Preview: Deck of Ashes (Steam Early Access)

Deck of Ashes is an adventure game with tactical card combat. One character at a time, lead the cast of antiheroes on a quest for redemption. Explore the cursed fantasy world and hunt down powerful cards. Forge a unique Battle Deck, and crush your foes! Can you rid the world of the Ash Curse?

Pros:

• Hand drawn cartoon graphics.
• 3841mb download size.
• Card battler gameplay.
• 3 modes- Prologue, campaign and epilogue.
• Ash-when you play a card it turns to Ash and becomes unplayable until resurrected.
• Ash pact-special card that can be played and costs health to resurrect all Ashed cards.
• Hand-6 with a max of 10.
• Fantastic card art.
• Mana-used to cast cards.
• Epilogue has a tutorial explaining the mechanics.
• Tent-after a battle you can use your rest points to bring cards back individually and refill health.
• World map-choose your own path and go where you want.
• Steam achievements.
• Fast loading.
• Save and exit option.
• Round based combat.
• Two game versions-original and Cosplay of Thrones.
• Cosplay of Thrones adds a slew of new cards and a special achievement and items.
• Four difficulties that range from infinite lives and plentiful checkpoints versus the extreme difficulty that turns the game into a roguelike.
• You can return up to 3 cards each round.
• Click already cleared tiles once to attempt to get resources from them that are used for crafting.
• Camp-central hub with a Blacksmith, merchant, herbalist and an Ash master who can upgrade and resurrect cards for you.
• Clear UK-hover over anything to get a pop-up.
• Recipes-blueprints for making new cards.
• Ruler of the land is the big bad for the land. A timer represents how much time you have until the combat starts, the ruler will ridicule you and even destroy parts of the map.
• Event tiles-random and can be good or bad.
• Hovering over a tile will give a hint as to what to expect when landing on it.
• Keys can be found and are used to open chests.
• Ash storm-random cards spawn randomly on the map and have a turn timer attached to them.
• Rewards-at the end of a fight you can earn Ash points for crafting, coins for buying items.
• Skill trees to unlock.
• Simple to learn.
• Drag and drop system.

Cons:

• Menus can clutter up and overlap.
• Only graphics option is resolution and fullscreen.
• RNG plays a huge part.
• Unnecessary and timely animations when using the Ash pact.
• Not always sure what game mode you are playing.
• The tutorial only covers combat then it’s loads of reading.
• Sounds like the same song on loop.
• Navigation is clunky as you have to click tile by tile.
• Text can go really small.
• Slow paced.
• Unlocking traits/upgrades/skill trees are slow.
• A lot of resource requirements.
• The difficulty of enemies as you progress turns into more health over and over.
• Having the free reign to prepare for an unknown fight means its entirely possible to be under-equipped.