The Land of Glass

frantic repetitive movements.

Weird game (and I'm a big fan for it being weird), but too simple. The game is centered around throwing cards onto a grid in order to reduce defenses and eventually knock enemies out of the ring, sumo-style. You get to construct a deck to determine what you use to attack enemies, which is good since there's little reason to hold middle-weight cards or a large amount of grid magic or field magic. Because each of attack, defense, and two types of magic are bound by separate cooldown timers, the deck construction simply allows one to streamline their deck to one grid spell, two field spells (heal and slick/damage), big defense cards, small attack cards to soften, big attack cards to kill

After coming to grips with the general pace of the game, you learn that all the stats of monsters shown prior to each encounter really don't matter. The same strategy works the whole way through the four campaigns and amounts to little more than throwing cards as fast as possible . The processional nature of the combat is not nearly engaging enough for its long hours of repetitive fights. To note: Difficulty selection seems to only change the speed at which the game runs, so increasing the difficulty doesn't make the game more interesting.

The story has some nice characters to it, though its overarching plot is baffling, leaving major questions about the nature of magic and the monsters invading the world. The four campaigns are completely separate from one another (as opposed to being the parallel narratives I initially expected). The Prophecy narrative is the strongest of them with two sober characters intimately connected to their culture and history. The Redemption story feels pointless with two characters who talk past each other almost the whole run.
Also, why glass? I mean, it looks cool, but does it have some thematic resonance that I just missed for 20 hours?

+

This game is an interesting experiment, but I don't think it works. You've got action combat with a fancy grid and people being knocked about, which sounds cool... however:
The stamina bar, knocking about, and aoe blast effect stuff is both fiddlier than the grid, and less important, so I'm not sure they're better elements than a simple health bar with regeneration would have been.
Drag and drop just doesn't feel particularly good to do as an action game thing, so the game ends up feeling physically less fun to play than it should.
Many of the fights end up playing out the same.
The music is very repetitive.

I'm saddened that a game like this doesn't have that many reviews, so here's mine. While certainly not a masterpiece I found it to be a competently made and reasonably fun to play collectible card game with decent variety, likable characters, and a unique card battling system.

Cards are placed on a grid in real time with a variety of effects, mostly serving to break through defense cards with attack cards. While this is happening your characters rush toward the enemy behind the grids, providing a helpful and dynamic visual representation. Keeping your character strong enough to get knocked off the edge while maintaining the aggression to knock off the enemy feels pretty rewarding.

The game has four campaigns, and at this time I've only played through one, but that alone was more than six hours for me. I think I'll return to do the others at some point, thanks to how humorous the dialogue was between the amphibious magical protagonists of the first campaign I picked.

The story is delivered at a brisk clip between battles with opportunities to shop, build your deck, and upgrade. While card variety isn't the best I've seen, it's certainly not a slouch either since many of them have graphical effects in the battle and can even be aimed at your character or the enemies rather than the grid.

My gripes are relatively minor. I'm never one to bother checking my PC specs, I just game on a laptop, so I had to turn down a lot of the lighting effects to get it to run well. (It was still quite pretty.) I could've used some more information on the exact mechanics of some card effects, like the elemental magics that affect cooldowns and placement. I was never so confused that I couldn't win a battle on the second or third try though, so it rarely mattered.

All in all I enjoyed my time with it and I think it deserves more attention for trying new things and largely succeeding. Pros: art, characters, length, battle system. Cons: performance (on weak machines) and tutorializing. If I had to give it a numerical score: 7/10.

Land of Glass is a beautiful game with an interesting combat idea but gets worse over time.

Pros:
+Interesting combat idea
+Gorgeous looking artstyle
+playable with both mouse or controller
+great soundtrack
+Good Balancing

Cons:
-not enough variety in the cards. Every fight feels kind of the same which makes them boring after some time. There are just a few different card effects you can play and most of the time you play simply attack and defend cards. There are no new cards which change the way you play. This also makes the deckbuilding pretty boring.
-Equiable items are just stat increases and do not offer any decision making of what to equip as everyone would equip the +10 stamina increase instead of the +5.
-Combat is more focused on looking at both the offensive and defensive grid than seeing what is happening in the fight
-Not enough variety in the soundtrack. Even though the songs themself are great, if you hear the same song 5 times in a row it gets annoying
-You can't explore the map. But at somepoints there are optional places to go to but if you miss them at that point you can't go back

Overall had a good first 45-60 minutes with the game than it just became repetitive. In conclusion not worth the asking price

So, you get to walk around the map heaing the conversation of the two main characters as they expose the story. The combat is card based, but not like most games. The trick is you must put red attack cards in a grid that represents the enemy armor. You simultaneously must maintain postive number in your blue defense grid. The cooldown is longer if you attempt to overload a single spot so you have to spread it around. Grid shape changes from time to time. The other cards do something to the battlefield or grid to provide variance. You do not get to see the AI intentions, you will only know what happens when your defense grid breaks.

There are 4 stories- humans, drax, frogs, and some sort of jackal looking dude. You will get to play through the events from each race's perspective. Very appealing look and the combats only take a minute to play out. If you get stuck you can go back to previous over-world map and take another path. No leveling up, but you get gear that helps stats. You cannot grind this out, you must win with the cards you have at the start of the dungeon, but you get a card or two every victory.