Destiny or Fate

Yeah -- F this game.
Here's the problem I have with it. Most deck building games have you unlock as you go. So when you start it's tough, and as you go you unlock new cards and items. That does not happen in this game. Plus the levels all have the same few monsters. So I'm just replaying the same game over and over with no real progression because im not unlocking anything. So im either going to have a good luck streak or just bit it right away. Also each of the classes only have a couple unique cards. The rest of the cards are the same ones you see over and over and over. Maybe im missing something but there's no creative ways to build intresting decks. I've beaten slay the spire, monster train and so forth, and even though they were challenging I atleast felt like I was slowly moving forward -- figuring out new stratagies. This feels like im spinning wheels. Oh, and my game crashed and forced me to quit.

The game is a lot like A cardbattler but its not really like a roguelike.

It has some good things and is worth 4.99 but...
It needs work.

Fun collectable card game. certainly seems to be a lot of variety in the enemies. The battles can be pretty tough, and there is a lot you need to learn that the game doesn't explain right up front, (mainly that you can hit escape between battles to rotate your troops) but all in all, pretty enjoyable.
Art is good, and the music is good, but I really wish it explained what the enemy was doing, their turns go super fast.
A decent pick, though on sale is my suggestion, not full price.

tl;dr: A weak hybrid of deck-building (ala Slay the Spire) and a JRPG-type game where you tame Pokem... er... "monsters" to fight for you. Good ideas are hampered by poor variety and endless grinding.

The coolest idea in it is that each creature has a power bar that fills up to unleash their special attack, and the steps along the bar are coded with a card type (attack or defense). This is a neat mechanic that is pretty fun.

Otherwise, the game is not to my taste. Here are some of the things that made me quit playing:
- Whereas in Slay the Spire you can only go ever forward, here you can backtrack, creating an incentive to grind weak encounters to get strong enough to beat the boss fight. To unlock characters and new cards requires beating bosses, which means you grind the early part of the game over and over to take out the boss, which is not much fun.
- Battles at the same level vary wildly in difficulty, and so the random generation has more to do with your win/loss ratio than skill, in my opinion. The biggest factor is number of foes, even with cards that hit all opponents. You often walk in to find four enemies all about to attack for 11-18 damage on your whole team, which is impossible to stop.
- Most cards are not that great, and most characters have the same cards. Different decks don't play that differently, which makes the game repetitive.
- The awkward interface means some things you do a lot require opening a bunch of menus and using the same key control in different ways. Sometimes leave is ESC; sometimes it's C. The A is select, and you often select things by accident.
- Some cards are really, really bad. Several of the strongest-seeming cards say "attacks 3 random monsters." However, more often than not, those are YOUR monsters, making the card a very bad pick in almost every case.

Overall, it has some promising ideas, but is the weakest deck-builder I have tried. Hiring someone to revamp the cards to make decks more diverse would be a start. It might get better with more unlocks, but I'm just too bored to get to that point.

There are lots of basic problems on this game, and they are very easy to be fixed.


-The worst error is: Why the game has a lot of limitations against infinite combos? It's already hard to find the combo pieces, and the game is impossible to beat without great combos. Examples of limitations that shouldn't exist: You should be able to put less than 11 cards in your deck; When playing a lot of cards in one turn, some cards simply disappear from your hand/deck; There are other mistakes, but i doubt the developer will make any effort to fix them, even though there are only basic errors in the game.

-The game is extremely unbalanced. Because, different from games like Slay the Spire and Hearthstone, there are very little synergies in the game that lets you to win the game. And it's extremely hard to get these synergies, because you receive random relics, and can't choose the relics you want. The bosses also are impossible to beat unless you have a good sinergy.

-The game has very little variations. There're very few cards, monsters and heroes in the game. Also, the heroes and monsters that exist, are very similar to each other. This forces you to play very few heroes and monsters to beat the game.

-Why can't i look my hero and monsters on the "capture monster" menu? This makes me unable to see if a monster has a sinergy with my hero or monsters.

replayability 8/10
graphics 7/10
difficulty 7/10
good times 9/10
unlocks 9/10
cards/items 8/10
sound 5/10
just play it

Not a bad game, and i was surprised. Sold badges and bought it on sale for a total of $.02. I didn't expect much, but I find this game more enjoyable then Spire.

