Quantum Protocol
PROS
-
Game is incredibly cheap for the sheer amount of entertainment it offers.
-
The gameplay is completely unique and will feel both fresh and familiar if you’ve played YGO or other TCGs.
-
Everything from visuals to music to UI hit a very good standard that lets it blend in the background as you play.
-
The game still receives frequent update with a developer very receptive to feedback.
CONS
-
Learning an entirely new set of skills can feel a little arduous at the start.
-
The ‘fail until you succeed’ logic surrounding the game can make things feel a tad hopeless.
– Real player with 76.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Anime Games.
Full Disclosure: I received a copy of the game to playtest during development. You can even fine me in the credits as “SaruRoku”!
Quantum Protocol is first and foremost, a Cardgame, with a story that’s presented in a visual novel style.
The visual novel elements do string along a fun, but mostly lighthearted story, without any of the “choices” that would make a visual novel game, but they do provide levity and a change of pace after most stages, as well as giving you some insight to the various characters who’s decks each follow their own themes.
– Real player with 71.2 hrs in game
Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense
First of all this game is a pretty unique mix, it has some flaws yes, but its strengths definitely outweighs them.
The card game, while unusual for such a game is actually really good. Compared to the standart rpg fights in similar games where you have 3 or 4 different spells or attacks and you just have to see which type of elemental damage does the most harm and spam that and throw in a heal or stun from time to time, the card battles feel more challenging. On the highest difficulty level you actually have to think about which cards suit in which situation. Also it kinda suits the theme. While in fantasy settings I prefer the party of heroes wandering around fighting its battles itself, here it feels more like you are the base commander managing troops and resources of your colony and thinking strategically.
– Real player with 33.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Nudity Games.
One of the worst Winter Wolves' games out of the ones I have played. It has very few redeeming qualities and while I usually like WW games despite their flaws, I had a hard time enjoying this one.
Characters
Unfortunately, the characters were very weak in this game. WW can create some interesting characters and I know this, but in this case, I think they missed the opportunity to do so. The good news is that there are many characters you can choose to romance (with the free DLC). The bad news is that the characters felt shallow and unrealistic. I know you don’t play these games for their realism, but one would expect them to at least have some common sense. Instead it seemed like they were doing the most irrational things. For example at some point
! the rebel guy implied that he has assassinated people. Why would he admit that in front of people who are military officers? It makes no sense.
– Real player with 18.4 hrs in game
In Her Eyes
Follow our curator for similar games
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35180752-3-point-play/
Fantasy AVG + artistic characters and music + deckbuilding integrated = Summoned by a girl from another world to prevent an assassination that will happen in 30 days. AVG is a VN with a lot of choices.
– Real player with 2.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Deckbuilding Casual Games.
Written for 1561’s Thoughts - Honest reviews, for busy people.
In Her Eyes is a visual novel / card game with interesting gameplay but a not-so-great translation. It’s understandable, but at times the dialogue becomes rather clunky. The rhythm aspect is fun. 6/10
https://onefivesixone.com/reviews/in-her-eyes-2020-review/
– Real player with 2.2 hrs in game
Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown
A deckbuilder game with a novel theme and a twist in mechanics because it has a visual novel built around it, with its own set of problems and goals. It’s designed to be replayed, with the goal of earning permanent starting cards after winning the overall game, so it gets a little different every time. The plot is simple, but that’s fine because the point of this game is the cards.
I thought the little details in the story were charming. “Panda” really captures the essence of a streamer, and it makes dealing with disappointed parents feel more lighthearted when they’re pandas. It’s a game that’s not trying to be serious so you can focus on the cards and I appreciate that.
