Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Now, I'm not great with card games as some may know,
so when there's an electronic version of it out there to automatically regulate the rules, it's somewhat tempting to go after it.
However, some of these releases have made me question whether we need any more of these things in the world.
Enter Guardians of Graxia by Petroglyph
a fantasy board game involving cards on Steam and a few other places.
Now the first thing I saw when I installed the game was Times New Roman which made me go
'Who in the world chose those fonts?'
shortly followed by 'is this an early access game?'
because it sure felt like it.
Now this is a short review, so I reasoned I should only proporitionally play it before reviewing.
So, beyond the Times New Roman and creating a profile, I leapt into the tutorial to learn a bit about the mechanics
to be instead greeted with a text box made out of Arial, and if you don't know how I react to these Microsoft fonts,
you'd better know I hate using them by default.
There was so much text during this part I'll save you the pain of reading it all and summarise it instead:
You have a strong unit that you place on board
that then summons weak units
then you advance on the enemy and go for whatever the game tells you to.
Now it seems pretty simple and all that.
But there's a whole bunch of complex mechanics the moment you clash with the enemy.
Your units might have abilities to affect the damage done, you might have an ability card which does an effect, and so would your opponent.
It's only when both players pass that you then choose a card to sacrifice
to increase your attack to be more or decrease your opponent's attack instead.
Through some unknown calculation, boom! You do damage to each other at the end of the turn all at once
so even if you one-hit kill, they'll still hit your poor unit and do damage.
It was the by the time I reached the second tutorial mission that they really kicked up the random number generator
which doesn't really do you the favour of picking out cards that are remotely useful.
So I threw some units on board and sent them on a rush towards the enemy, only to get slaughtered.
It was at that point that I decided that dealing with randomised cards along with really complicated mechanics wasn't my cup of water, so I got out and left it.
You don't know what's going to happen at all unless you've done an hour's reading beforehand and have willed yourself
to recite the tutorial backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Now I'm going to go to the fictional universe, since I can review that unlike the graphics (thank you old graphics card).
I'll say it, it's very generic and samey.
We've seen all these things before, and you don't even need to look too hard for that.
In the missions I did, you have the humans as soldiers and calvary, elves as archers and mages.
Orcs are the enemy, along with wolf riders and dragons.
I think that's a good selection of material to pick from, right?
Guardians of Graxia feels like an attempt to enter a niche market
and some of the mechanics seems a bit nifty in concept.
but it seems like they should have dropped them by the first alpha and gone for a different approach altogether
because as it stands right now, it's overtly complicated and if I had this physically, I'd probably have no idea what I was doing, rulebook or not.