Review anarchistica 2/5 · Jul 9, 2023
Oh no, you randomed my random with your random!
Playtime: 37 minutes
Intro
The Simulacrum is a non-collectible collectible card game. You pick one of six pre-made heroes and build a deck with randomly generated cards. You can play battles against the AI or play through a randomly generated node-based campaign.
Review
I love deck-building, i've played at least 50 games with this mechanic. Several of them are among …
Playtime: 37 minutes
Intro
The Simulacrum is a non-collectible collectible card game. You pick one of six pre-made heroes and build a deck with randomly generated cards. You can play battles against the AI or play through a randomly generated node-based campaign.
Review
I love deck-building, i've played at least 50 games with this mechanic. Several of them are among my most-played games, like SolForge, TESL and Legends of Runeterra. I'm also addicted to Path of Champions, the node-based campaign mode of Legends of Runeterra (it's like Slay The Spire, but good). So The Simulacrum seemed like it would totally be my thing. Turns out, it's not.
The main problem with the game is that the cards constantly change. I'm not entirely sure how this works, but i tried a campaign and the cards all changed after losing the first battle. There's no proper strategising here, you just have to hope you get something random that works. In my case i got a card that somehow made me draw so many cards that i milled myself (i ran out of cards to draw). See a card you like? Well, it'll be gone forever next time, tough luck. And to make matters worse the art seems to barely change, so you get a very different card with the same art as a previously generated card.
During the second game the AI had a card that destroyed my strongest creature for 1 mana. There isn't even the remotest notion of balance here, it's all luck. There seems to be a limited pool of possible effect too, and -crucially- there are no keywords. Yes, it's a CCG without keywords... what?