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
I want to enjoy this game, I really do, and I understand a lot of the references and tropes in it are geared towards jaded streamers who agree with the fact that there really isn’t a guide to go about streaming successfully. That being said however, I want something of a guide, a meter, something more than viewers to tell me I’m successfully streaming. I’ve tinkered with the length of streams, I’ve tried to be conservative, tried to be nice and run the nontoxic suite, I’ve tried to be combative and run the ego trip end the stream as quick as possible, I’ve tried to go full immunity and keep my chat from hitting me, I’ve let chat beat up on me to rest up next week, doesn’t seem to matter, I don’t see any difference in my stream results. Maybe it picks up when you get your viewership set, either way I don’t know if I have time to keep playing to try to find it, I don’t even know if this is something I will revisit down the line. If you play the demo for this know that you’re just going to get more of the same, it never seems to pick up, never gets fully explained mechanically. Dunno if there’s more to do with this, if the devs are going to keep making changes, but I’m not happy with it at this point.
– Real player with 23.8 hrs in game
Monster Monpiece
Monster Monpiece is a highly flawed card game that still manages to be enjoyable.
The core gameplay is pretty solid. You get 3 Mana every turn, and you can use this Mana to play one of the cards in your hand (all creature cards) each round, placing it onto a small board. The goal of each battle is to get your monster girls across the board and into the enemy HQ, which will cause the unit to be lost but the enemy to take one point of damage. Typically, three points of damage will defeat your opponent. The enemy AI is extremely stupid and quite predictable, so the game usually compensates for that by giving it superior cards.
– Real player with 82.7 hrs in game
Monster Monpiece, or as I’ve come to call it, maybe another month’ll do it because this game can’t be played all at once without losing your sanity. That’s a bit of a mouthful though, so we’ll shorten it to “unless you really like card games and monster girls, you can skip this one.”
Alright, that wasn’t much better, but my point is this game drags on for way too long for how little depth there is to it. After the first few battles you have basically mastered the game, from there the only thing that changes is getting new cards that do new things that the old cards might not have done, or they do better, or etc etc card game mechanics until you realize two things. Nothing matters but the main stat which is used to summon a card, and that skipping the first few turns has 0 downside and lets you stack your hand to summon whatever you want anyway. Unfortunate first hand draw, didn’t get a 3 mana monster, doesn’t really matter cause next turn you can draw one of those 4, 5, 6 cards anyway. To help you understand, this would be like Yugi summoning Dark Magician on his second turn, it’s really dumb, and it’s how the game is actually played. The second thing you learn that makes almost any other card in the game irrelevant, is that some cards get a + mana bonus, in particular, they tend to give mana when you summon them, and when they are destroyed. Whenever you first get access to a card with this (Nekomata), the game completely changes because you skip your first turn, summon nekomata, she casts her ability to give 3 mana, instantly dies to whatever monster you put her in front of, on your 3rd turn now you have basically 3x as much mana as you would have in any other battle up until this point. From there you stack your deck with Nekomatas, and congrats you have beaten the game. Also don’t bother with healers or buffers, they are just dead weight in comparison to putting another combat ready card on the map that can stand on it’s own, seriously, you might think that’s just a min-max kind of statement, but no really, it just works out like that with how the game is built.
– Real player with 51.0 hrs in game
Library Of Ruina
This game taught me that if something an enemy uses seems cheesy, simply use it as well and turn the dial to 11. Exploit or die. Use Gebura and Myo’s effect and leave all your worries behind, until Xiao ends you. Coming off of Lobotomy Corp made me predestined to love this game.
10/10, makes me feel like my IQ is room temperature, in Celsius
– Real player with 176.7 hrs in game
THE BOTTOM LINE
Library of Ruina is a bookstore the size of a city block–you’ll get lost in it for hours at a time, exploring a bottomless well of new and interesting stories to experience and share.
Review as follows:
I spent 160 hours with this game, but it’s lived rent-free in my head for so much longer. The world and story are evocative, unique, and at times disturbing. But the gameplay is just as unique, you’d be surprised how much changes when you strip the “roguelike” from “roguelike deckbuilder”. There’s depths to this game, and thanks to being singleplayer, it’s an ocean of archetypes and strategies that don’t centralize around a defined “meta” you might find in something like YuGiOh or Hearthstone. It’s all the joy of first discovering Magic the Gathering with friends, except in this case you don’t even need friends!
