The Amazing American Circus
Target Audience: Those Willing to Take the Lows With The Highs in Card RPGs
Summary:
This is a recommendation in essence, but for a specific subset of people.
I’m going to be straight up from the get go here: The Amazing American Circus is one of those games that I want to love up and down, but ended up being the biggest thorn in my side due to what happened during the review period. To say that I faced some of the worst bugs: specifically saved game bugs, in my review career would have been an understatement: I had 8 separate runs break wildly in that period where I could not continue to make progress. While those bugs seem to be fixed now, I have a form of PTSD at this point. Every time I play, I’m waiting for the game to break again. Hell, even the video I made had a major bug in it. There’s a reason I have around 40+ hours of gameplay without actually beating the game, and to say it hung over the experience would be an understatement to say the least.
– Real player with 57.7 hrs in game
This is not a Slay to Spire, this is not a Monster Train. The Amazing American Circus is not a roguelike-roguelite card game, it is more like a card game built around a campaign, with some management sim built around it, in which you need to cover the costs, upgrades etc from the incomes you get during the shows.
If you more curious about the game, and want to check a short, ~20mins long video in which I showing what content you could expect from the game with one circus show (card battle) included, then here is mine:
– Real player with 29.8 hrs in game
aton
Aton is a strategic online 1v1 tower offence game with deck-building elements. Construct a strategy, execute wisely and don’t get overpowered by your enemies mindgames.
Combining the best of two worlds
In aton, the worlds of real time strategy and tower defense collide to form 1 vs. 1 tower offense like it never existed.
Nothing spawns randomly and no senseless wave-grinding: In aton everything is player-spawned.
With a big amount of different buildings, effects and monsters new possibilities, synergies and strategies open up with every new match.
Read More: Best Deckbuilding eSports Games.
Mystic Vale
It’s a great rendition of my favorite card game, and always a fun play due to the nearly-unique card crafting system (I’ve only seen one other game, which both isn’t in video game format and is a product of the same company). It’s fast-paced and the automatic counting of resources is very nice.
That said, there are a few issues (all minor):
EDIT JAN 28: 1 was asking for clarity in cards remaining (counting on-deck or not). It’s apparent enough after checking once or twice and sticks with you; as of this edit, it’s cards under the on-deck
– Real player with 481.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Board Game Games.
I recently downloaded this digital adaptation of the card game Mystic Vale having never played the physical version. I can say I love the game so far, and recommend it to anyone from fans of casual card games to more serious board game geeks. Essentially, It’s a well-balanced deck-building game with a theme of fighting the corruption of a sacred landscape through the cultivation of nature, and in my view is very relaxing, yet mentally stimulating, to play.
Those who have played the card game Dominion or other games of the deck-building genre will recognize the mechanic of purchasing cards from a center tableau, adding them to a deck of initially underwhelming cards, and slowly increasing potential of combos and synergy as the game progresses. However, the mechanic in Mystic Vale of crafting each card by adding components, or “advancements” in in-game terms, to each card’s top, middle, or bottom zones is unlike Dominion or any other game I’ve played. In my opinion, this concept alone sets Mystic Vale apart as an island of true uniqueness in a sea of ripoffs in the board/card game sphere.
– Real player with 81.0 hrs in game
Rise Of The Overlords
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Select an Overlord with unique stats and abilities to represent you in the battlefield
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Add powerful units, spells and equipments to your deck
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Fight your opponents in dynamic battlefields
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Explore dungeons, fight epic bosses, collect treasures, find secret rooms, avoid traps… and much more
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Adapt your play to the battlefield and to your opponent
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Discover a legendary world full of stories to be told
The Rise of the Overlords world is a vast terrain where different races coexist. Some of those races have common purposes and group them under factions. Those factions have evolved and specialized in the art of war using particular techniques that allow them to develop different strategies in the battlefield.
Currently, there are three factions available but there will be more factions who will join the fight in the future. Select the faction that better represent your game play. Do you prefer brute force and close combat? or ranged combat and traps better suits you? or would you go with heavily armored units and healing spells? It’s up to you to create your own strategy to defeat your opponent.
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Enhance your Overlord and units through legendary equipments
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Cast powerful spells to erase your enemies
Soulveyor
Build up your land from scratch and collect souls throughout the world in order to help you become the best duelist there is. As you become stronger, test your strength against the various temples scattered throughout the world. What secrets lie within them? Show the world what it means to be a soulveyor.
Build/Craft
Use your land to grow crops. Build machines to process your products. Use advanced conduit systems to transport your items, energy, fluids, and gasses. Craft more advanced items to help you along the way.
Seal Souls
There are souls scattered across the world. Find them by mining, chopping trees, harvesting, etc. and duel them in order to seal their soul, and possibly obtain one of their scrolls.
Duel
To complete a seal you must duel the soul by using your own deck of scrolls in order to help you! You’ll be transported to a battlefield where your duel will commence! You can also fight alongside your soul-mate, resulting in a 2v2 duel!