Has a pokemon esk feel to it. Collect enemies after each battle and bring up to 3 into battle. Depending on the cards played, you can activate a support characters abilities. You have to charge their abilities in a unique way. Can also level their abilities and you main champions at shops. You can manage your collected enemies between battles. All HP is restored to fallen enemies and champion after completing a level.

By my third run through, i have made it to the final battle and lost... Good news, i unlocked 4 champions on this run through. After freeing a new champion from a crystal, you unlock them in a shop with coins collected from passing a level. Unlocking them adds new cards to be collected for any run through.

I recommend giving this game a try. It's relaxing and I enjoy the ability to unlock new champions for future play. In my humble opinion, it is a better all around game then Slay the Spire. It's not as difficult, but the game play is more free flow and changeable.

pros:
- challenging campaign
- replayability
- some unique monsters

cons:
- the final boss is too difficult (or maybe the generated map was hard)
(frustrating: you can't use the chain in some boss fights)
- sometimes the game is not challenging - random can be unfair
- slow moving on the map (controller)
- there is no title, only icons but you don't have info about the icons
- missing infos about your enemies on map
- repetitive music
- bugs (controller support is not perfect, broken ai, orb selection on the dead monster)
- the "half" transparent pictures (right corner) are very lame - amateur
- maybe the game needs more cards

(pro tip: you can copy .save files from steam\userdata)
6 / 10

At first, I was intrigued by the idea of party-based Slay the Spire gameplay, but the experience showed its weaknesses in the first few hours. Another review cited "great idea, clumsy execution" and I wholeheartedly agree.

PROS
- Great visuals
- Interesting gameplay that is less like Slay the Spire as might initially appear

CONS
- Loose balancing. The base values of Slay the Spire are fairly low, which, in turn, helps keep volatility low. When you die in StS, it tends to be over multiple battles which gives you time to course correct. In this game, RNG swings wide and will cripple you in a single bad turn.
- Healing is less stingy than StS, but there are so many sources of unblockable damage, you'll certainly need it.
- Card descriptions and rules are hazy and inconsistent. Rollovers sometimes don't exist if you need a refresher.
- Interface is junky. In addition to overly complicated methods for simple things (i.e. swapping a monster into your party involves multiple dropdown menus)
- Long-term progression is unnecessarily punishing. The currency used to buy persistent improvements only comes from chapter bosses and a little bit from battles in chapter 2 and beyond. Not so bad. You also have to spend it mid-run. Also, not the worst. Except you also have to spend it in the card shop on the map. Imagine if in Slay the Spire, XP didn't persist between runs, could only be spent when you reach a shop on the map, and then only if you have enough to buy the next level entirely. Expect many runs to net you nothing long term.

I feel like this game just wants to waste my time. Very disappointed

eh...

Well, there are things I like and things I don't like. It's a nice enough Card game with the gimmick from the last level of Dicey Dungeons where you collect the enemies you defeat so you can use them in your party. Problem is that the characters often don't do much. Most just do like 20 dmg attacks if you fill their meters or if you really lucky then they have heal because else there isn't that much healing out there.

The Art style is... varying. On the one hand you have great designs like a cyborg snowman. On the other you have a boss fight that is just a naked woman with giant breasts. So again... eh.

The balance seems of atm. The first level seems to drop not enough gold to actually do anything with. I have encountered a few stores already in act 1 and never have I been able to buy anything (this is not hyberbole, I have not purchased a single item. And the heroes that spawn also require a currency that you get from defeating bosses so not in act 1 either).
Then there is the act 2 boss the Hydra that does 60% of your max hp as a starting attack.

The cards themselves are sometimes really strong and other times virtually useless. There was one that said: deal 15 damage to a random monster 3 times. That sounded like a strong card, so I picked it only to discover that your teammates also count still as "monsters". So yeah.

This game certainly has potential and Slay the Spire also had some balancing issues at the start so let's stay optimistic.

Good idea, bad execution.
The game is slow and clunky. The interface has a ton of excess clicks, presumably to accommodate navigating using a controller. The artwork is good but the general aesthetic is a matter of taste.
While it does some things that Slay The Spire doesn’t, everything they both do Slay The Spire does much better.

I feel as if the tutorial didn't explain very much of the game to me and I don't want to sift through the comments/guides/youtube playthroughs to learn your game. I think you should include a lot more about stats, types of monsters, composition of teams and their effects, artifacts and sets and the like in your tutorial. Telling me that my resource number correlates to the number on the corner of the card and that playing cards, in the magic order on my characters head, does something is very little information on how your game is desgined. The videos didn't tell me much from the Steam page either.

