Slay the Spire (2019)

It's a great rouge like deck builder and super addicting. My go to game to play in the background.

My biggest problem is that it relies to much on RNG so some runs it just feels like your screwed no matter what. Especially since there aren't many moves that heal and you don't always draw blocks. While it feels great when you get the perfect run, i feel there's more restarts than perfect runs.

Overall it's addicting and i do recommend but if your not a fan of massive RNG and grind i would stay away.

I came late to Slay the Spire after it was made available on PS Plus. I'm a huge fan of deck-builders but harder to please when it comes to roguelikes, so my anticipation for playing this one fell somewhere between interest and apprehension. Turns out it was a solid and fun challenge, but for me and my tastes, didn't last longer than a handful of hours.

The story

More or less non-existent, as far as my playthroughs could decipher. You choose 1 of 4 hero archetypes (that can be unlocked after successive playthroughs) and you're trying to make it to the end of the dungeon. There's very little in the way of exposition in flavour text or reasoning as to why you're in the dungeon.

The gameplay

Great as far as deck builders go! Lots of card variety for each player archetype and some great implementation of this or that mechanics, like sacrificing health to gain a new card, or choosing to upgrade a good card at the cost of losing two cards. It made for some really fun and tense situations as I was nearing the end of a run, trying to min/max in my mind what's the best chance of getting me across the finish line.

The replay value

This is where my opinion may be an outlier. I really enjoyed playing a couple of the archetypes but a few of the others were lacklustre to me. Also, the deck and build variety can probably be seen as a great challenge for some players, but I found myself wanting to just keep building the same poison deck with the thief rather than trying something new. I can't say that's a knock against the game though, more about my personal playstyle. So that being said, the drive to continue playing the same style over and over wore off quick.

The conclusion

As far as PS Plus games go, this was a huge winner. It made for a really enjoyable afternoon and I can see how certain gamers will dump hundreds of hours into this trying to chase all the trophies or master every deck build for every archetype. While that wasn't my style, I was still content with my time with Slay the Spire.

I can finally write a review as I beat the heart with one of the characters (Ironclad). I'm not a min-max player and I feel like the folks who get really into this game take a really strategic and holistic view to their deck. I never gamed out what the level 3 boss would be like with early card picks, but just went for easy synergy. Similarly, I'm awful at skipping card rewards which bit me in the ass with huge decks at the end of the game.

I'll probably keep playing from ttime to time to see if I can get my other characters past the end game, but I won't be shooting for 100% achievements. Some seem damn near impossible and sadistic, like beating the game with 1 relic or just common cards. Not my idea of fun.

04/27/20

I got 6 hours in, and unfortunately this game's just not for me. I'm not a big fan of turn-based combat, let alone when it makes up the entirety of a game. In my defense, I bought this game blind.

I've read that it's a good game to play while listening to podcasts, or audiobooks in the background. I might try that sometime, and see if I can warm up to it.

Ascension 15 on just one character, let alone all three, was enough to make me tired of this game. The the ratio of RNG to meaningful choices is slightly too skewed in favor of RNG + the time investment required to see through the few meaningful choices that you are given (mainly path selection) is far too great to make for an incredibly satisfying, "just one more run" type of rogue-lite. As it stands, it's just satisfying, which is by no means a bad thing. Let me get this out of the way, the game is fantastic, no two ways about it.

I realize that my issues may sound somewhat vague, or not like issues at all but rather just a matter of "git gud," but they're hard to clarify without getting into an exhaustive level of detail about the various situations that you're presented with and why, no matter how much you may struggle, and how much you may think really hard, RNG will almost always (at least beyond the first few ascensions) play a bigger role in determining the outcome of your run.

Of course there are strategies to mitigate your losses, but by pursuing them, you end up sacrificing a large amount of what the game has to offer. Essentially, there are a lot of potentially viable builds—aka winnable builds—but some of them require a ludicrous amount of RNG to piece together, but are technically speaking, no more powerful than the less RNG heavy strategies (what I mean by this is that a win is a win, it doesn't matter if you barely scraped by the last boss with only a few HP left while using a "safe" strategy vs. completely destroyed it without getting hurt using a "risky" RNG blessed strategy—when given an unlimited amount of time to think about the very few choices you're given, the less skill matters and the more RNG matters); what all of this does is force you to always go for the same few strategies rather than, say, try and build off of that one potentially interesting relic or rare card synergy that you got early in the game—you're almost always better off ignoring it in favor of the few higher win % strategies, which quite frankly, becomes pretty boring.

Despite all of my whining, I really, reaalllly liked this game. I complain because I care, and because I see this game as having the potential to rival The Binding of Isaac in terms of longevity. Just a few tweaks to the amount of player choice would open up more potentially viable build options without reducing the required skill to clear the game.

New character available on the beta branch! :O

I had a fiddle around with her. Really interesting mechanics, you have different "stance" modes like Nioh, and also there's a lot of stuff with "retaining" cards, and you can scry. Very cool. Can't wait til they finish all the art/animations; I've been looking for an excuse to dive back in in deep.

A lot of my friends have recently picked up Slay the Spire (it's part of the current Humble Monthly thing, go grab it!), so it has been fun to fight them for leaderboard positions over the last couple weeks!

Competition has been fierce. Love this game, have put around 200 hours into it over the last year or two. Will def grab this for Switch next time I have to travel anywhere. Probably my favourite game of 2018, and I generally don't like card games or deck building games, but this one is fantastic.