Recent reviews by Carnage

Can't actually use the Premium currency that makes up this price tag for a cosmetic set, because the cosmetic sets are more expensive than the currency you get lul

From the perspective of someone who is both a long time 40k fan and a competitive TCG player involved in the community:

Many things absolutely need to change before this game "releases" (Yes it's technically released, but Everguild is using the early access term to test the waters and figure out how much they can make this game cost)

Specifically:
- Warlords need to be the same rarity and accessible. The fact that each faction has a single commander that's just better than every other is absurd, not conducive to creative deckbuilding, and heavily contributes to the reasons this game feels extra pay to win
- Draft needs to either A) not cost $ and be an individual game mode, or B) let you keep the cards you draft for higher cost. Paying and working for what will average out to a single pack for greater than 50% of players is is not very rewarding
- Deckbuilder UI needs a complete rework, start by allowing players to add more than the deck limit. Currently you're unable to add a large amount of cards then deck thin, it's aggravating, clunky, and unnecessary.
- Drop the premium pass and make it free or increase the progression rate by maybe 250%-300%. Currently it is infuriatingly slow, as you're immediately greeted, after paying TWENTY USD, with a progression plan that will not result in a playable deck without hundreds of hours of grinding
- Starter decks need to be more focused. You're expecting players to try the game out with these, but a collection of singleton cards from every archetype only means your players are forced to either spend about 1k USD, or play the game losing for hundreds of hours. That's not appropriate if you're trying to make a real TCG.
- The turn timer currently will end your turn despite you still taking actions. This is entirely unacceptable and in a game filled with mechanics like regeneration and armor, I would consider this a game breaking oversight until addressed. The fix for this is extremely simple, just prevent the timer from ticking for 5 seconds after the active player completes an action. This has lost me several games at this point and is incredibly frustrating when you have to wait for all the animations to complete and suck up your limited time to make plays, you currently have to begin playing your turn before you're actually finished planning it to keep up with the animation timer drain

Most of my priority feedback here is on the egregious monetization and lack of progression, just to be clear there are plenty of balance issues I think should probably be investigated, specifically compressing the stat curve of early game drops a bit so that board wipes are more consistent, this game really needs better control options and some interactivity focused cards and more utility focused cards. This game is fundamentally a very static addition/subtraction simulator at the moment. The way the energy system works and odd tempo puts much less focus on card advantage and more focus on card value and tempo plays to keep snowballing board state. This leads to another point, If a card costs 5 it needs to threaten a win in the next few turns. If a card costs 6-10 it needs to win the game. There are basically zero cards in this game that I believe will see play because you are just skipping a turn to do nothing. Cards that cost 10 in a game like this need to have text that's closer to "Destroy each of your opponents units" or "Draw 5 cards, heal all of your units, and do some other thing" what is currently in this game are a collection of giant floundering dudes that come in for 10 mana, do limited damage to a overly specific target, then not attack because it's turn 10 and your opponent is about to start their turn and play 5 two cost cards that will just kill you.

I just don't understand how NRS can take something as exciting and timeless as a tag fighter and make it slow, predictable, boring and feel like garbage to play. Yet here we are, another year of the same formula in another attempt to dazzle casual players with admittedly high production quality and visuals, yet shockingly low playability. NRS follows the trend of stubbornly refusing to take from decades of better games in the genre to assist with their nonsensical gameplay design and appears to have really doubled down on trying to make this game as frustratingly counter intuitive to play as the last two. If you don't regularly play other fighting games, just move past this review and buy it because nothing I'm about to rant about matters to you. If you're dabbling in the genre and want to see if this is where you should start? Go purchase SF6 or any other game. This game will follow NRS history of no support and being abandoned after ~2 years. There's nothing here worth your time and investment. If you're a fighting game player wondering if you should check out MK1 instead of whatever game you're playing read on:

Pros:
- No restriction on AMBUSH assists, this is a great idea, calling assists mid animation like in a throw opens up tons of possibilities and is a great example of what can make these types of games great.
- Solid roster, there's a good mix of archetypes here, even a puppet character

