Arcanium: Rise of Akhan

Form a team of three heroes, assemble your decks and power up as much as you can before facing the boss. Very formulaic gameplay, but enough content to keep you coming back for a while Pros: -16 different characters to unlock, each with unique cards and abilities. Additionally, for each hero, you can use one of three Heirloom artifacts that let you lean into a different playstyle/archetype for that run (e.g. tanking hits vs dealing backlash damage, summoning minions vs. applying burn to enemies) -Progressive unlocking system where you earn experience with each separate hero to unlock more cards for them in future runs, which keeps you coming back for more -Unlockable difficulty levels - you might struggle on the lower levels as you’re still learning the game, but now I can’t even imagine playing on less than level 4 Cons: -My only complaint about gameplay is that it is comparatively easier than other roguelikes. In Slay the Spire for example, you might win 1 out of 5 games in normal mode, 1 out of 10 once you get to the higher challenge level. But even at maximum difficulty in this game, I still win more than half the time. Part of this stems from the “open map” design where you can go back to a capital and heal whenever you want (though the price does increase every time). But the deckbuilding aspect is also very forgiving - you can edit your deck between battles, and it has to have between 9 and 14 cards. So unlike other games, there’s no “bad” choices, no times when you’re forced to dilute your deck. If anything, you get to replace your weak cards with stronger ones, and by the end of the game, you’re cycling through your entire deck every 2-3 turns. -My only other primary issues have to do with the user interface. While this is a game, it’s abundantly clear that it was not originally designed for mobile. For example, when you’re scrolling through your cards, you can’t tap and drag; you have to put your finger on the scrolling icon and move that. When you’re upgrading your cards however, you can tap and drag, but holding down your finger on a card is how you expand it so you can read it more closely, so if you take more than a second to scroll down, you get interrupted by a card blowing up in your face. It would also greatly benefit from a way to sort cards or artifacts (e.g., by rarity) instead of only displaying them oldest to newest. -Finally, the main reason I’m only giving 4 stars is because the game closes a lot. It’s not while I’m playing that

This game for having a mobile port is amazing one thing though is that at first it seems that it’s impossible but if you keep playing for long enough you will learn to love it

For over 6 months the game crashes when choosing a Netflix profile to sign in when. As soon as I tap the profile the app just closes. As far as I can tell there is no way to bypass this problem and I’m actually shocked it hasn’t been fixed in all this time. I’ve reinstalled the game and tried on multiple iPhones running the latest versions of iOS.

One are the best games? I’ve played in a long time. Good progression, good fights requires smarts. balanced beatable on every difficulty level. If you know what you’re doing, it’s great totally worth your time!

There’s a good game in there But the theme is so generic, UI is exceptionally clumsy, constant surprises that ruin a run simply because it didn’t tell you what would happen. It’s fine? But I wouldn’t bother with it

First tutorial mission doesn’t allow progression after selecting Ability reward, can’t even exit to menu (options grayed out).

This game takes after Dream Quest and Slay the Spire but offers multiple characters similar to the lord of the rings tcg. Great innovations and UI. Don’t listen to the other reviews saying the game is impossible. I was able to beat the arkhan boss on my first try with the starting level 1 lion, fox, cat on Normal Adventure. I did not have any unlocks and this was ,y first time playing the game. It took strategy and it took me 4 hours since I had to think hard about my strategy and read all the cards.

Game is a lot of fun, but picking a card and what to do with it is frustrating sometimes. Dash+attack sometimes won’t dash first if you don’t slide the card perfectly

Beat the arena only to receive a black screen and can’t continue. Forced quit, and it happened again.

This is a deck building rogue like in the vein of Dream Quest and night of the full moon. Moderate learning curve, as both the battles and world map have quite a few mechanics involved. Some of those mechanics, such as the major and minor buffs are not always well-explained, which made fine-tuning decks challenging. My other complaint is the metaprogression. I don’t think even the best player could beat the boss on normal difficulty starting a new save game. Increasing your character’s and map’s experience levels unlocks more powerful cards, making subsequent runs much easier. I have mixed feelings about that. Some assets are incomplete, with flavor text missing and at least one feature (execute) that is present but not functional. Graphics, music, and animation are all good. Art style is consistent.