- Tested on PC
- Game purchased
There is in my taste for cards to collect a neurosis that seems to go back far in my childhood. I remembered one night after a judo class, where the girls of the club exchanged cards Spice Girls and the prepubertal teen that I was did not understand well the interest of ecstasy so much for simple pieces of cardboard. Then a friend gave me a copy of Geri Halliwell that she had too much. I kept this precious map for a while and then the recreation classes were flooded with maps. Magic and later of Pokémon. Then there will be thousands of other cards. Demons thirsty with blood, valiant knights, elves learned by hundreds but none with your smile, Geri. Those few lines are for you.
Here comes a new challenger
Slay The Spire had democratized the genre by going out in 2019 their game deckbuilding/roguelike of which we now know by heart the contours. He had at the time pleasantly surprised the community of card players, yet more accustomed to playing several than alone. WhileHearthstone and RIOT for its part announced the forthcoming arrival of Legends of Runeterra, the breach that had opened Slay The Spire was a breath of air for those who were playing in multiplayer games only made sense of a good old table. About that date, Abrakam successfully launched the kickstarter of its future project: Roguebook.
Roguebook Leave us in the middle of a magical book, whose pages have been erased for dark reasons. A small team of two heroes (of the four available) will be deployed by Master Splinter's like to help cover the ink pages and access the following pages until the last where the final boss awaits us. That's basically the scenario. Nothing good but as in any good Roguelike, we're not here too much for that. The repetitive aspect of the genre still makes it difficult for developers to create a scenario that would give a valid reason other than madness – to start over 250 times a level. No, the real scenario of the game published by Nacon looks more like a fight against oneself, against the game itself when the difficulty gets hard after several run successful.
High risk, high reward
It will be necessary to learn hard how to optimize your deck to perfection and which cards best participate in interactions between heroes. After every victorious fight, a little gold and especially ink that will have to be used wisely to access the many objects offered by the game. This is precisely where one of the great difficulties of Roguebook. The more parts of the map you discover, the more fighting you will have to do, otherwise you won't have enough gold to access the bonuses you've discovered. We will then have to make choices and take the risk of doing the fight too and to arrive in front of the boss of the end of page with, of course, perks of qualities, but of precious life less. A well-linked balancing game that rewards self-denial and gaming experience.
Rate deckbuilding, Roguebook completed its part of the contract. Richard's Pawsensei Garfield feels about the quality of the mechanics and the different possibilities of deck construction. Each of the four heroes has very different cards and game styles. Sharra, for example, the first heroin with which you will start, will be strong in the front line, and part of her cards are based on a mechanism of rotation between her and her acolyte, which will greatly boost the damage. The mechanics of Aurora are based on buffs and debuffs she will apply to facilitate the task to her companion. The artistic direction around the heroes is on this side rather successful and you will have no difficulty in identifying what the role of each hero will be in judging from their truncation (a little doubt about that of Sorocco, the half ogre with steel fist...). Once the first run is finished, malus can be activated to correlate the experience and thus gain more page from the Roguebook. These pages will serve as a currency exchange for bonuses that will ultimately be the only ones to be kept through runs. A more mechanical « roguelitis » which still allows to smooth a little the overall difficulty.
Edmund McMillion
The famous roguelike The Binding of Isaac, should soon be entitled to an extension to his card game, The Binding of Isaac : Four Souls Requiem. At the time I'm writing to you, the Kickstarter has collected $6.7 million worth of money and should soon be born. Used for card game fans on table AND roguelike to mix useful with pleasant.
Gems, gems not
The few negative points – as there are – are to be looked for on the side of replayability. If the card game part is varied and makes you want to test and retest all kinds of compositions, the Roguelike part is a more dull in the state. Finish first time Roguebook can be done in just a few hours and some of the elements to improve over the course of the victories seem superfluous. A little fill that I would have willingly exchanged for a few more pages or heroes. The mechanics of the final bosses are also rather dull and sometimes frustrating compared to some well-feeled finds during the intermediate skirmishes. Finally, one can regret the lack of balance of some early part gems which for many of them remain superficial in the creation of your deck, while others will send you directly to the end of the book.
Verdict
The few technical and translation bugs present at the exit of the game should be quickly corrected and a little rebalancing in the accession to the different objects of the game should allow Roguebook to be one of the best in its genre. The parts are very often pleasant and despite some frustrating situations inherent in the roguelike, one takes a real pleasure to discover what is randomly hidden behind the pages of the book. The variety and complexity of the maps sometimes give surprising and unexpected situations and hides a fairly rare gameplay depth. After the failure of Artifact on the multiplayer, Richard Garfield successfully reconnects with the solo card game for our greatest pleasure.For
- Richard « Magic » Garfield
- Cards AND roguelike!
- Variety of maps and possibilities of interesting combos
- Smoothing of the mastered difficulty
Against
- Limited replayability
- Transparent OST
- Interestless scenario
This intro :-p
Whenever she reads us we never know 🙂
How much is the Geri card worth on the market now? ^^^
The intro beats! Spice Girls power! I shed a tear too.