My fault, a bit, for not reading more in depth about your game before purchasing, but I think a greater detailed tutorial would go a long way to help people understand your game.

Great game, and already pretty solid despite being in early access. Highly recommend.

However before you purchase read this:
Be warned though, the game in its current state is plagued with lots of, some even game breaking bugs.
The screen freezes regularly and requires a forced restart of the game, some card effect are broken, and do weird stuff like deal 99% dmg to one of your characters leaving you with 1HP.
Another bug I have encountered was after maxing out my Orb slot reduction for recruited monster, in a boss fight this thing reset, and I got all of my monsters turned back to 5 orb slots which cost me the battle.
Some of the hero abilities are inmbalanced AF, and overall it this with the poor translation on what does what, this game can be very frustrating.

As I said, the game is good, tons of replayability, different ways to win, nice art work, and character design. Lets hope they crack down on the bugs soon, because I had to come and edit this review which was mostly positive, after a LOT of hours invested and being just 3 characters short of fully clearing the game with all the heroes.

The game is good and has a lot of great ideas but this game needs to fix the difficulty.. This game is like Slay the Spire but 100x harder than it, needs to NERF the starting area and starting boss.. Game needs more rest spots that are not as expensive, since you make like 30-50 gold a battle and it cost 200 gold to heal just 50hp to allies. Having almost every enemy have poison(this ignores block) when they attack, this makes stay up on HP very difficult. You cant unlock new heros unless you beat the boss (dont heal after the boss either) and try and find a shop to buy one before u die and loss everything. IF THIS DOESN'T GET FIXED I WOULD NOT BE RECOMMENDING THIS GAME AT ALL! DONT BE LIKE ALL THESE NEW AAA GAMES THAT DONT LISTEN TO THEIR FANS!

Pros:
- Good variety. There are plenty of cards, monsters, and heroes to utilize.
- Fun core mechanics. You need to strategize and find synergies if you have any hope of winning.
- Decent replayability due to unlocks and different heroes.
- Consistent updates and patches.

Cons:
- Unpolished. Certain animations are lacking sounds, the UI can be clunky, and the ending isn't done. I assume most of these issues will be resolved by the time the game is fully released.
- Unbalanced. A lot of the cards are just not very powerful and I find myself skipping most card rewards as the options are all trash. Certain abilities, specifically evasion, have the ability to be completely broken late game.
- Way too grindy. You are rewarded for clearing every tile on a map with no time constraints forcing you to progress. It took me 5 hours to do a complete run as the first hero which is too long for a roguelike.
- Bad localization. English translations range from weird to unreadable. Some of the cards I had to learn from trial and error as their text was not sufficient to explain their effects.

Overall I had fun with the time I invested and the game has potential. I'll be waiting for more updates and balance patches before I play more.

Destiny or Fate is a great new entry into the deck building genre. Less than 2 hours in and I am breaking to write this review.
Stuff I like:
- Great art. The presentation is solid and attractive
- Creature collecting! You get to choose to capture one of the monsters you fight after each normal battle, each with different specials that can be activated. Opponents often have single target attacks that seem to randomly choose one of your units, so a roster of monsters acts partially as aggregate health through the game
- Interesting new mechanics for using abilities: each unit has a meter made up of attack or defense 'orb' symbols. You fill the meter one spot each time the type of card you play matches the next empty orb for that unit. When full, you choose between 2 abilities, with one usually being basic attack damage. Right from the start you can begin to shape your party towards attack, defense, healing, support...
- There is already enough content to please based on my few hours: a decent roster of heroes to unlock with 3 starting. There seems to be plenty of cards, though too early for me to really judge

Things I don't like:
- The turn animations can seem a bit slow.
- I'm a guy, and I like boobs and all, but the first boss art is a bit much in pandering to the boys.

There's a lot to like about this game. It's like Game of Thrones, the TV show, in that it has tons of cool ideas, and falls totally flat on execution.

According to the developers, there's a huge translation patch coming in September. You should definitely, 100% wait for that patch. The game is agony right now. Not only are there tons of awkward misclicks that happen because of stuttery, unresponsive battle buttons, but the terrible translation leads to constantly getting things wrong.

Here's an example. I found two cards. One of them said, and I quote, "Deal 30 damage to enemy." The other card also said "Deal 30 damage to enemy."