Play With Friends
Have as many players join your world as you want. Each player that joins gets their own plot of land to work on! Or take your character over to their world and stay for a while!
Exploration
Every world is completely unique and randomly generated. Explore the secrets of your land, or go visit other worlds and bring back their goods to yours!
Thirsty Heroes
Thirsty Heroes is a dungeon-crawling business sim with turn-based deckbuilding combat.
Discover, Research, & Exploit Dungeons
Send heroes Scouting to find dungeons, use Divination to pinpoint vulnerabilities, then equip heroes to exploit the weaknesses and bring home the loot.
Find & Craft Gear to Build Heroes' Decks
Take control during the crawl to fight through monsters, traps, and chance encounters using your hero’s Deck, built from equipped Gear. Find randomly-generated loot and valuables to upgrade your squad and face tougher enemies to satisfy the King’s demands.
Management Gameplay
Heroes can’t fight if they’re thirsty, so keep their spirits up with conversation and drinks from the bar! Use Hero Gambits to automate combat so you can focus on the big picture.
Plus:
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Cross-platform play for PC and Mobile. Nature calls? Don’t stop the crawls!
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A gripping story featuring a villain inspired by the inane tweets of teenage celebrities.
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Endless play with no level cap or limit to dungeon size.
Case Opener Guns
This is so worth the money, Really fun
– Real player with 4.5 hrs in game
TL;DR: It’s CS:GO with fewer cheaters and a significantly less toxic community.
Long version: This game offers exactly none of the dopamine release associated with case unboxing in games like CSGO, TF2 or Dota2. It also offers none of the (guaranteed) risk, other than its initial cost. The game is made in Unity, and has resolution and sound controls. The sound effects get irritating pretty quickly, but they are easy to mute. That said, the game doesn’t store sound settings on exit so if you’re sufficiently benighted enough to launch it a second time you will have to make whatever changes you want again. EDIT: This appears to be a bug more than a future. Sound settings save on exit sometimes, and other times they don’t.
– Real player with 1.1 hrs in game
Spellsword Cards: Origins
So I read through a few of the other reviews and I can see how some may find it negative. No it is NOT flashy and doesn’t have ‘interesting’ characters, but to be honest, it’s kinda refreshing. I’m an old school gamer and I’ve played Many card games, rpgs, whatever and I have to admit I’m addicted to this for some reason. I’m determined to beat the stupid lich with all my characters if possible. That being said, it’s also VERY frustrating and will P1ss you off many times! The cards are a bit unbalanced, for example I’ve reached the lich with no access to mana or healing cards depending on who I choose. This makes it a bit unfair, as well as not being able to meet the boss with a full health. No matter how hard I try to finish the previous battle with as high health as possible, it just doesn’t cut it. There was one game I used to play a lot, had over 400 hours until some new dev, crappy pants, redid the whole thing and made it vegas like…I truly hope these devs Don’t do that to this game at all! It’s a game unto itself and Yes it Does need work but it can be challenging and fun if you know how to use the cards given to you. I noticed the new game from these makers and I wanted to give it a shot thinking it would be similar to this style, but I think they already headed to the slot machines….
– Real player with 170.1 hrs in game
An interesting take on Card Game / RPG / Roguelike hybrid. I like the mechanic of dumping cards to the discard pile to gain extra action points (earned quite a few 1 turn kill combos that way). I do like the card combinations and various synergies thus far, and I due appreciate the card upgrades system as well.
EDIT: Some previously written issues turned out to be user error, and thus deleted that portion of the commentary above. Other than that, the above aforementioned is exactly the same prior to the deleted, and erroneous (on my part again, sigh) critique.
– Real player with 26.8 hrs in game
Pick, shoot, repeat!
It is a gun-building game, where the goal is to survival as long as you can to unlocks new maps. The mechanic is:
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PICK your upgrades.
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SHOOT to survive.
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REPEAT the process.
35 upgrades
12 levels
Endless combinations, but which one would help you survive the longest?
Spellsword Cards: Demontide
It’s not finished so maybe this review is not fair but it’s not in early access.
I finished only the 1st chapter because the 2nd is not done.
Pros:
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creative monsters, unqiue enemies
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long campaign (example: longer than the Northmark’s campaign)
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autonavigation in quest menu
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some art is nice
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gauntlet / puzzles minigames
Cons:
- the campaign is not polished
I couldn’t finish the 1rst chapter when my hero was a warrior because I couldn’t defeat two monsters (stirred up & in flight),
and I don’t like the slow grind (job board)
– Real player with 22.3 hrs in game
Sometimes I think what’s happening with Steam and why there are so many negatives. One reviewer says that ‘it needs a pass over with someone who understands card games’. Really, mate? Dev has just designed the whole card system and is good at it. Dev is often active and updates the game, but it seems that you want to push him away.
The game is good, it has a really interesting character development, cool story and well-designed battles in which you have to tune your deck. It is a deep system, not crossing the line of ‘read the fine print’, check the guide here to see it yourself:
– Real player with 12.0 hrs in game