Astral Towers

If you like card puzzles, try the game, this is NOT a deck builder however, as the story mode give you a specific and fixed hand of cards you can choose from and the free battles against AI have both decks (your enemy and yours) randomized. There are youtube videos out there to help if you are having trouble with the battle-puzzles during the campaign and after you are done with that, you should be skilled enough to try winning against the Archmage difficulty AI for the achievements. I liked my time on this indie old card battle game, its not perfect but It was money well spent.

Astral Towers is an ancient 2011 card battler (not one of those nasty P2W ones though) with a fantasy theme where you sort out your cards, fight 1v1 duels... think of this is as Magic the Gathering from Temu. Being a 15 year old game, there's a slew of defects, despite being "Remastered" this is ancient and plays badly. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. The game is comprised of somewhat mediocre hand drawn 2D illustrations instead of professional looking 3D game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent. Regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is very low, beneath what PC gamers have come to expect in this era of cuttin…

Astral Towers is fine overall and definitely worth about 4-5€. Unfortunately, playing against the AI is much more fun than going through the campaign. The campaign gets repetitive fast and mostly comes down to doing the same things again and again, which hurts the experience a bit. The writing is amateurish, but has some old-school charm to it. In my opinion, the art is amazing. It has that certain 90s Magic the Gathering vibe to it which I love. The sound design is fine, there are several music tracks, and the sound effects get the point across. Perhaps the worst thing is that this is the sort of game that would be amazing in PvP. While you can play hot-seat, unfortunately there is no way to play it against other players online. Regardless, it's a fun puzzle game.

Excellent

I love this game, I've been playing it since it came out in 2011 (before it was on Steam). From my perspective, the campaign is more of a tutorial for the mage battle mode, which can be played against the AI or in hotseat mode. It's very compelling, but unfortunately it is very unbalanced. Each player is randomly assigned a set of spells/creatures at the start of each match, but you can't see what your enemy has. There are certain spells and creatures which are close to a "win game" button (e.g. Assassination) or very close, depending on what they're up against. Sometimes I know I can't win after 2 or 3 turns. But still, I keep playing!

I've been playing Apus Software games since the original release of Astral Tournament. This one is somewhat different from the other games, focusing more on the puzzle aspect. Enjoyed the campaign. The hard mode was quite challenging.