Cardlings Reviews

Floop the Pig

Good Game, no players.

I had this on my wishlist for a few months before purchasing it, intrigued by the combination of turn-based strategy, cards and resource gathering. However, when I started playing it, I discovered that there really wasn't that much to it, when the game actually wanted to progress beyond the loading screen that is. Turns out it would only start up if I had a medium sized world selected. So I jumped right into it, started a normal skill level game, only to find that within five turns all the additional buildings I had somehow managed to build were destroyed, and most of my units with them. The neighboring PC player was right next to me and I discovered the hard way that it was quite technologically superior, which prompted me to start a new game on the Easy level on a large world. But then, it wouldn't start on large, so I had to go back to medium. This time, no nearby PC players, but the unlimited turn just kept on going. I was constructing building after building during my second turn, so many that I was running out of room on the map. In the end I just got fed up with it so I quit, then uninstalled it. I've gotten more value out of games that I paid less for.

I'd like to see more for this game. It has really no 'story' mode or anything that keeps you playing it, it ends rather quickly unless you want to go online. I'd like to see a story mode, card upgrades, transforms, things that add more depth. For a cheap game it's good but I won't spend hours playing it. I would love to see the ability to rotate buildings or destroy plants / stones that are in the way, as well as the ability to go THROUGH buildings with your troops or around trees as it can be too easy to trap the troops.

I like the game's premise. Collect resources, play soldiers from cards on the battlefield, asynchronous turns: While you move your soldiers, your opponent builds their resource buildings. Two different victory paths, even: Collect enough resources to upgrade your castle or destroy your opponent. The art is okay. Someone thought that using a glowing, burning script to write card titles was such a cool idea it had to make it into the final game (it's not, really) and the only difference between stone quarries, gold mines and iron mines are the non-intuitive colors of their dots, but apart from that, the art is functional enough. No one ever playtested the game design though. Being able to place units around your own units is a horrible idea. Once you're in the lead with resources, you have won the game. It's a maddening design failure and one that could have been easily offset by the clever asynchronous turns: If you could place units only next to your own buildings, things would immediately be much more tactical and interesting.

A very interesting game where each turn one player is in a combat phase summoning their units, commanding and attacking with them, while the other player is in the building phase gathering ressources (by clicking on the dropped ressources) and placing their economy buildings (those gather nearby ressources automatically in greater quantity). Each turn those roles rotate. Units and buildings can only be placed near adjecent buildings and units. Since only the player in the combat phase can end the turn (it ends automatically after 90 seconds), the player in the building phase can gather ressources by klicking on them while waiting for the other player to finish. While in the beginning those 90 seconds seemed to go by very fast and I missed some attacks/buildings while reading what everything does, later you can learn to click faster on all the buttons or use the shortkeys and the 90 second limit becomes much more manageble. I also didn't like the initial idea of a "clicker" to gather falling ressources, but then it was actually pretty interesting, since the longer the enemy takes to complete the comabt turn, the longer you can gather them, ex. the more units he summons and prepares for a big attack, the longer you have to gather ressources manually or place buildings to counter him. After finishing the tutorial, I started my first game on normal and won, the difficulty on normal is fair, although at the start the enemy had a lot more units since I had no idea what unit does what and took me time to checkk all the stats. A game lasts approx. 30-45 mins. I think the game is mostly made for multyplayer, but I'll definitely also recommend this game for singleplayer. Also, praise to Eric Matyas for the great title screen music! Small edit: Sadly it seems the multiplayer doesn't work anymore.

I really want to like this game! It has such an interesting dynamic game flow. The push and pull of timing your plays to be as precise and efficient as possible to end your turn before your opponent gets a chance to build up as much is very interesting. Sadly, the parts I was most looking forward to are the parts that could still use some work. The card based unit selection is fine, if a bit random. Card based building however seems to have some issues. If the game goes on long enough, I end up with a hand full of entirely gold mines turn after turn, when there are at most 2-3 on the map at any given time and once they're built they're either destroyed or bribed, so there's no reason to have more than 3-4 in the entire 'deck'. Being able to view the 'deck' for units and buildings or at least know what the hand drawing mechanics are would help me feel less frustrated about this. If I could customize my decks, even just tweaking the balance of the existing types of cards, that would go a long way to improving my play experience. This game feels like a base game waiting for expansions to really expand it into something truly great. I'll check back in later and see if things have gotten better, but cannot recommend for the time being.