of issues, and it's lacking in content or appeal. In short, it's not GOOD, even in a single pinpointable aspect, and that's what ends up killing this game.