A Long Way Down (2020)

Playtime: 42 minutes

Intro

In ALWD you place terrain pieces to move between floating "islands". Along the way you collect things and battle enemies. Battles involve playing three of a few cards from your hand. Cards either deal damage, heal, inflict/remove curses or boost/reduce attack/defense.

The Good

ALWD is a weird one because it has solid production value for an indie game, but terrible gameplay. The art looks good, the effect are nice and various other parts (cards, interface, etc.) look professional.

The Bad

The game is just really boring and bad. Building your own path is just tedious and uninteresting. The endboss stealing your tiles makes it even worse. Every battle is the same with the same handful of enemies and extremely basic cards. I've played lots of CCGs and this one easily has the most uninteresting cards. They all make a number go up or down. Worse still is that the game doesn't calculate actual damage values for you, so you might do more or less damage than the listed value. This is just awful design.

And of course, it had to be a roguelike. Health does not regenerate between battles, only with a healing card or a campfire. When you die (not if) you lose all the cards and items you found. You only get enough dust to upgrade maybe one card. So you get to do the same exact battles with the same exact cards again. Ugh.

Conclusion

ALWD is very pretty but incredibly shallow, boring and tedious. And despite the "1.0 out now" in the header picture, it has been abandoned by the devs (last update : September 2020). I have played over 40 CCGs and this is only the third with a 1 star rating.