Arcanium: Rise of Akhan 9+

This is a deck building rogue like in the vein of Dream Quest and night of the full moon. Moderate learning curve, as both the battles and world map have quite a few mechanics involved. Some of those mechanics, such as the major and minor buffs are not always well-explained, which made fine-tuning decks challenging.

My other complaint is the metaprogression. I don’t think even the best player could beat the boss on normal difficulty starting a new save game. Increasing your character’s and map’s experience levels unlocks more powerful cards, making subsequent runs much easier. I have mixed feelings about that.

Some assets are incomplete, with flavor text missing and at least one feature (execute) that is present but not functional. Graphics, music, and animation are all good. Art style is consistent.

So hey, I got Netflix, I like games, looked online for their best offering and this game came up. I play for a bit, seems cool, building my deck and powering up bit by bit. Nice. After 30 tiles that were a pleasant mild challenge, you get forced to fight an impossible battle, where at best you manage to slay one of three OP opponents that respawn anyway in 3 turns. So you die pathetically and only then can you discern the roguelite structure of the game: new cards are awarded for your forced failure to help with the next run. So you’re never gonna progress past the first 30 tiles for maybe dozens of runs before you can power up enough to get past them, after which the process repeats after another 30 turns and grind grind grind away. I like roguelites, I even like roguelikes which are much harder. But that’s because you know it’s coming and it’s a challenge start to finish. Totally blindsided here and absolutely zero motivation to play a pretty easy mellow game that auto-nerfs you after 30 turns. Pick a lane guys.

It's really good, by far the best game in the Netflix game collection right now. It's a card battler rogue-like like Slay the Spire, but a bit more complex with multiple heroes rather than just one and slightly easier difficulty. It's more satisfying to set up card combos in Arcanium than StS because there's so many different paths, though.

A run is a pretty good length (not too long, not too short) and it's easy to just pick up and play even when you just have a few minutes between meetings or something. Only criticism would be that there's a few interface bugs from time to time and it's harder to play on a phone if you have big fingers at the later stages of the game.

As someone with like 100+ hours played in Slay the Spire, Arcanium is like a 10/10 for me for sure.