Follow our curator page: IndieGems if you like and want to see more reviews like this one.

The Land of Glass is an interesting game. There is plenty of originality, and the artwork is beautiful. But there are too many flaws about this game at the moment, let me elaborate.

There are several campaigns and each campaign has a larger map, leading to essentially dungeons that further progress the story. Each campaign follows two characters of the four available races of the game as they deal with the portals that are fouling up the world. The stories following the characters are fairly interesting, giving the player a good view into the mindset of the characters as you play.

The game revolves around collecting cards, managing your deck, and battling with the cards continually. In between the card fights you have dialogue and minimal movement options for the next thing to do or the next step to take. The card game is fairly interesting and also fairly challenging. It is simultaneous card laying with simple rules for cooldowns. The basics are easy to learn.

You have several different kinds of cards, the most basic ones are the attack and defense cards. There are two grids that show up in each battle, there is a grid on the left, representing your opponent(s) and the grid on the right represents your character. You have to move attack cards into the opponents grid, and defense cards into your own grid. If you attack a defense grid that your opponenet does not have any defense in or has defense weaker than your attack card, you damage your opponent. There is a health bar at the top of each character on the battlefield to give you an idea of how far they will be knocked back with each attack and damage. This remind me of Super Smash Bros in that your goal is to knock your enemies off the grid before they do the same to you.

Other cards include stat-boosting equipment cards, strength-boosting cards that increase your deck's carrying capacity, spells to be played in-game that offers healing to you, individual or area damage to the enemies, or other specialty cards that directly destroy your enemies's defense, so in essense, armor break. There are quite a few magic type cards, and many different cards to collect. The dynamic cardplay idea is very good, but this gets really repetitive after a few battles, you are constantly in a clicking frenzy trying to strategically place cards.

Due to the frantic nature of the card laying, I read in a different review that you need a controller to play. This is not entirely true. I find that a controller is more difficult to play than using a mouse. The major complaint was that you have to drag the card to the grid with the mouse. In the options menu, you can change this from "Drag to Place" to "Click to Place" your cards, then the mouse is much easier than the controller. I used both to test it out, the mouse came out in favor, in my opinion.

The card battles range from easy to nearly impossible, fortunately there are difficulty selections, so that a more casual player can learn the game and pick up the basics without too much headache. But when the battles get tough, it is truly challenging, even in easy mode. So be aware of this. The difficulty ramps up a little too much, in my opinion. If there are already different difficulty settings, the easy setting should allow the players who want to progress with the story to not have to do too much rapid-clicking or grinding. In grinding, the only thing that can be done is essentially get into a dungeon, win some fights, then leave. The reason for this is that winning battles earns you card drops, and if you obtain enough powerful cards, you can then challenge the more difficult opponents.

The art is very good, very bright and eye-catching. Everything is put together in mosaic form. With the landscape pieced together by colorful blocks. Every new area you go into, or any old area that you revisit, will start by self-forming from individual small pieces. This is pleasant to look at the first few times, after a while, it feels unnecessary and feels like a not very good way to waste time watching the landscape form from little blocks. In addition, since the story is fairly linear, and there is usuall only 1-2 interest points that you can click on at any point, the click on an interest point then watching your character walk to that spot to inevitably start a card fight gets really old really quickly. The characters move slowly, that is not surprising, given their relative sizes on the maps. But to watch them move from place to place is not needed. There are times when I wish the game were set up like Hero of the Kingdom games where the click on an interest point means instantaneous interaction. Time-saving measures like that is usually more desirable. When the characters are interacting with one another and talking, pop-up dialogue boxes tell the whole story anyway.

The music is not too pleasing to the ear. I listened to it for quite a while when I played. Each map's battles seem to trigger the same tracks. So getting into 10 fights in a row in the same map means that you hear the same stuff every time. I do not know how many tracks are available, but some modulation would be welcome. Fortunately this can be easily turned off if it does not suit the player's tastes.

I realize that this game is played as it was designed. But I always have to ask myself, am I having fun? The answer was yes for about the first 1/2 hour, after that, it was very repetitive, and I realized that I was merely fighting the multitudinous card battles in order to view the next set of dialogue, to see what was going on with the characters. I am glad that the story interested me, but it was disheartening to see the unique and freshness of the combat wear off and the frantic clicking is no longer a draw. I think if this is how the game is meant to be played, that's fine. If an toggle option to turn the card game into a turn-based card game, that would be really interesting, and would give you plenty of time to seriously consider the importance of each card in that deck. In a card game based PC game, that card-deck building and utilization should be the most important aspect. If the card game loses its appeal to the audience, general interest would wean as well.

Overall, I cannot recommend the game at this time. The cons outweigh the pros:

Pros:
+Excellent artwork.
+Good stories.
+Card game is unique and interesting.
+Interesting characters

Cons:
-Card game is less strategic, and more frantic clicking. Just not my style.
-Card game becomes repetitive and less fun rather quickly.
-Music is too repetitive, had to turn it off.
-Artistic generation of maps become repetitive.
-Characters move around a non-explorable map slowly, just time-consuming.
-Not worth the asking price.

At the end of the day, I just felt that I was not having a lot of fun.

I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.

So, you get to walk around the map heaing the conversation of the two main characters as they expose the story. The combat is card based, but not like most games. The trick is you must put red attack cards in a grid that represents the enemy armor. You simultaneously must maintain postive number in your blue defense grid. The cooldown is longer if you attempt to overload a single spot so you have to spread it around. Grid shape changes from time to time. The other cards do something to the battlefield or grid to provide variance. You do not get to see the AI intentions, you will only know what happens when your defense grid breaks.