Alright. So it deals 30 damage to an enemy. No problem. I attack with one, and oh! It deals 30 damage to ALL enemies. That's a pretty big deal. The other one dealt 30 damage to one enemy as expected, but the identical wording and only difference being 1 mana cost vs 2 mana cost made me wonder, "How in the hell are these cards different?"

The game doesn't offer you a tutorial. The artifacts, which are like Slay the Spire, are set up to be as frustrating as possible to swap out. You can only have a certain number equipped at any given time, you can't just drag and drop them into position, you have to click them, then click swap or remove, then move your cursor down, click another artifact, click change or remove, then click the slot you want to move it to.

It feels like every aspect of the game's UI, every button you click, was designed to be clicked and adjusted in the most tedious way possible.Sometimes right-click backs you out of a menu. Sometimes the B button does (On the keyboard! B on the keyboard, not a controller!) and sometimes ESC does. (Keys are currently NOT rebindable, YIKES.)

You can recruit monsters. They seem terrible at first, but you can level them up. Unfortunately, once you're in a battle and you're about to use a card that activates a monster's skills, you'd BETTER remember what said skills even are! There's no way to check them in battle.

There are icons that appear above your character and the monster's portraits to denote status ailments and debuffs. You might think you can hover over each one to see what they do, but you would be wrong. You have to hover over your character's portrait, and then ALL the debuffs and buffs appear, making you scroll your eyes across huge blocks of text trying to figure out "Which of these is that little green tear drop, and what does it do?"

Not that it matters. When you find that little icon's descriptor, the translation is so bad that you'll have to re-read it five times to figure out what it does.

Here's another fun one. I had a card that gave me 50 Defense and a HEAVY curse in hand whenever I played it. I used it a few times, and then during the next battle, I did a double-take when I realized I had two HEAVY curses stuck in my hand. The curses this card generates are permanent additions to my deck, not a per-battle card clump!

You might think, "Oh, that's an interesting mechanic" but here's the thing. I used other cards that gave me curses, and those curses did NOT stay in my deck permanently! This one HEAVY curse though does stay in my deck, and nothing on the card denotes it's special.

Inconsistent. Clunky. Difficult to understand.

If these words describe the type of game you're interested in, then by all means, buy this game.

I liked the artwork. I thought the characters were cool to look at, and the ideas inside the game had progress. The music is fun and thematic. The bosses are challenging. However, the abysmal UI (which is the whole game) the poor translation, and all the other issues I had resulted in an unforgettably bad experience.

I genuinely, honest-to-god hope the developers fix all of these issues. I love STS-style games and wish we had more genuinely good ones. If you're looking for good STS alternatives, here are my hot takes.

1. Monster Slayers. Oldie but goodie. Polished, refined, fun.
2. Fate Hunters. Still a WIP game, but I'm friends with the developer and his team has been hard at work polishing and refining their game. I even help with the translation.
3. Blood Card. Interesting mechanics, lots of replayability.

There are many good options on Steam. Save this one for later. MUCH later.

If you like Slay the Spire then this game is a similar, better in some ways. Has the added bonus of capturing monsters you defeat to then train and fight for you. Really great concept and heaps of strategic fun to be had! The unlock system is well done and keeps you replaying (also the unlocks apply across all playable characters which is cool). Sure it needs polish, some spelling and translation could be better etc etc, but my first playthrough was ultra enjoyable. Second time I worked out some pretty broken combos so perhaps some card balancing needed for some heroes. Overall a great early access game and cant wait to play the finished product.

Needs a way to speed up battles. Needs Balancing. Needs Translation Improvements. Needs to add variety or diversity to the current setup so that each run doesn't feel the same.

Those are just suggestions for improvement b/c EA and whatnot...still even without all that it's still well above average game with tons of unlockables etc. and I'll give it a 7.3 out of 10 as it is today.

I consider myself rather a novice gamer; got into gaming through husband. At first I was not too interested to play this game, but my husband started to play and he got really into it (he forgot to eat lol). I decided to give it a try and I am glad that I did! At first it was slightly difficult as there was no tutorial or instructions but I could get the hang of it pretty soon (with a little help from hubby). When I started playing, I thought the game was simply to beat monsters using cards. I realized that it requires more than that as I learned about activating each character’s special attacks by filling up orbs. I enjoy how it requires strategizing. It is also fun to unlock characters and try them. You have to start all over from the beginning if your hero dies, but battle settings change constantly. There are more features such as upgrading cards and characters’ attacks which I need to explore more.

