Slay the spire

[TLG NoStresS]

                                                                         

 

    The joy of a singleplayer card game like Slay the Spire is that it puts absolutely broken combos within your grasp. It feels good to deal 50 poison damage to something. But it feels even better when you drop a series of cards that sextuples that amount of poison, kills an enemy, and triggers a corpse explosion that cascades splash damage to all of the other things that are trying to kill you. Slay the Spire is zeroed-in on this feeling of linking cards together to produce avalanches of damage, defense, or utility. Plenty of games put this domino-effect sensation at the center of their gameplay loop, like when you collect enough Diablo gear to unlock some obscene damage multiplier, or when you Call enough Duty to temporarily become a helicopter. Slay the Spire's achievement is the way it makes this feeling of power simultaneously so potent and elusive. This is an intricately designed deckbuilding game grounded in deliberate balance, populated by confounding enemies, steady rewards, and tactile decks of cards that play like efficient, beautiful machines of your own creation.

 

   Slay the Spire splits its 283 cards into three siloed archetypes (The Ironclad, The Silent, and The Defect), characters that are as asymmetrical as StarCraft's Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. But the fantasy monsters that stand between you and the top of the spire don't play cards of their own. Instead, they fight sort of like Pokémon, inflicting damage, pesky status effects, or buffing themselves each turn. These actions are telegraphed in advance by UI and, like our most recent Game of the Year, provide near-perfect information. The good outcome of this design is that I never feel cheated when I die, rare for a roguelike or card game, let alone one that intersects the two. The Defect, Slay the Spire's robotic character, for example, starts each run with a relic that summons a lightning orb, one of four, elemental energies that can occupy vacant slots encircling The Defect. To my naive eyes, this character was about lightning, and my initial runs were spent hoovering up as many cards as I could that made lightning orbs. I'd always grab multiple copies of Storm, a power card that summons a lightning orb whenever I played another power card. Free lightning! It felt great to end each turn and watch my family of floating green balls dish out randomly-targeted zaps.

 

   This build would sometimes push me into Slay the Spire's third act, but eventually it'd get my robot face kicked in by the first monster that dished out big, turn-one damage. However much lightning I filled my deck with, it'd still take three or four turns to bring it out, and by then, I'd be dead. Simply knowing Slay the Spire's combos or best cards isn't enough to earn a win. Your willingness to abandon your sweet deck idea when the RNG isn't serving up, say, loads of lightning orb cards for the Defect is itself a skill. You're building an airplane as you fly it, from partially randomized parts, through an FTL-style web of varied encounters and events.

 

Sursa: pcgamer

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