Isle of Swaps

This is a solid card game buried under terrible UI, insufficient game modes, and bugs. The sense of building/trading for a collection and the trickle back of cards to a master binder between roguelike runs works beautifully. The art and mechanics are excellent. But man, everything outside of the cards. • The game pauses entirely when out of focus. • Can't save an incomplete deck, which leads to a lot of annoying menuing, especially when trading. • Can only trade for up to 5 cards with up to 5 cards at a time. At first I thought this was a limitation on being able to trade, but you can do as many transactions as you want, so... why? • If you turn off manual paying of card costs, it'll sometimes use colored energy before colorless energy to pay generic costs. If you turn it on, it'll force you to pick even when the choice is obvious. • EXTREMELY clunky binder system... you either have to sort through a binder which includes blank spaces for every card you have not collected or you have to Next > through sections of each color. • So many annoying little things like not having shops immediately open in the middle of the screen when you click the node. • Vending machine is slow and has…

Maybe I just don't understand this game... But I got to area 2 and the enemies had the same amount of monsters, Their monsters had roughly DOUBLE my HP, and they did roughly DOUBLE my damage per card. On top of that they had constant field healing. What is the player to do in this scenario?

This game is fine. It's not particularly bad, and as you can see from my hours, it's pretty playable and interesting. However, the reason that this game drops to a Not Recommended, is because the UI is horrible: - "Flipping" through your collection feels like it's built for a mobile device. - Once an hour or so the UI bricks and you just can't click anything, requiring an Alt-F4. - Some cards are terribly written and don't make sense until you play a couple of times with them. If there was a "Meh", review rating, I'd give it that, but I can't, and I definitely don't recommend it. It's fine.

Game put me into a mirror match against myself, except the AI had twice as much health on all their monsters for no reason. Thankfully their actual deck was randomly generated and lacked the really good stuff, so I was able to wear them down. Then on the last turn I tried to use Meteor to finish the fight, since the amount of damage it was going to deal according to the card text was enough to wipe out the AI side while leaving 2/3 of my monsters alive. Except no, somehow it did bonus damage and killed everyone on the field, which counted as my loss. Turns out if you lose a fight, you don't just lose a life but also one of your monsters. I happened to lose the only fire element monster I had, making my entire deck useless. No thank you.

once to build a thorns deck you'll never wanna play any other way

Very fun game, interesting combos, various strategies are playable but ... the game is just too easy. I guess developers didn't want the game to be frustrating but basically "lives" are not used at all because at some point you just stop losing. Since you don't loose Nuzzlelock becomes just normal mode without additional challenge. Randomiser challege is just a big joke, since it's easier than default mode, you just take duo monsters and exploit "super effective" bonus. Additionally strategies like spamming AoA, just using energy cards if you get true damage from them are just OP. To speed up every mode (except nuzzle lock) you can just spam "white flag" card. As I said it's too easy but I still played to max everything, so I guess it was worth it.