There are 4 stories- humans, drax, frogs, and some sort of jackal looking dude. You will get to play through the events from each race's perspective. Very appealing look and the combats only take a minute to play out. If you get stuck you can go back to previous over-world map and take another path. No leveling up, but you get gear that helps stats. You cannot grind this out, you must win with the cards you have at the start of the dungeon, but you get a card or two every victory.

It's an actually original idea for once. I'm really tired of playing the same game over and over, and the card-based combat feels fresh.

This game is an interesting experiment, but I don't think it works. You've got action combat with a fancy grid and people being knocked about, which sounds cool... however:
The stamina bar, knocking about, and aoe blast effect stuff is both fiddlier than the grid, and less important, so I'm not sure they're better elements than a simple health bar with regeneration would have been.
Drag and drop just doesn't feel particularly good to do as an action game thing, so the game ends up feeling physically less fun to play than it should.
Many of the fights end up playing out the same.
The music is very repetitive.

The Land of Glass is a visually rich and challenging game which delivers unique combat in a well realised world. If you are willing to pit yourself against deciphering the combat system then a land of complexity and beauty awaits your discovery.

Full review: http://pixelpopnetwork.com.au/2018/04/the-land-of-glass/

Art ! This game is VERY good stylistically, in fact ; it's why I wanted to check it out in the first place!

You are set with multiple characters, each with their own story ( warning, some of the intros are a bit on the long side, but they do their best to keep you entertained, while also teaching you the basics of the game.

This is where.. things kind of get messy.

The battle system has you placing cards on a grid, one on the left for attack, one on the right for defense.
you place a card of a number value on the attack side ( which represents the opponent's defense) higher numbers removes defense, and when you lower a spot on the attack grid below 0, your attack cards will start to push the enemy.

Your goal is to push the enemies off the level ( think smash bros )
I do NOT recommend you use Keyboard and mouse, you will absolutely get your butt kicked every time.

controller works fantastic, when you pick up an atacl card, you are instantly in the attack card grid, and same for defense.
If you play with mouse, you have to pick up the cards, and drag them over to the grids - this eats up time, and the fights are in real time - so you cannot stop to do things.

You are also given magic cards, equipment cards and other things ( they are explained as the mechanics get deeper, the battle system is actually pretty intensive )

After a fight, you are awarded cards - and you canonly equip so many at a time ( represented by weight - which increases as you level up )

you cannot grind for more cards, you are always given the same ones - so how you make your deck is up to you to decide - and it will affect your every fight after the introduction period.

The writing is adequate, I didn't play every character story, but from what I did play - I enjoyed the various stories, and how they interconnect with each other.

I will say this though - don't play for too long in a siiting, this game will tire out your hands very quickly due to the rapid pace of combat.

It kept me engaged, and I think you will enjoy it as well !

+

frantic repetitive movements.

Weird game (and I'm a big fan for it being weird), but too simple. The game is centered around throwing cards onto a grid in order to reduce defenses and eventually knock enemies out of the ring, sumo-style. You get to construct a deck to determine what you use to attack enemies, which is good since there's little reason to hold middle-weight cards or a large amount of grid magic or field magic. Because each of attack, defense, and two types of magic are bound by separate cooldown timers, the deck construction simply allows one to streamline their deck to one grid spell, two field spells (heal and slick/damage), big defense cards, small attack cards to soften, big attack cards to kill

After coming to grips with the general pace of the game, you learn that all the stats of monsters shown prior to each encounter really don't matter. The same strategy works the whole way through the four campaigns and amounts to little more than throwing cards as fast as possible . The processional nature of the combat is not nearly engaging enough for its long hours of repetitive fights. To note: Difficulty selection seems to only change the speed at which the game runs, so increasing the difficulty doesn't make the game more interesting.

The story has some nice characters to it, though its overarching plot is baffling, leaving major questions about the nature of magic and the monsters invading the world. The four campaigns are completely separate from one another (as opposed to being the parallel narratives I initially expected). The Prophecy narrative is the strongest of them with two sober characters intimately connected to their culture and history. The Redemption story feels pointless with two characters who talk past each other almost the whole run.
Also, why glass? I mean, it looks cool, but does it have some thematic resonance that I just missed for 20 hours?

I'm saddened that a game like this doesn't have that many reviews, so here's mine. While certainly not a masterpiece I found it to be a competently made and reasonably fun to play collectible card game with decent variety, likable characters, and a unique card battling system.

Cards are placed on a grid in real time with a variety of effects, mostly serving to break through defense cards with attack cards. While this is happening your characters rush toward the enemy behind the grids, providing a helpful and dynamic visual representation. Keeping your character strong enough to get knocked off the edge while maintaining the aggression to knock off the enemy feels pretty rewarding.

The game has four campaigns, and at this time I've only played through one, but that alone was more than six hours for me. I think I'll return to do the others at some point, thanks to how humorous the dialogue was between the amphibious magical protagonists of the first campaign I picked.

The story is delivered at a brisk clip between battles with opportunities to shop, build your deck, and upgrade. While card variety isn't the best I've seen, it's certainly not a slouch either since many of them have graphical effects in the battle and can even be aimed at your character or the enemies rather than the grid.

My gripes are relatively minor. I'm never one to bother checking my PC specs, I just game on a laptop, so I had to turn down a lot of the lighting effects to get it to run well. (It was still quite pretty.) I could've used some more information on the exact mechanics of some card effects, like the elemental magics that affect cooldowns and placement. I was never so confused that I couldn't win a battle on the second or third try though, so it rarely mattered.

All in all I enjoyed my time with it and I think it deserves more attention for trying new things and largely succeeding. Pros: art, characters, length, battle system. Cons: performance (on weak machines) and tutorializing. If I had to give it a numerical score: 7/10.