Maddmike Steam Curator

The early access label on “Dragon Eclipse” won’t leave you scratching your head. You’ll flirt with the boundaries of its content somewhere before the seven-hour mark, and far before then you’ll get intimate with its greatest vice: a consistent deprioritization of polish.

The UX of this game has problems. End-of-turn actions resolve back to front despite enemies facing opposite sides, so you’ll need to dart your eyes around your monitor just to follow what’s happening. Many screens make it unclear whether they’re expecting just a ‘click’ or a ‘click-and-drag’ from you thanks to bad feedback and no animations.

Dragon Eclipse just isn’t very tactile or satisfying to control; it’s had me scrambling the internet for antonyms of ‘feel’ just to get this review out.

Thankfully, if any genre can get away with those problems, it’s a roguelite deckbuilder. It’s here to tickle your brain, not your fingers, and if you can stomach a little underproduction you’d be doing a tremendous service to the systems underneath. That seven hours I spent was one sitting; a testament to how enthralling the game can be.

https://youtu.be/AOxnI1RNsl0

Dragon Eclipse’s Punnett square has a few key influences; something like Slay the Spire meets Pokemon. Each run has you taking three of your Mystlings, little evolvable creatures that can only say their own names, and trying to beef them up as much as possible before the Doomsday Clock is done ticking and the final boss comes to fight you.

Runs, successful or otherwise, yield experience that unlocks more card options for future runs, more eggs from which Mystlings can be hatched, and more trainers with their own set of passive boosts.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3274454008

The aspect of the ‘trainer’ isn’t just a Pokemon reference but a meaningful differentiation in how Dragon Eclipse plays: your Mytstlings are beings independent of you and your cards. They have their own attacks, their own spells, and their own passives. Your bread and butter attack card in a regular deckbuilder might read as ‘Deal 6 Damage’, but in Dragon Eclipse, your card is more like issuing an attack rather than an attack in and of itself—one whose power is contingent on the power of the Mystling.

In that way, the relationship your cards have with the game is Dragon Eclipses’ key feature. Here, they’re much more like support cards to nudge your beasts into particular patterns or tease out strength that’s latent within them.

You can feel that distinction even at the control level: you don’t click and drag your cards on an enemy to be attacked, you click and drag them onto an ally to be commanded (a cool touch, albeit one that demands a lot of unlearning inherited muscle memory to do reliably).

Hitting the end-turn button doesn’t just pass the game over to your opponent but also causes everyone to activate their end-of-turn effects, usually a combination of self-buffs and attacks on the enemy.

There are a lot of strategy-making opportunities within this system and even more Mystling synergies to find. One of my most successful runs involved using a Mystling with easy access to card draw and a Mystling with bonus damage contingent on hand size. In another run, I ran two ‘support’ monsters that just existed to turbo-scale my Frogmar, a volcanic frog with incredible strength scaling at the cost of losing shields for it.

Finding and exploiting these combinations is great fun, though having a build with extreme reliance on a singular Mystling does pose risks. One of the incentives for going wide and keeping the whole team strong is the way passive roguelite boosts work here.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3274453904
You can buy ‘relics’ after each fight, offering permanent upgrades for the rest of the run. There are two twists: you tie them to a specific Mystling on purchase and their cost scales up depending on how many relics that Mystling already has equipped

The further you invest into one individual Mystling, the more costly that investment becomes, giving you a reason to spread your strength instead of just blindly following one strategy.

Evolution encourages similar behavior: Mystlings get their new, mature form only when four relics have been equipped to them. If your strategy has you funneling all strength into a singular Mystling, you may find yourself at the final boss with only a single evolved monster—sacrificing the bonus stats and empowered cards that evolving all your units could have brought.

Though to be honest, that may not matter. Outside of its lack of polish and content, the biggest problem a deckbuilding enthusiast will face with Dragon Eclipse is that it’s just too easy. Even on its hardest difficulty, the final boss is a pushover. Though a Doomsday Clock sits over the run itself, most of the fights within a run don’t have enemy scaling—that makes it far too easy to rely on defensive tools and cheese the encounters through attrition.

It’s also too consistent. The downside of cards sharing a smaller portion of your power budget here is the fact that your deckbuilding fundies are secondary to your choice of Mystlings at the start of the game. Because so much power exists inside of the Mystlings themselves, you’re like 80% of your way towards a strategy by the time the run starts. Some sort of semi-random Mystling selection or even just an incentive to play with sub-standard combos would go a long way.


Dragon Eclipse is crudely made and content-light, but its teambuilding and monster collecting is a compelling twist on the deckbuilder standard. It’s worth a play despite not currently being worth the long-term relationship this genre is often capable of; it has a strong foundation to go from good to great—assuming it uses this early access period to evolve.

Follow our Curator page, Summit Reviews, to see more high quality reviews regularly.

