Steam Community :: Shadowmarth

3.6 hrs on record

If you play a lot of this type of game, you will find it utterly unremarkable. A massive quantity of the deckbuilding and class aspects are ripped astonishingly directly from the best example of the genre, Slay the Spire. The structure is Slay the Spire to a T. You have the same map, with the same types of nodes, and the same resources with slightly different names (potions/relics/gold). The difference is that you have, instead of a careful and intentional, tactical turn based structure, it's an odd real time hybrid that typically amounts to just watching autoattacks for seven seconds between turns. It claims autobattler heritage, but the critical elements of an autobattler are all missing: competition and drafting with numerous competitors, the aspect system is pretty basic and not nearly as stackable and fun as most autobattlers, and well, you can completely micromanage the movement and attacks of your units if you want, so it's not really AUTO either.

A perfectly good use of an afternoon, I'll probably put more time into it since the custom hero option is interesting, but honestly every time one of these comes out and just tries to be Slay the Spire again without understanding what made it good, it irks me considerably. And this is one of the most direct. The difficulty at the first tiers is completely nonexistent, and like many of the worse members of the genre, you can make such a broken build by the end of a run that there is functionally no way to lose. Even bosses can be CCed endlessly, shields can be stacked up to the thousands without even running a shield-centric build, damage numbers quickly become absurd. Relics are also far less interesting than StS, each one I've seen so far simply gives you a good effect with no downside or requirement of attention from you, such that after a while I simply stopped even looking at the ones I was acquiring. I could go on, but that is enough.

Posted December 5, 2023.

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