Mahokenshi - The Samurai Deckbuilder Reviews

Very unique take on the roguelike deckbuilder formula!

Beautiful art, amazing music, fun game play. An easy recommendation, I had a good time with this one.

I really wrote Mahokenshi off based on its "we have Legend Of The Five Rings at home" presentation, and this was a mistake. It's a gem. It's not doing anything particularly clever with its worldbuilding, but this is fine. The art is lovely and made by humans, and the gameplay is fully the center of the experience. Mahokenshi self-describes as a deckbuilder, and this is straight up incorrect. It's a strategy parkour game. You don't putter around a little map getting into card duels from time to time. You schmoove, sprouting wings, kickflipping over dudes, landing sick combos that take enemies out before they can try to attack. There's meta progression that you unlock through challenge coins, and there's little vignettes and emergent storytelling based on where you go on a given map, but the core of what makes Mahokenshi good is how good movement feels in this, I will stress, chunky hex grid based strategy rpg. The maniac smile that spread across my face when I realized how it plays, I'll tell ya. Now, this is a game that takes you seriously in terms of its difficulty, and I can see folks potentially bouncing off of this. I don't think it's unfairly hard, but some challenges definitely seem to want you to come back later when you've invested a few more challenge coins. Also, on the subject of gripes, you have three upgrade trees and it feels like Humility is far and away the best of the three. Also, you unlock characters one at a time and you level them separately, so there's a negative incentive to switch playstyles, even if you might have more fun trying out the other clans. I don't think any of this has disrupted my play experience so far. I'll update the review if my feelings change, but just on raw gameplay this is worth it full price, and a steal on discount. Edit: Updating because I was wrong. Characters hit max xp pretty quickly, and a lot of unlocks are transferrable between characters, encouraging you to switch between them. Also, crucially, each character rocks, and the clan identities aren't 1-to-1 with L5R. The kappa aren't the crab, even if they fit the same defensive profile. They do cash manipulation, they maneuver by charging, they have AoEs. And sure, ultimately this is all in service of building up a stockpile of a million counterattack procs by farming their defense value to the moon. That's crab-like. But even as a defensive class it has a ton of flexibility to its playstyle and feels both insanely broken and fun to play. Once you've maxed out your tengu, try each character. 2nd Edit: Rolled credits. Even taking your time and fishing for challenge completions, I think Mahokenshi feels a little short. This and the story basically being wallpaper are my only complaints. Every character feels great. The schmoovement is extrodinary. I'd love to see another of these from the studio.

Short game which took me 17-18 hours to get all the achievements, but I found it a lot of fun. Needing to your deckbuilding with both movement and damage, and buff cards is a really unique mechanic which I really enjoyed. Each mission is a unique map where you have to collect cards to add to your deck from scratch while moving around the map and engaging in combat, doing side quests and obviously each has its own main objective. Each of your 4 Mahokenshi you get to control feel very unique with their own cards and powerful combos you can pull off. The one is high mobility with her flying while dealing high damage by stacking strength buffs. The other is a tank able to abdorb massive amounts of damage while having a retaliation mechanic and an ability to turn the defence into damage. The other has a stealth and poison mechanic, and the last one is a caster with half the hp of the others but very high damage aoe spells that are single use cards. Each have rewarding combos you can pull off and it is a lot of fun. Very meditative and relaxing game. The story is extremely superficial, but just serves to give some context for what is happening on each map and mission, and serves its purpose well, it doesn't need to be more than that. I encountered a few very minor bugs, one was a visual glitch which was easily fixed, another time an AI companion blocked my ability to complete a mission by blocking the goal, and once my cards didn't draw and I couldn't take my turn needing a restart. Each of these only happened once and were mostly minor. The only real frustration I had was with how the RNG of collecting cards on a map can screw you over a bit sometimes. For example some cards function in combination with other cards, like dealing damage based on the number f spirits you have, or interacting with your wards, or being able to be used from stealth. If you can't find the cards which combo with these abilities, ie cards that give you spirits, wards, or stealth, then it is quite frustrating to try and do smooth combat. This was mostly a minor thing, but sometimes a did restart a mission just due to really bad RNG on the cards I found and lack of synergy between them. Overall I hada lot of fun and would highly recommend it.

TLDR version: 7/10 Cardgamer/deckbuilder/roguelike enthusiast: 9/10 Solid game with a fun theme, good storytelling and fun and engaging mechanics. biggest problem i have is i want more. I play a lot of deck-builders, especially the rogue-like kind. I really like this one. It really brings a bit fresh to the genre the samurai aesthetic is a more or less unexplored theme for this. Completing most levels i have encountered is not too difficult, but if you want to complete the extra side objectives it can get pretty tricky, the game doesn't require you to do so right away, you also don't have to successfully get every side objective on any given map in one run, so you can retry them to get meta-progression points. This game has a really interesting way of incorporating movement and positional awareness into the game completely allowing you to say shoot in and land a hit and then use movement cards to scoot back out reducing the incoming retaliation. There are definitely cards that give a payoff for you maneuvering into an ideal position before using them. All in all i think its a fantastic game and a great building point for new games in the genre the few things i would like to see are: a DLC/Sequal/Update that adds some multiplayer to the game a lot of game sin the genre are starting to embrace that playing card/board games with friends on the internet is a like-able thing and this game really puts off that vibe of being a "Board game" and a "Card game" at the same time as still also firmly being a video game. Games like Hellcard and across the Obelisk prove that the multiplayer formula for these games when implemented well can really make the game play super fun. A little-bit stronger of a theme for each character, they are all neat and fun to play but they don't really leverage enough uniqueness in thier play strategies since any character can kinda grab any other colored card. I'de like to see thier starting deck and desired cards have a little more nuance and impact on how that run will go. If you look at The new Ninja turtles splintered time roguelike, sure you want all the upgrades you can have but there are certain ones that match up perfectly with certain turtles strategies (on hit for Michealangelo, Master strike for Leonardo, tool activation for Donatello etc.) It would also be fun to have some longer maps where you really get to build your deck for a while ... the current maps especially the ones that require turn limit clears can feel short and like you don't really get a chance to engage in the deck-building as much as you'de like .... it kinda feels like you just have to take every movement card you can to run around the map quickly ... maybe some bosses that guard teleporters so there is more than one intelligent way to solve the crossing the map problem. Within the setting you have created, maybe a phased map or two where you have multiple objective to complete the map but some of them are choices and you don't have time to do both then once complete providing you with a new set of multiple objectives you cannot complete all of. Making each play through on a map a little more fresh, so that you aren't only replaying the maps for the harder side objectives but also to see how different the map plays out if you make a different story decision.

Loved the gameplay and theme, played decent on the Deck too...until I hit a hard lock bug around the third or fourth level. The only game I've ever requested a refund on. Will consider repurchasing if the developer patches a lot of bugs (based on other reviews as well).

As others have said, beautiful game until it crashes with a corrupted save, leaving you unable to ever finish the game. This occurs over two accounts& computers in our household alone, in different levels. The issue has been reported multiple times for over a year now without any response or action taken by the developer. Inconceivable that this is still being sold.