Shattered Heaven Reviews

Picked it up to scratch a card-battler itch. The deck building and battling is satisfying, but I was pleasantly surprised by the art and world-building. If you like the usual suspects of the genre, you will likely enjoy this one.

Story rich deck builder battler with some pretty interesting mechanics and a bangin' soundtrack. There's awesome sound design to all of the strikes and power-ups as well. The story rich part is really the distinguishing feature from the countless other options out there. That said, while there is a *lot* going on in the story, it's very difficult to dissect even from one ~25 hour playthrough. Everyone is lying to you all the time about everything. When you finally start to encounter trustworthy people who fill you in on what is really going on, you're still misinformed because everyone has been lying to THOSE people about everything always. It's really only at the very end of the 4th of 5 acts that you finally have a full picture of what is going on, why, and the stakes, by which point your meaningful choices have already been made. It is in many respects the HARD opposite of Mass Effect 3's ending. Rather than simply picking between 3 options at the end, you unknowingly narrow yourself down to a single option (of 3 to 4 endings) long before you have any comprehension of how the story could possibly conclude. Full price, maybe not, but absolutely any discount at all makes this well worth it. Difficulty: I would say increases quite steadily throughout the game, and it's very unlikely that your understanding of the mechanics, and character's power, will progress in step. I found I rolled through the early chapters effortlessly despite not really understanding all the mechanics until about the halfway point, and I continued to just barely scrape through the midgame without needing to take it seriously, and then in the endgame I would actually fail dungeons on each first attempt and have to deliberately re-spec characters to defeat certain encounters.