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31028489-Maddmike/]Maddmike Steam Curator[/url] The early access label on “Dragon Eclipse” won’t leave you scratching your head. You’ll flirt with the boundaries of its content somewhere before the seven-hour mark, and far before then you’ll get intimate with its greatest vice: a consistent deprioritization of polish. The UX of this game has problems. End-of-turn actions resolve back to front despite enemies facing opposite sides, so you’ll need to dart your eyes around your monitor just to follow what’s happening. Many screens make it unclear whether they’re expecting just a ‘click’ or a ‘click-and-drag’ from you thanks to bad feedback and no animations. Dragon Eclipse just isn’t very tactile or satisfying to control; it’s had me scrambling the internet for antonyms of ‘feel’ just to get this review out. Thankfully, if any genre can get away with those problems, it’s a roguelite deckbuilder. It’s here to tickle your brain, not your fingers, and if you can stomach a little underproduction you’d be doing a tremendous service to the systems underneath. That seven hours I spent was one sitting; a testament to how enthralling the game can be. https://youtu.be/AOxnI1RNsl0 Dragon Eclipse’s Punnett square has a few key influences; something like Slay the Spire meets Pokemon. Each run has you taking three of your Mystlings, little evolvable creatures that can only say their own names, and trying to beef them up as much as possible before the Doomsday Clock is done ticking and the final boss comes to fight you. Runs, successful or otherwise, yield experience that unlocks more card options for future runs, more eggs from which Mystlings can be hatched, and more trainers with their own set of passive boosts. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3274454008 The aspect of the ‘trainer’ isn’t just a Pokemon reference but a meaningful differentiation in how Dragon Eclipse plays: your Mytstlings are beings independent of you and your cards. They have their own attacks, their own spells, and their own passives. Your bread and butter attack card in a regular deckbuilder might read as ‘Deal 6 Damage’, but in Dragon Eclipse, your card is more like issuing an attack rather than an attack in and of itself—one whose power is contingent on the power of the Mystling. In that way, the relationship your cards have with the game is Dragon Eclipses’ key feature. Here, they’re much more like support cards to nudge your beasts into particular patterns or tease out strength that’s latent within them. You can feel that distinction even at the control level: you don’t click and drag your cards on an enemy to be attacked, you click and drag them onto an ally to be commanded (a cool touch, albeit one that demands a lot of unlearning inherited muscle memory to do reliably). Hitting the end-turn button doesn’t just pass the game over to your opponent but also causes everyone to activate their end-of-turn effects, usually a combination of self-buffs and attacks on the enemy. There are a lot of strategy-making opportunities within this system and even more Mystling synergies to find. One of my most successful runs involved using a Mystling with easy access to card draw and a Mystling with bonus damage contingent on hand size. In another run, I ran two ‘support’ monsters that just existed to turbo-scale my Frogmar, a volcanic frog with incredible strength scaling at the cost of losing shields for it. Finding and exploiting these combinations is great fun, though having a build with extreme reliance on a singular Mystling does pose risks. One of the incentives for going wide and keeping the whole team strong is the way passive roguelite boosts work here. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3274453904 You can buy ‘relics’ after each fight, offering permanent upgrades for the rest of the run. There are two twists: you tie them to a specific Mystling on purchase and their cost scales up depending on how many relics that Mystling already has equipped The further you invest into one individual Mystling, the more costly that investment becomes, giving you a reason to spread your strength instead of just blindly following one strategy. Evolution encourages similar behavior: Mystlings get their new, mature form only when four relics have been equipped to them. If your strategy has you funneling all strength into a singular Mystling, you may find yourself at the final boss with only a single evolved monster—sacrificing the bonus stats and empowered cards that evolving all your units could have brought. Though to be honest, that may not matter. Outside of its lack of polish and content, the biggest problem a deckbuilding enthusiast will face with Dragon Eclipse is that it’s just too easy. Even on its hardest difficulty, the final boss is a pushover. Though a Doomsday Clock sits over the run itself, most of the fights within a run don’t have enemy scaling—that makes it far too easy to rely on defensive tools and cheese the encounters through attrition. It’s also too consistent. The downside of cards sharing a smaller portion of your power budget here is the fact that your deckbuilding fundies are secondary to your choice of Mystlings at the start of the game. Because so much power exists inside of the Mystlings themselves, you’re like 80% of your way towards a strategy by the time the run starts. Some sort of semi-random Mystling selection or even just an incentive to play with sub-standard combos would go a long way. [h2] In Conclusion [/h2] Dragon Eclipse is crudely made and content-light, but its teambuilding and monster collecting is a compelling twist on the deckbuilder standard. It’s worth a play despite not currently being worth the long-term relationship this genre is often capable of; it has a strong foundation to go from good to great—assuming it uses this early access period to evolve. [quote]Follow our Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/]Summit Reviews[/url], to see more high quality reviews regularly.[/quote]