Games good but promotion material is a bit weird

I think, as it stands, the game needs some polish.
First notable issue, lack of feedback. Alot of sounds feel missing, especially regarding firing sounds and hit sounds. I think this is important for the game, kinetic wise.

Second issue. I feel like I'm not interacting with the game once I put down the cards. I'm waiting, ages, for a round to end. Once or twice it's fine, but it's every round that it's like this. It's my main issue, arguably. I'm just watching a machine I set up go to town and I'm not involved. It'd be nice if the charge bar was charging mana each 5 seconds, and you acted in real time. As it stands, it's an incredibly uninvolved experience. And when I compare to other games of the two genres it's trying to fuse together, I don't think it's there yet.
I mean, lets look first off at deckbuilders. You place your cards, at at most you gotta wait like 2-5 seconds for an attack to happen. And the high end is usually for 3 or so enemies.
Then the "Tower defence". Well, you usually get a major active tool you can use heaps. And the rounds are generally pretty quick. AND, especially with some of the best TDs, you get to act in real time too, if you are fast enough.

There's none of that here.


Third issue, I don't feel many enemies are interesting. I've gotten pretty far, but they just don't feel very dynamic. Nothing really surprises me, because aside the fun animations they all act pretty similar. I think Dome Keeper had much better variety in that regard.

Forth issue, the tower and upgrades itself. This is a real sour point. I find that having 2 slots for AGES is extremely punishing, but more importantly it's not fun. I want to really build that tower to the moon, I want to place my garisons around it and really control the flow of battle. But I don't have any of that. There's no control and very little engagement in this regard. You spend a good majority of your time trying to max out towers until you get another slot or waste that chance by grabbing another relic.
And, the other items, aren't very engaging. Most are stats up in a specific "type" of damage, or a "tower or garrison". A few cards spice it up, like reload, but there's not very many. For a deckbuilder, it's really quite limited. There's not even a block, or reactive attacks back (because enemies die immediately when they touch the tower), no heals except via draws, no interesting mega attacks that are just playable as cards. It's mainly just focused on damage buffing permanently, and tower building. Which isn't exciting.
There isn't much build variety. Because there isn't much cards, especially not many that define how the game plays as a deck builder. I'm sure the other candidates might have more, but I don't feel like this was a great showing. Because I can't SEE that, with this demo. I can't check the others and give my honest thoughts.

Ontop of that, some towers are just not well designed. Judgement, especially. Judgement is an "orbital" based one, but the moment your enemies pass the radius, it becomes useless. An entire tower slot for this? If it at least moved back and forth based on the closest enemies that'd be nice. And the Garrison minions feel inconsistent, even at their very best it's an issue. If there was a way to target, that'd help.

Overall, I wanted to like this demo but I'm not feeling it. It feels half baked. A cool idea, but not much under the hood. Which is a bad sign for a deckbuilder.
I hope some changes are made. There's a strong concept here.

It's good.

Only complaint: can you add the function to disable the blinking bar on the right side. Sadly, I'm photo sensitive and the blinking made me sick; my eyes still hurt and I feel like hurling.

Other than that, it's a good game I can play for endless hours! Just right now, I can't with the blinking bar.

This game is absolutely fantastic! I'm absolutely in love with it!
Even in its free version, the game offers an impressive array of builds and depth. Just try placing two cards with the same color in the storage on the left, and you'll quickly realize the endless opportunities that await you.

USEFUL ADVICE
If you find yourself having trouble with transparent cards, it simply means that you don't have any available space. You can either add a new space after completing a full circle, merge two towers with the same quality, or simply remove one tower from your layout.

Having followed Heretic's Fork from its early development, I am very impressed and happy with its current state! The game presents a unique fusion of tower defense and deck-building mechanics. Every playthrough offers a fresh challenge based on the cards you are dealt. Very engaging and definitely worth trying out. Looking forward to the full release!

Sadly, the game is going in the wrong direction right now. The only real mechanic this game offered which separated it from being a boring generic, 1 dimensional, run of the mill tower defense style game was the card storage system. With this mechanic being removed, the game is so bland it hurts. It gives the player almost zero means to progress further into the run besides crossing their fingers. You have to rely on the 5 cards you draw each turn. That is it. Where as in the past before the change, you got to store 2 or even 3 card (if one was held in the upgrade area) PLUS the 5 drawn cards. Effectively giving the player 2 chosen cards to keep every turn. The complexity this feature added was very healthy for the game. Removing it drastically tanked the enjoyment I had in the game. I hope they do not follow the same ideology going forward, so I can one day give this game a thumbs up.

A promising tower defense/deckbuilding game, clearly in early development. You combine same tier cards to create a card of the next tier like autochess games. The most interesting mechanic is that if you have too few cards in your deck, you get a bunch of basic rock cards so your deck can never be too small (less than 11 it seems?).

There's not a lot of synergy between towers; cards empowering your towers are always a specific element or type (3 elements, 2 types each).You want all your resources to apply to all of your towers, so unfortunately the best to do is stack 1 or 2 of the same towers, which is not very interesting in the long run.

You can get an infinite combo with x2 hot potato's, several reloads, and a few rocks. Hot potato turns rock cards into draw engines, while reload generates energy. With 2 hot potatos, you can draw more cards than you use. This allows you to keep drawing and getting infinite energy to then spam cards. The best thing to use this with is Blessed, which lets you draft pretty much any card you want (with enough time/rng).

Even with this however, enemies scale significantly fast. After 1hr I could no longer 1 shot enemies with over 20,000% increased dmg with the machine gun towers (sin spotters) and lost. You could probably go much further/crash the game using the wrecking ball towers by spamming hemorrhage cards to make them bigger and completely cover the entire arena.