– Real player with 160.0 hrs in game
Signs of the Sojourner
This game is fantastic. There’s hardly a negative comment I could make upon it.
Story-wise, your mother passes, and you’re responsible for keeping your hometown alive through her story/trade caravan. You meet a variety of people and learn about/influence their stories, learning hidden stories about your mother’s past on the caravan route and ultimately finding an appropriate ending to the caravan problem (the town relies on the caravan for business, and your store needs to be successful for the caravan to justify coming around.)
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
Probably my favourite game of this year so far. I was honestly close to just quitting within the first few minutes, but once I got used to the concept the whole thing became weirdly addictive. I got drawn into the game’s world and was excited to plan my trips, explore all the places, meet the people, solve the mysteries, find out about all the subplots…
The first playthrough took me about 5 hours, and apparently the other ones weren’t much shorter because there was always new content - and admittedly also because I’ve spent quite some time figuring out which cards to collect and to play and on retrying conversations… I’m almost done with my 5th playthrough, all of them lead me to a few new places, people and stories, and there are still some left to explore.
– Real player with 30.7 hrs in game
Wander Stars
Wander Stars is a turn-based RPG with roguelite elements where you make your own attacks by combining words to make your own fighting techniques. Learn new words to collect, combine, and experiment to discover enemy weaknesses, synergies, and strategies that will help you win your battles!
The story of Wander Stars follows Ringo, a young martial artist looking for her brother, and Wolfe, a mysterious scoundrel running from his past, as they join forces in an unlikely partnership to collect the pieces of the Wanderstar Map.
Key Features
-
Make your own attacks - Collect and combine different types of words to make your own fighting techniques like a SUPER AWESOME FIRE KICK!
-
An anime you can play - Each run plays like an anime episode where you experience the adventure through exciting cutscenes and intense battles.
-
Wander into adventure - Explore every place you visit through a randomized map and find treasures, rivals, special events and more!
-
Binge and reruns - Replay episodes to learn hidden aspects of the story, find any events you missed, and train to earn permanent upgrades.
The Curse Of Mantras
The Curse Of Mantras is a dating sim with optional card battler gameplay.
You play as either Lily or Ace, and you wake up in a strange supernatural world known as the Afterlife. A strange man, Mantras, greets you and introduces you to the world’s rules and your companions.
Your companions are other dead people that represent an avatar of one of the four elements: water, fire, air, earth, and one of the two arcana: life and death.
Lily and Ace are the avatars of death. The most powerful avatar, the only one who has the power to activate a strange device, a music box, which can make them remember their past lives, and most importantly, why and how the died.
The Zone: Stalker Stories
This is the Zone – a post-apocalyptic world of strangeness and confusion, treasure and danger, exploration and tactical card battles.
Advance through twisted monsters and deadly anomalies. Unearth artifacts of mysterious power. Develop your psionic abilities and crush foes with the force of your mind.
Create your perfect deck by equipping artifacts and researching new powers. Carefully manage your expedition to maximise your loot and how far from home you can go. Take side quests with unique rewards. Make friends… Make enemies.
Inspired by games such as Slay the Spire, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Darkest Dungeon, the Zone blends a new take on deckbuilding with a full narrative RPG – a rich story crafted by industry veterans (Mount&Blade, The Next World).
-
Gorgeous hand-drawn art
-
Gripping story, colourful characters
-
A beautiful, dangerous world to explore
-
Deep inventory management - Assemble your deck and abilities by carefully choosing your equipment
-
Research powerful upgrades for combat and exploration
-
Complete side jobs to gain unique rewards
-
Many different items and abilities to mix and match your perfect playstyle