Cons:
- Unfortunately pretty every thing else that is related to the core gameplay system. The method NRS uses here to read and dial up inputs is essentially a direct port of MK11. This ends up resulting in having to really slow down your thinking and reactions to match the speed of the game. There's a few points I want to cover that are directly related to this.
- Strings, this is a dial up game in that you will input any sequence prior to the execution of the sequence. This works in something like Tekken where movement is fluid and windows are large. In MK1 however, this functionally serves to limit the time in which reactionary offense can occur. You will not be hit confirming in this game mid string, you will also not be altering your inputs to react to uncommon situations, which is really self-defeating in a game with assists where player expression SHOULD be front in center of shifting offense and combo routes.
- Block button and down 1, This system is built entirely off of these two mechanics. You use a button to block in NRS games. That's fine but this is a universal left/right block effectively removing yet another use for assists. Additionally because there is no such thing as linking a normal in these games, and your buttons are so slow due to being components in a string, this results in a very slow "my turn - your turn" game pace. The strings in this game are built off the idea that down 1 will be your universal reversal to punish a string and take your turn back. However down 1 is unsafe on block. This results in collapsing the pressure in this game down to a few guesses, of which you need to make and input prior to having visual information of what's happening because you need to dial up your punish. It all feels like finger twister and is downright uncomfortable, and is really just unnecessary, just another barrier to converting your intentions to execution that feels designed by a committee of people who knew they had to make an MK game, but didn't understand what works in fighting games, so refuse to trim the fat from their system for the sake of making it "the thing that MK is".

I genuinely have never seen a series get such a free pass because most of the people who buy it and praise it are casually visiting the new MK and are not intending to stick around, They play this and assume that fighting games are tedious and annoying to play because this is all they've been exposed to. But those players COULD be fighting game players one day if NRS wasn't doing such a disservice by designing these clunky ass $70 animated films

Devs abandoned it, and pulled it from steam to charge $420 USD for an HTML version with pay per word, sub fees and microtransactions

Kino game but people are getting upset because they chose to make an uninformed purchase and thought it was EDF/Evolved/Anthem (which are all wildly different games by the way so you can really tell it's mostly people upset that a random game is not uniquely tailored to their individual tastes)

All in all, very solid Team-based hero-shooter with some good mechanics, maps and solid gameplay.

To be clear what you're getting is a PvP objective based game. This game is played over rounds, and there are a variety of objectives (typically payload and wave clear) with hopefully more to come (Exo culling rounds please). The structure is pretty neat, The first round is essentially a warm-up, where you're clearing waves while racing to one end of the map, whoever get's there first gets solid advantages and head start in the following round, but overall the PvE round slightly inconsequential and is focused on your teams ability to coordinate and wave clear. Round 2 is where both teams play a bit of tug of war via payload and PvP. The structure of the heroes is similar to what you would see in overwatch, however the big exception here is that it's not balanced in the same squishy and slow philosophy as overwatch. What you're getting here is great third person shooting, with well balanced abilities and a low (relatively) time to kill, that actually allows for some great tactics and individual mechanical skill to come through.

It really is unfortunate so many people were either misinformed by someone or not willing to look up and follow any information about a game before getting upset and have chose to start looking to form a brigade against a thing that is really neat for the people who were looking forward to it. You don't have to like every game and that's fine, but c'mon don't kill this thing the rest of us enjoy over it.

Stop giving people like this money

Negative value. You pay more for the characters than the character pass and get nothing else, so this is basically a 50% markup for 2 random pieces of avatar clothing

Very good digital version of a very ♥♥♥♥ game. If you're already a yugioh player you already probably play and don't need a review. If you play any other cardgame and are looking to get into YGH, don't.

Like a somehow buggier version of Tarkov without all the things that make Tarkov good

Bring back solo invasions tied to rune arcs or remove blue sentinels, don't have both