You can have swathes of allies, performing attacks every turn, and barely have to do anything yourself. You can unleash ridiculous damage and then multiply it for kicks. And as with the best deckbuilders, it’s possible to create decks that barely let the opponent have a go. There is a switching mechanic that makes cards more powerful dependent on where your character is positioned. But on the other hand, we wonder whether Roguebook would have been too unfamiliar, too befuddling, if combat also upturned the cart.Īnd it’s not as if the combat is tame. On one hand, it’s a shame to find the combat so rote: we’d have loved to see Richard Garfield off the leash, looking to disrupt things as much as he has done with the exploration and deck upgrading. Squint and you could be playing Slay the Spire, as it’s heroes on the left, enemies on the right, and turns are taken to do attacks or perform blocks in an effort to preserve your life points while enemies lose theirs. The single-player, roguelike framework allows you to be completely imbalanced, and Richard Garfield and Abkram Entertainment have thoroughly gone to town with how overpowered you can become.Ĭombat is a little more familiar, and we suspect it might be too familiar for some. But with ‘This card’s cost is reduced to 0’ and ‘Draw this card in your opening hand’ gems, we were able to make it a turn-one nuclear bomb. At one point, we gained a 12-cost ally, which is near-impossible to play in normal combat. It’s a tinkerer’s dream, and we found ourselves laughing maniacally as we applied ridiculously overblow benefits. But you apply them to the card you want, bolting them on and multiplying or even completely changing the mechanics. These gems have very specific benefits, like doubling damage, or adding a ‘Draw a card’ tag. But the second nugget of genius comes in the form of gems. There are cards to buy too, as you would expect. There are artefacts, which can be socketed in either of your heroes, and they do much the same as Slay the Spire’s relics. Find gold and you can buy things in a shop – always there, never denied by bad luck – which offers truly transformative benefits. Want to explore the entire map? It’s going to be challenging, but it can be done: it’s a highwire act of finding and using the paint and ink in an optimal manner.Īt some point we’re going to have to review the combat, but we can’t but help getting excited about the exploration, because it is so indelibly tied to the quality of your deck. Want to optimise your deck before you head in? Sure, you can do that too, and exploration becomes a game of risk-reward, as you balance the risk of battle versus the paint pots they give you. Want to race through? Sure you can: beeline to the castle, taking in a couple of elite enemies who give the best rewards. It’s sensational and works regardless of how you want to approach it. It rips up the Slay the Spire template of having a chain of nodes with miniscule choice between paths, and offers up something that could have been a game unto itself. Less powerful but similar are ink pots, which let you reveal individual hexes or a few in a line. By painting them, you reveal what was beneath them, from enemies to treasures to events to gold and much, much more besides. You carry paintbrushes, and you can stand in an area, press Y, and ‘paint’ all of the hexagons around you. It’s a fog of war, effectively, and that fog is lifted in the most surprising way. You can travel over the revealed hexagons – in fact, Breath of the Wild-style, you could head right to the castle from the start and have a pop if you fancy it, but much like Nintendo’s game, that would be suicide. They represent the world, and they come in two states: revealed and unrevealed. This is a world of hexagons, sprawling out as far as you can see, like an old ‘80s war board game. Once you hop out of your safe haven and into the world of Roguebook, you’d be forgiven for being completely daunted. So far, so familiar, but it doesn’t take long for the cogs of innovation to start whirring. With them chosen, you set off on a rogue-like journey to see how far you can get. That’s not too unusual: games like Monster Train and The Amazing American Circus have dabbled in multiple characters, each bringing their own cards to the deck. Introductions to Roguebook are familiar: choose your character, and then choose a second as your sidekick. Unlike other games in the genre, there’s not much demonic grimness here.Īnd as you would expect from Richard Garfield, much stays the same, but an awful lot changes. Slovenly kings throw out animated dinner plates to attack cat-rats climb over a siege engine in an attempt to lob fireballs. Enemies are drawn from an endlessly creative mind, sometimes grotesque, but mostly Jim-Henson-like in their overblown character. Everything blooms with a bioluminescent glow, from the pyrotechnic attacks to the lush backgrounds. That Faeria gorgeousness is here in spades.
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