King of the Sandcastle

Hard to believe this game was playtested at all. The difficulty in acquiring currency in the game to buy good cards is insane. Hundreds of shells take literally dozens of runs to acquire and the "premium" shells even longer. On top of that, the game features [b]perma-death[/b]. So if you accidentally lose that nice card you saved up for, it's back to square one to start grinding again. Even more frustrating is that there are badges you need to find to power-up your cards. These badges are already exceedingly rare, and more than that, are very unbalanced. Some badges are borderline useless while others can stack to create nearly unkillable combos. The fact that the badges are also randomly awarded, and [b]not[/b] reuseable means that experimenting with them is a HUGE risk. In regular sockpop fashion, the game does not feature a tutorial, which also means that many of the games mechanics are completely hidden from you, the player, until you get surprised by them (usually leading to another perma-death). I literally cannot imagine a gameplay loop more un-fun than this: spend an hour grinding for something good, get 1 chance at making a little bit of progress, get surprised by some h…

The fights only consist of clicking when a cursor is in the middle of a bar. After you click, you have to wait for a while for the animation of your attack, the animation of the change of turn, the cursor moving on the enemy's bar, the animation of your enemy's attack, and then one last animation for the change of turn. It's not *that* long, but it still feels like quite a long waiting period after taking your turn. In short, it's a very bland and repetitive game.

a shorter silly game in which you fight those that came before you it took me about 10 hours to get far enough to become the next king of the sandcastle and while simple, having a small reachable goal is actually what helped me get trough the current depression slump 10/10 game, that even if it doesnt end up being for you u only spend a couple of bucks

Bought the game. Installed the game. Got to view the menu. Got no further. Refund and uninstall.

There enough poorly thought out design decisions here that ruin what would otherwise be a fairly fun game. The inability to freely experiment with builds in favor of excessive grinding gives me little incentive to want to come back.

Oddly addicting for such simple gameplay. I thought this was just gonna be a quick game that I'd play for 10 minutes and then I somehow got sucked in and played for 2 hours straight. Definitely would not recommend to anyone that doesn't like quick-time mechanics (because that's almost the entire battling systems premise...) or get frustrated from dying over and over. It's a lot of grinding and trial and error but it's a gameplay loop that is nice to turn your brain off to.