Much more than a poker

A great game for quick mindless fun. Could use a bit more challenge and new enemy types to really complete it for higher darkness runs.

Had a lot of fun scouting the streets and outwitting my opponents in this strategic board game. My only wish is for the campaign to get expanded with more scenarios in the future.

The game is needlessly grindy to an unfun degree. Early on, I enjoyed the game quite a bit as your early game decisions and strategy strongly dictate your success or failure. Every week's actions in and out of the dungeon play a heavy role in how well you'll do in the proceeding weeks. You'll have to make decisions and sacrifices. Eventually however, you'll get to the point where you've stabilized and these decisions matter less and less. Just repeated journeys into the dungeon to collect heirlooms to upgrade the town. To make matters worse, you constantly have to re-explore low level areas with new recruits because your veteran units refuse to go into them. The final area of the game requires multiple sets of fully geared and leveled units as after each mission the survivors refuse to re-enter the dungeon area. These systems only increase the grind and aren't meaningful game play.

I'm writing this review after finishing the game on normal difficulty so take what I say with a grain of salt. The story is incredibly short and linear with most dialogue options circling back to the same outcome anyway. On normal you don't need to make many strategic decisions at all (I forwent hiring additional runners because I felt I did not need them and to save creds). On this subject, you don't need to budget your credits either. You can pretty much buy whatever the best is at all stages of the game. The game locks you in combat mode for long periods of time in dungeons making you expecting to encounter many more enemies than are actually present. This makes progressing unnecessarily tedious as I preferred to overwatch much more frequently than I needed to. I thought the game ended much too abruptly as I was honestly expecting much more to do afterwards. Overall, its really not a bad game but it definitely could have been better.

When it comes to card games I have tried many. Yet somehow I keep finding myself back in the Spire. Slay the Spire seamlessly combines two of my favorite genres, rouge-likes and deck builders together to create a game that is truly enjoyable for hours on end.