That makes much more sense, thanks. I reckon most of the raters who have already written the reviews are wussies Sold, I'm going in for the purchase. Expect me to see me in the forums soon!
I've actually read the reviews in the US App Store and I agree with some of the criticism to a certain extent. The game is just too buggy on release and gameplay experience lacks polish compared to previous Rocketcat titles. It needed a lot of fixing. I admittedly am not well-versed on strategy or card games, but I have some experience with them to play competently. I've reached the fifth floor so I'd like to say I don't suck at this, hahaha Basing on my own experience, learning how to play the game without tutorial isn't a problem at all. Understanding how turns work and enemy attacks isn't hard to do, but you just need a bit more time to play to get it. Aside from the bugs, what made me play Five-Card less is the lack of motivation to progress. It's a good game design, but it lacks something (I can't concretely describe it) to get me to want to play more. When I get a Game Over, it felt tiring to play again. Comparing it to Wayward Souls, dying felt frustrating but rewarding at the same time. Five-Card just seems to not fit for me.
It's got some bug and signposting issues. I'll see if I can fix some things and get it higher with the next update. Besides those, the design is kind of unusual for us too. It's simpler than what we usually make and it's a card game that isn't designed around deckbuilding. The thing is though, I usually don't read the App Store feedback directly because there's no way to respond to them or ask more details. Sounds like you already bought it. Let me know what you think after you get some time to play.
Here's a bug that is at least fairly easy to reproduce: Mage's Firestorm *only* ever seems to come down after Mage himself moves. Also sometimes Mage just immediately Firestorms, but no idea how that works. A more moderate and effective strategy IMO is to use your crappy 3rd party member as fodder. Let them take all the hits, and don't use fountains to heal them. I just have an Archer that pretty much dies every fight.
I just finished a run where I took "greed" as my first perk, cleared every monster and didn't buy any items. Final score was 11,290, which I believe is the highest legitimate score. I did abuse the mirror guard bug a lot and could try clearing without Guard/Mage, but otherwise there's not much left for me, at least until the next patch. Overall decent game!
^Grats man! I think for me the replay value will come from replaying the game with a different main+secondary.
Wow. Congratulations! You certainly make me envious here, I'm still struggling to make significant progress in the game on a consistent basis. Well played
Yeah I've seen that one, not sure what causes the second bit. What did you think about the Elite Guards and the final boss fight?
Hmm. Well, they're both a bit too easy, IMO. But IMO the entire game is a tad too easy, so maybe the answer is system-wide changes rather than buffing them. The flattest thing about Elite Guards is that their heal is so unthreatening. In general, whenever a monster heals it's pretty bad? Most of the time they just end up healing some full health guy. For the final boss, I kind of question the fact that after you kill those, he doesn't just spawn more elite guards. Right now if you can get over that hump and burst down the elite guards, it's pretty smooth sailing until the inevitable Mercy kill. On a related note: Mercy is maybe too good to be able to use on the boss? It's pretty cute that it works, but it makes Priest an autoinclude in your final lineup. A lot of this is kind of clouded by the fact that Arcane Discard and bugged Mirror Guard are so good vs. them. Once you make Arcane Discard a bit fairer and fix Mirror Guard, maybe things swing into balance a bit better and they're as challenging as intended. Maybe not, though! Haha.
Great game, Kepa. Just finished for first time. Some thoughts: There definitely seems to be a bug with firestorm. Some of the casting animation looks very similar to "about to run up" animation. Maybe that's the idea but it's a bit frustrating to plan around and I'd rather it be my strategy that wins or loses, not guessing which animation means what. I'm almost never know which characters nor enemies are debuffed. It would be nice to know that with an icon. Injury to Insult doesn't make any sense to me and doesn't ever attack what I expect it to attack. Should archers/poachers reset when one vanishes? It seems like they don't always. When a character dies, the description of a highlighted card says run away even though that's not the card selected - In any case, great game. Looking forward to playing more as the game gets tweaked.
More things I noticed: Sometimes, characters get stuck in the "about to attack" pose and don't do anything for multiple turns. Sometimes, characters attack in consecutive turns with no lead up.
