Grail

Too random. You highly depend on traits and events (that gives you cards for combos) to be able on win. On top of that you will just have encounters that are pretty much certain you will lose. Wins will feel like they were handed to you, because the right cards and traits for the right combo appeared.

Less of a deck building game, more of a finding hopefully 1 card that might maybe fit into your build a couple of times per run. It's so luck based it's a little ridiculous.

The music is great, but the foundation of the game is rotten. It really comes down to two key points: player agency and card design. I think most games in the auto-battler genre have found ways to give players more decisions and make the time between battles more engaging. Things like positioning, equipment, cycling units/cards out, and managing economy all help to make it feel like your choices matter. Narrowly winning a battle because you optimized small but important parts of your build is rewarding. For something making such a late appearance to the genre, it's surprising that it's so sparse even in comparison to some of the earliest entries. The card design really doesn't help with this. If your deck is focused on burn cards, being offered a choice of a shielding card shop, increasing max HP, or getting food cards is demoralizing. It also feels like the payoff cards are too few and too rare. You might have most of the setup for a shock build, but if you don't get the card or trait that catalyzes it, you'll just fall further and further behind. Wins and losses are compounding in this way. With so many better options for auto-battlers, including several that are free…

Good, fun take on the genre. Don't listen to people who claim it isn't skill-based, it is. It's a very straight-forward game to learn, but it definitely rewards mastery of the characters and a proper understanding of their card pools and how different cards interact. It's not gonna be a forever-game for me, because I do think that some of the game's basic structure leads to a certain amount of repetitiveness surfacing after, uh, more than two hundred runs. But that's, like, fine? The game's price tag is very affordable, and I got plenty of hours out of it. I'm pleased to have bought and played it, and I think it has advanced my understanding of the genre.

Core gameplay is fun, but the game doesn't respect your time by not allowing you to use the "skip" option on the ""player"" battles at the end of each day. There's no technical reason for why it shouldn't be possible, and it wouldn't force anyone that wants to watch the battles to enable it. I'll change my review if this is changed in the future, but meanwhile, I cannot recommend the game since even at a sped-up time, it's just tedious to watch your deck fight against the "ghosts" of random players.

I LOVE GAMBLING LETS GO GAMBLING