You have 75 HP, no potions, a handful of attack and defend cards and one bad ass character. Can you survive? In the 2D RPG card battle game Slay the Spire, you play as one of three characters: Ironclad, Assassin, or Defect with a fourth character to be unlocked after clearing the game once. Each begins the game with a relic which is a magical item that can assist your chosen hero in different ways depending on the character. You start the game with full health, and must defeat enemy after enemy using a deck of cards that allows your hero or heroin to perform certain actions, such as attack or defend for an x amount of damage, or other effects such as drawing and discarding, gaining or losing life etc..
This game won’t hold your hand even for a second, so each move you make is critical to your survival. Your health doesn’t simply regenerate after each battle so, choose each card carefully. There are campfires where you can heal your wounds or upgrade a card in your deck. Along the way, you will encounter not only enemies in your quest to conquer the tower, but also, random encounters with strangers who have something to offer in return for your character losing some HP or cards from your deck. These can be found through the question mark icons located on your map. Some choices may seem easy, others are a little on the dark side, so tread carefully.
At the merchant, you can purchase cards, potions and relics with gold gained from defeating enemies or from question mark encounters. Their will a different selection each time you visit a merchant on the map. Although, it clearly looks like the same merchant at each shop, I’m sure he’s being using a super rare black-market potion in order to teleport to various locals on your map. Nevertheless, you can buy copies of cards that you love playing with already, or find something new and possibly on sale, hunt those bargains. Your map itself is broken off into multiple paths, giving the player a choice of either fighting more demon spawn foes or encounters more strangers with stories to tell. I personally almost always choose the latter because I think not knowing what to expect is half the fun of this game.
Once you fight and barter your way to the top of each floor, you encounter a boss fight. I suggest making use of the campfire to heal up before facing the boss, you’ll need it. Each boss has 1) Much health, 2) At least one special ability, 3) the power to summon minions to do their bidding. That third one is not true for every boss, but the ones that do have that ability are my least favorite to face. One on one, should mean me vs the boss, I’m just saying. The music is more dramatic whenever you face a big baddie as well. The score in the game is great by the way. Really sets a creepy kind of vibe without losing the D & D fantasy base.
After spending a few weeks with the game, I can safely say that I love it. The old school art style, the music, the easy to understand gameplay, and of course, the cards. I came for the card battles and left satisfied, that should be on my gravestone.
CBK Score: 9/10
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