Recent reviews by Bandit

I picked up the game early on and quickly became addicted to its theme and I rather enjoyed playing matches against the gauntlet and pve mode. However, eventually you are forced into PVP if you want to continue to build your decks and advance. This is all well and good except that they have absolutely destroyed the balance in the last few releases. Let me break this down for you.

Imagine a CCG that supposedly has a limited resource system. In this game it's faction and power. Cards have certain colored faction, and require a certain amount of power to play. Now realize that the developers create a crapload of cards that allow drawing whatever faction/power cards you want pretty much at will. End result: Instead of 1 or 2 faction theme decks, you end up with the meta being dominated by 3 faction decks that are simply loaded up with the most powerful cheap cards from those 3 factions.

Imagine a CCG that supposedly uses randomness to create a deck to draw from. Now realize that the developers create a "market" system, where you can bank 5 situationally powerful cards, and then load the game up with "merchants" who allow you to trade cards you don't want from your hand with those in your market that you desire. Now further realize that these merchants are trivially cheap to play, and on top of that often have damage/health/ability stats that make them just as good as other normal cards that don't allow drawing from the market. End-result, 3 faction decks loaded up with merchant cards.

If you're looking for theme play, look elsewhere. This is a game of easy mode resource management where an army of merchants beats the heck out of everyone else.

I'm a huge fan of ARPG, Grim Dawn, Diablo, Torchlight, etc. This game is shaping up to be an interesting twist on these other games.

1. WASD movement - Some people don't like this, I find I prefer it because...
2. Dodging and aiming are things - Unlike some other ARPG where you hold still and spam attacks, this game requires you to move about and try to avoid enemy attacks and projectiles, at least for now (I'm early level). I feel more engaged with the combat than I do with other ARPG.
3. The look and feel, story, voice acting, cutscenes, etc. are entertaining.
4. They have mission modes and campaign modes and more... I see where they're going from a content perspective and I dig it.

There are some downsides right now as well:

1. While skills can be modded, this is definitely not a deep, customizable skill tree system like other games in the genre. This is 100% the biggest downside to the game that may prevent some people from enjoying it.
2. The crafting interface needs some work, it feels kind of clunky to me. It's not clear to me how to min/max my character. I'm sure that will come.

The controls are terrible. There are a lot of gimicky timed jumping unlockables and I find the ledge grabbing and distance jump mechanics to be difficult to work with. Took the fun out of the game quickly.