So having put 10 hours into this game I think I am at the point where I can give it some proper judgement.
I want to heavily stress that this is a demo so things might be very different once the game released as for the demo however I have to give it a thumbs down.

1. The biggest disappointment was that many features hinder the game experience more than they help as well as gross oversights in gameplayability.

You can speed up and pause the game but when you actually have to make a choice in cards you are unable to pause and are on a timer. At this point I question why even add a pause feature because for casting the very limited spells it aint worth it and if you need to take a break just hit escape.

There is literally NO REASON to not play the game sped up. You have near to no interaction besides using cards. There is the one or other spell but besides divine light they do lackluster damage at best. Again it feels like the devs did not play their own game.

After the waveboss is defeated you get to pick between either a towerslot or some damage up and in rare cases a regenbuff. Why even make a towerslot a pickable option? It is just dumb. You will never pick the powerups because all they do is add +100% to some damage type. Well guess what? ADDING ANOTHER TOWER ALSO ADDS +100% DAMAGE FROM THAT TOWERTYPE AND ALLOWS UPGRADES!
More slots also allow you to combine lower tier cards if you rolled unlucky and there is literally no reason to not pick a new towerslot unless you got all of them already.
This is probably the worst offender in terms of oversight. Just unlock a towerslot with each level, let people pick a trait and this game actually becomes more enjoyable.

There is little to no cost difference between cards. +10% towerdamage? 3 Green. +15% towerdamage? 3 Green. +20% towerdamage? 3 Green.... it just feels tasteless and denies any strategy of focusing on lower tier cards to use many smaller boni to outdo larger as tradeoff for decksize.

2. Tower damage is way too low / crit locked to unholy damage?
Start the game, try to play with flame towers only. By the time the first bat-circle comes you will loose 30% hp even with damage and range upgrades. Unless you use judgment you pretty much will do so every time because the damage on most towers just plain sucks.
The game gives you a lot of +% cards but the basedamage is so low that none of that matters.
Judgement is the one tower with high base damage that actually does something with the % cards.
Combine that with the fact that seemingly only unholy damage can crit for whatever bloody reason and you have 1 tower that stands to carry you through the game.

As for judgement I also question why the devs had to make it spin back and forth instead of having it path through enemies. It just causes judgement to be unable to penetrate any group of enemies so you end up spamming it and pretty much using it as your only tower to advance killing even more variety.

3. Bad enemy design
Besides the bat-circle that forces you to use a certain tower the enemies are generally too bulletspongey compared to your dps. The worst enemy however is the tank. The designer of that mob clearly hates counterplay.
If you have not plaied the game: Imagine an enemy that damages your hp while being out of your attack-range. Because you have zero control over your guns your tower will shoot every enemy that is closer first and since the tank moves slow you get a beating you cannot do sh*t about. To add insult to injury the slow speed causes other newly spawned enemies to permanently move in closer than the tank so your tower keeps on fighting trashmobs as your hp dwindle.
Oh and if you think one is bad there is also a wave with several just to drain your hp.

Also even after 10 hours I cannot tell if certain enemies are even weak to special damage types or not.

4. The game does not tell you enough information.
Yes yes demo build blabla but seriously it is a deckbuilder it should tell you things about your cards. You will find yourself playing and then question yourself "where is my tier 3 towercard I just plaied?" Well it turns out tier 3 and higher cards vanish after being plaied. The game does not tell you that.
Why? Because this rule is not even consistent for all tier 3 and higher cards. Some stay, some do not. Figure it out by playing with no indicator whatsoever.

5. Too much rng.
This is a game about deckbuilding so some rng is a given. The issue comes when your freedom is taken away and you are forced into a cycle of perma rng.
You may think "oh, you redraw your deck so sure there is some rng" and you are right. Here is the bad parts of rng tho.
You have zero influence on what you draw. Using 2x holy damage cards it would be nice to have a guaranteed holy damage card as one of the outcome picks. No such luck.
So if you focus on tower damage and get 3x minion damage cards it really sucks because draws are your lifeline. The worst part is you cannot even throw the cards away because you combine lower tiers into higher ones and your draws are limited. Not only do you end up with dead cards in your deck but also in your hand as you hope that rng lets you draw them with another useless card of the same tier to get rid of both.
A simple mechanic of allowing you to keep at least 1 card on hand would fix a lot of issues here.
Also a mechanic where the stat on the first card chosen is guaranteed to pop up in the outcome would make for way more strategy in combining.

However all this rng combined with higher tier cards vanishing on play and you end up constantly at the mercy of rng. This causes the game to be less of a deckbuilder and more of a permanent gacha.

6. Minions are just useless
You have the option to spawn minions only to find out their are even dumber than your tower and do about as much damage as throwing a wet teabag at the burgler breaking into your house. They also do not even draw the enemies from your tower but just do what your tower does but worse, because they also switch targets to the closest enemy to your tower and not to them. So enjoy your little useless henchman spending more time running around like headless chicken trying to get a shot in before your tower does than actually being worth their card.



Overall just focusing on the gameplay and not artwork or background setting I find this to be very poorly designed towerdefense at this point. A good bit of my time plaied stems from the simple fact that I tried to force certain loadouts by starting the game - combining the cards hopeing for the best - and then ending the run if I did not get what I want.
As a result I sadly have to say that there is just a total lackluster of viable builds even with good rng and that takes most of the joy out of a towerdefense in which you do not even maze.

Game crashed twice. Both times after 10 minutes of playing. Many animations, such as cursor and card movement are annoyingly slow. Text is small in a lot of places and very hard to read.

Honestly? Pretty boring. There are some interesting bones here, and I know this is just a demo, but if this demo does anything it makes me LESS interested in the full game, rather than more.