Overall, this game is simple enough to start playing without getting stressed but is challenging (and gets more challenging) enough to keep you playing without getting bored. I consider a game well-balanced if both my husband and I can enjoy, with different years of gaming experiences, and this game is definitely one of those.

Overall ★★★★☆ (4/5) Recommended for people who are seeking strategy games!

I bought this game 2days ago and played for a while. Literally, couldn’t stop playing it. Very interesting game play due to interconnection between hero abilities, card, and enemy special ability. I just got into 3rd stage without much investing into mastery (which you don’t lose even if you die). I highly recommend to people who love strategy challenges. I hope to see more updates with interesting heroes, cards, and enemies. So far, I played 3 heroes, and it’s been lot of fun in each hero play. (It seems there are more than 10 heroes available, but I could unlock about 5heroes so far).

Pro
-Turn based strategy game
-Rogue-like: maps change every time you play again. Various events triggered.
-Old RPG-like: teammates, skills, gold, upgrade, etc.
-Unique Card / Hero style: It appears to be like SLS, but very different in terms of game play due to the hero skills and monster skills.
-Replayable: As you keep trying, you will have better chance to beat the game and there are various heroes you can give tries.
-Fast updates (It seems they listen to most of the feedbacks!)
-Somewhat challenging
- No time limit (I usually take my time to think about best strategy and I love that there is no one pushing me to make a decision in timely manner haha)

Con
- music is somewhat monotonous (but I guess most indie games cannot get out of this pit)
- No wiki page yet. I hope someone starts to build a wiki page somewhere. Some monsters get different abilities from what they have in the beginning. So try to upgrade all the monsters. You may get what you want. (But I wish I know what I am aiming for so I don’t waste my time :P)
- Card descriptions are somewhat too short or confusing, but you will get it at some point by playing the cards multiple time. I hope to see the more precise and concise card description comes in the future.

Difficulty ★★★★☆ (4/5) for the first-timer.
- This game is quite difficult for the first timer, because this game does not tell you what is what, and game description is pretty complex/confusing too.
★★★☆☆ (3/5) for after few hours of playing.
- Once you start to understand the game logics, then it becomes more enjoyable and you start to build your own custom hero, monster, card deck. Boss fighting seems pretty overwhelming in the first fight, but you will see it is not too horrible/terrifying once you learn to know sacrifice your monster or to invest some masteries.

Graphic ★★★★☆ (4/5)
- 2D, not 32byte.
- dark theme
- traditional RPG monster looks and some Japanese RPG game looks


Story
N/A
-I haven’t beaten the game and there is no introduction in the beginning of the game, so I guess there is no story line at this point. (or, maybe not at all)

Gameplay
★★★★★ (5/5)
- There are 3 attributes for heroes and monsters: Attack, Defense, and Support. I recommend having 3 party members with same type of attribute, since there is a synergy effect in certain cards. So far, I noticed synergy effect covers up to 3 party members of same attribute, so there is no point of having same attribute members of 4.
- In each card, certain type of bubble is assigned to the card. There are total 4 types of bubbles such as Attack, Skill, Power, and Curse. This is important to activate unique skills of heroes and monsters. Your hero and monsters have 5 bubbles next to their portrait. Let’s say my hero has Attack, Attack, Skill, Attack, Skill bubbles. To activate the skills of this hero, we need to use the card with the corresponding bubbles in the same order. I’ll try to make tips on the guideline posting sometime this week. I wish more people to join this game with me! (let’s make a wiki page!)
- Hero skills are totally game changers that sometimes you will have to debate yourself: should I use this card to attack the monster, or should I use this defense card to charge the bubble to activate the skill? You can make certain combos with hero skills and card combos too.
- Each enemy has their own skills and specific pattern. Some skills target random, some skills target specific hero or monster. You can see what your enemy is aiming to, so you can prepare for the next move. This intensifies the defense mechanism, which gives lot of fun. When you evade certain-death-appearing-to-be, thrill is overwhelming.
-Boss fight is epic. Especially for the first few times. I don’t want to spoil anything, so give a try for yourself. My first reaction was “You are totally kidding me. How can you even beat this totally cheating dude?” I saw some guy saying this is impossible, but you can! I beat the first 2 bosses without any masteries!

There are some language barriers in the beginning, but I’ve been through that with many indie games. I really hope the development team follows through users’ feedback and make this game more enjoyable for us!