What seems like a fun game at a glance and has a unique take really starts to fall apart at the seams as you dig into the design philosophy about "difficulty" the balance has.

The rarer cards fall into one of two categories "expensive and unplayable" or "spammable and break the game" without really a middle ground. Hit the right build and play right and you can just break things. Don't and you lose.

The way the design tries to handle this is by limiting access. Which philosophically makes sense. But the implementation is very heavy handed as you climb through the difficulty ranks.

In the campaign there are several chapters where you are. at the mercy of the RNG of the shop. In at least 3 of them you have several back to back fights that will literally stunlock you to death if you don't perfect block every turn. They gave an enemy a spammable AoE stun and then make you fight 3 of them and call it balance.

In the roguelike mode this philosophy manifests by taking any skill expression out of the game in the first place. Boss drop tables are indistinguishable from a common hallway fight at times.

Then eventually you no longer get options from the boss and they just give you a random common card for killing a floor boss. For context this effect is often paired with a powerful boon to balance how limiting it is in other deckbuilders, and even then it's considered situational. In this you just get that curse upfront.

This game has strong bones but is missing something significant to really make it shine. If they fix it. I'll update this review, but for now skip the game if you enjoy Ascension style climbs and replayability.

If you like the idea of a linear story with deckbuilding aspects maybe give it a shot, but I would wait a few patches unless you enjoy being frustrated.

I was very excited for the game and played a lot of early access. The 1.0 release feels like they are taking some thing in the wrong direction.

I buy a lot of games from the Slay the Spire genre so I've played a lot of them. I thought I'd love this one because (a) it's a card battler, and (b) the goofy superhero cartoon art style is pretty. I was so wrong.

On the good side, the art is beautiful and the characters are cute, especially at first. The JRPG-style battles are not a bad idea; you get a pool of mana to fuel your abilities, which grows by 1 each combat round, allowing you to unleash stronger powers after a few rounds of battle. There are a variety of powers and each hero gets their own set, with slightly different mechanics. For example, your starting hero is a critical hit guy who focuses on attack, while one of the early unlocks is a defensive guy who focuses on ramping up block. There are others who increase your attack strength through "corruption" (on enemies) or "rage" (on your own guys), and the opponents have varieties of all of this stuff too. After each battle you get to pick one power from a set of three determined by which heroes are in your group, plus you collect money that you can spend in the shop to buy more cards or one-shot potions that heal or protect your heroes.

The main issue in my opinion is that the unlocks require going through the excruciatingly long campaign, which is easy in the beginning but quickly ends up being a series of puzzle fights where you play "guess the intended build." For example, sometimes you really need dodge because you'll be facing a foe that tosses out a huge single-target attack at a particular round, so you can't dodge too early or you'll be in cooldown when it fires off. Other times you need block stacking or rapid attacking. This would be fine except the story also plays out while you're doing it, so if you lose, you have to replay through repetitive story dialogue. The story dialogue is cute at first but after a while it becomes the same 8th-grade jokes over and over, and you start rooting for the villains. Ha ha, the slimes are all named Bob, so funny! But less so the 90th time you read it. At one point a bug triggered a conversation where the lava defender hero became "mom" and scolded every enemy defeated, which turned them into pacifier-sucking "baby" Bobs. This joke was not very funny the first time and sure wasn't funny the 15th time.

After each step of the campaign, you reset all your heroes back to the default and start the next run back at square one. It feels like advancing has little impact, as it's always temporary. They made this choice I assume to make balancing the fights easier for them, since you return to baseline after each sequence of fights. It seems a bit demoralizing, though, when you build up a rocking combo only to reset back to Square 1 for your next step through the campaign.

There is a mode where you play a more traditional roguelike and this isn't as bad, but the unlocks are all behind the campaign, which frankly is way too long. I'm sure this is someone's cup of tea, but it just wasn't mine.

As other people have mentioned, new content/heroes incredibly grindy and unfun to unlock. To unlock the newest heroes for example, you have to beat roguelite mode on medium, hard, Apocalypse, then finally Apocalypse 2. Which might not be a problem except that animations slow down the game making progress slower, and unless you have the absolute perfect build you can't beat Ragnarath. Wanted to enjoy, but not worth the hassle.