Magibrick

This is one of those times where I’m ecstatic that I took a chance on a game I knew nothing about! Despite loving Endgame of Devil, I’d almost written off Magibrick as a similar Luck be a Landlord-like with a similar pixel art style but that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality Magibrick is a brilliant roguelike deckbuilder melded with board game-like mechanics in the vein of Reversi (Othello) & Go. With a deck of creatures at your disposal (unlockable & upgradable with the metagame currency earned during runs), the player is tasked with outmaneuvering the opponent to cover the majority of the board with their color panels/bricks before a certain number of turns elapses. Your deck of creature cards each have various ranges & patterns of bricks they are able to lay alongside particular effects that can influence the state of the board & your score as well as a mana cost equivalent to their scoring potential. The strategy enters when the enemy also has a gamut of cards at their disposal & both you & the opponent are capable of destroying bricks that overlap one another essentially nullifying bricks that count towards score at the expense of not being able t…

[h1]A Nice Little Package Ruined By Frustration[/h1] [h1]Things I Like About Magibrick:[/h1] [b]Gameplay[/b] [list] [*]I genuinely believe the developer has created something interesting here. Players need to occupy as much space as possible in a 9x9 tiles before the final turn. Magi bricks(colored creature bricks) can only be destroyed by other methods, while overlapping arcti bricks(empty colored brick) will destroy each other. [*]Creature bricks have different patterns and abilities, and their roles are certainly interesting to play around. Some creatures can occupy multiple space at once; some can turn strong enemy bricks into lesser forms; and some can buff ally to score more points. [/list] [h1]Things I Dislike About Magibrick:[/h1] [b]Unfair Difficulty[/b] [list] [*]I am not against difficulty, but the frustration makes it hard to keep going. [*]You are always using an incomplete deck against a well-synergized deck. Even the very first battle you are already fighting against a decent treant build, and depending on the AI you could hardly turn around. [*]Your upgrade is limited and scales way too slowly compared to the difficulty spike. In order to have a viable build you…

Magibrick is a really creative tile flipping game. There are lots of variations available to a wide variety of units in order to help keep things fresh. You wouldn't want to overplay it, but for $8, it's well worth it.

While not perfect, it's a charming little turn-based deck builder where you fight the CPU for tile control. Combat mostly lasts for 3-7 turns, depending on the level. Like with so many of these games, you pick your path of levels on each stage, deciding between combats, resting places, puzzles, etc till you reach a stage boss. [b]Positives:[/b] [list] [*] interesting boss mechanics such as targeting certain blocks after play, field destruction, control points, etc [*] lots of card mechanics with synergy potential [*] puzzle levels, mostly before a boss, require a bit of thinking and can be repeated as often as you like for extra card rewards [*] combat levels can be repeated 1-2 times and losing once is, for the most part, not the end [*] unlocking new cards is mostly grind-free when you pick the helper card that gives you more rewards each battle [*] difficulty is doable once you've experienced various play styles and card mechanics, sans RNG shenanigans from time to time [*] developer was quite responsive and fixed some UI issues I had while trying out the demo version [*] had no performance issues or crashes on my potato machine [/list] [b]Negatives:[/b] [list] [*] although…

Appears the premium version has been pulled from Steam recently. Demo version is now being sold. May as well download the demo for free. Wrote the developer asking about this but so far no response.