Card Fuse Reviews

6/10 A good game marred by too many issues. If you're the dev reading this, i respect that you made this. I had a surprising amount of fun, but the graphics do not do this game justice. It did really feel like a game that a passionate solo dev went "wouldnt it be really cool if this game had this?". It really makes me want to make my own card game. That being said. 1.) This game does not onboard you at all. Even beating this game on the hardest difficulty and on the shortest board state i still do not fully understand what all the numbers and effects that appear above the enemies' heads or what fully happening. 2.)Card fusion, is also really aggravating to do. Since your card stats are always brought in the middle between two cards, the sheer amount of fusions that objectively makes your deck worse is kind of insane. I fully understand why each fusion should average in the middle but so few cards give attack/defence meaning most cards got worse with each effect added. If we are to take the base deck's anchor where one mana deals 6 damage, I didn't ever beat that benchmark. Most of the time I would double the damage maybe, but the mana would just to something like 5, effectively cutting my dps. The only setup I could increase my damage output was making cards that cantripped. Draw 1, energy gain 2, but it requires the stars to align to get them on one card. By that point it didnt matter the sword did like 1 damage if you could chain them. I found myself wanting to stay around level 2 and 3 to break my deck as increasing the card pool with additional levels introduced upgrades i felt were useless. 3.) The decks become incomprehensible. I don't know how you fix this problem, but the cards become too complex. A card should be immediately recognizable what it does or take minimal time to figure that out, but these cards will have between 3 and 6 abilities stapled to them and when I kept wanting to look for specific cards or effects, it really slowed down the flow of the game trying to read each and every card i drew. Half the time I just threw cards not knowing what it did, just that it had 6 colors and likely was one of my good cards and not one of my dump cards that got screwed over by fusions. 4.) I wish I had less decisions, but more impactful ones. To play off the previous section, I think the game would have benefited from less total fusions per card. It'd help with the readability problem alot and having more consistently powerful upgrades would make them more meaningful. 5.) I *ADORE* the concept of the card maker, but it doesn't work. I actually got so hyped when i saw the card maker because i thought I could add some fun/balanced cards to the mix, but it looks like its broken and a good 3 hours of fiddling and reading through the guide did not seem to fix that. If it ever gets fixed, i'd love to see the ability to affect the card pool as well, like you make custom cards that can replace base game cards. 6.) The music slaps 7.) The enemies do not shake up gameplay enough. Like i said before, I only was able to half understand what the stuff above the enemies' heads really mean, and i didn't need to learn further. The only tactic i needed was getting my defense high enough since it never goes away, then attacking, rinse and repeat. I never had to engage with what the enemy does as most attacks from them as if you built your deck right you can just turn 1 kill most enemies while they're still setting up. If you fail to get your deck up to scruff your enemies always kill you the same way, outright dps or they setup faster than you can kill them. Slay the spire's enemies is a great benchmark as it's more of a rock paper scissor system that rewards careful thinking and planning rather than just constant dps checks like this game.