Sorry it was ace warrior not mercenary that does a bunch of consecutive attacks from range with no lead up. And I had an assassin do the vanish and then get stuck there and never came back. Had to kill the app and of course had all health down to the end of fight level of health to start the battle =\ Seriously buggy.
Debuff icons would have been really good. Better UI information in general. We'll do what we can with this, though some things would really require rather big changes to the underlying system. We're redesigning Injury to Insult, it's really confusing and part of it doesn't work right now. Archers should reset, though this may be a bug we've fixed with vanish. Give Up thing is known bug. Yeah the heal AI is really random. I don't think I like heal spam design much anyway, it just prolongs the fights when it does work. Does he summon other monsters properly? We could change his summoning tables to just summoning elite guards. The axe warrior does this? I've only seen the mercenary do it.
Stuff in the update coming up so far: Looks like we were able to do an "enemy is about to hit" indicator it's a pulsing cracked skull on their last turn before hitting you. Enemy indicator in top left corner of a fight, with how many are remaining in this battle. Tap on the enemy indicator to bring up a bestiary for each remaining enemy. Pause menu now lets you tap on a character you have to see a list of all of their cards in one place. Still working on bugfixes, more news on that later.
Great news. Was actually coming here to ask if there were any news. Hope the game's doing well, Kepa!
Great design I read most of the thread and I think all the issues I had with the game have already been mentioned. Still, I registered on this forum only to tell you how much I love the design and as a long-time fan of turn-based RPG (pretty much the only type of single player games I played in my life). It is refreshing, challenging and very fun to play. Overall the major problems were all about not having any information at first but then it is easy to learn after that. (except for the flying metal poisoner XD) I am one of the people who would absolutely love to see a bigger/complete RPG with a deeper, more refined version of this game design in it. I would buy it as a console, mac or ios game and recommend it. It is also very cool to see your dedication to your players and the hard work you are putting into your games, you are doing it right!
Bugfix work is going slow. A lot of the remaining bugs are ones that are really hard to track down. We're going to submit what we have pretty soon, I think. Thanks! I think we'll end up trying again with something deeper, maybe even with a branching story. I don't think that would start until next year at least, though.
Update submitted a couple days ago, should be hitting in January. Here's a changelog: - Enemies now have attack indicators on the turn just before they attack. - Combat HUD now shows the remaining enemy count in that battle. - Tapping on the remaining enemy count opens the Enemy Bestiary with descriptions of the remaining enemies. - Pause Dialog now shows what cards each character in your party has. - Game now uses less memory and performs better, especially on older devices. - Many small visual improvements. - Fixes and improvements to combat, card logic and overall gameplay balance. - Fixes and improvements to save game data. More changes: - Tactical Shuffle and Vanish now interrupt across lanes if there's no enemy in the forward lane. - Injury to Insult now shoots the last enemy that was attacked by your party, for extra damage if the last attack was made by an ally rather than the ARcher herself. - Scrollbar added to pre-fight popup enemy list. - If an enemy is at 30% health or under, Mercy range, their health meter will now pulse as an indicator. - Saved games now remember what screen you were last on in the dungeon. - Boon dialog can be closed early by tapping the screen. - Banish now consistently cancels any active attacks on the target enemy. - Mirror Shield nerfs: Reflects 120% damage base instead of 150%. Blocks half the damage of an enemy attack instead of all of it. - Clarified that Mirror Shield also counts as a block. - Changed description of Firestorm to clarify that it requires the Mage to attack after the third turn. - Description of Kick and Bash changed to clarify that it works on Lightweight enemies. - Enemy descriptions changed to clarify which ones are "Lightweight". - Fixed Priest using wrong class title sometimes. - Fixed an exploit with force quitting the game with Mending Boon. - Mage's Arcing Blast now correctly does double damage if it's Shiny. - Fixed a bug with using the Phoenix Feather with 2 dead party members. - Various other fixes, adjustments, and changes based on player feedback. I'll still be checking this thread and twitter and such for feedback, along with the Wayward Souls thread (which we also submitted an update for).
