Yeah, it's a shame so many people aren't doing so well at it. Like, I get it, Wildfrost is utterly BRUTAL, and the final boss gimmick they have going is kind of insane... But that just makes me love it all the more.
Shame there's no mention of the funny card that has a pretty good chance of instantly ending your run every time you play it. It links a random ally and enemy so that if one dies, the other also goes, and yes, it can and will do that to your leader.
Doesnt that only target its own lane? So as long as you keep your leader in a different lane when it activates it doesnt hit them. I could remember wrong though since I only had that card once. I absolutely remember that I made sure that the leader and that card were in different lanes though and that it only ate my leader when I actively put him in the same lane to see what would happen, since I lost that fight anyway.
As someone who played StS after this, Wildfrost is much more appealing to me. It does seem alot of people are turned off because of the difficulty, though, so it might not be an instant like.
@@bn5055 I totally agree about it being more like Into the Breach, but where's the randomness in ITB? Do you mean in terms of what cards/upgrades you have access to? But that's in StS too.
Lovely game and technically not the "Too hard" that people are complaining about. It's just the balance and RNG of the cards or allies you get. There are some serious hard counters that you can run into where what you've built in 2 battles has no chance in hell against the next enemy. The Devs have already stated they are looking at balance in upcoming patches. Good luck to them, that's some hard work.
Literally any of the first 3 fights (without ascension at least) can be beaten with the starter deck and any reasonable combination of comrades you can aquire till then, unless you pick a completely crippled leader at the start or build wrong on purpose for a challenge run. To be honest I would love to see how the people that complain about this play the game.
Neat little game, i hope they will expand on it soon. My only gripe is metaprogression being tied to specific actions, like buying cards on sale or equipping charms. Well, difficulty do be going quite steep too. But I'm only few hours in, so I'm not sure yet.
@@GeeDoggy123 Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler After you fight the final Boss your winning team gets posessed and becomes the new final boss. Each time this happens you unlock a new difficulty. After three times you unlock two cards that together form a special card. If you have that in your deck and beat the final boss you block the posession and can go and fight the true final boss and win the game.
I gotta say Elise probably didn't get to the end of a run on this one. While yes the game can be very random and many of the unlockables can be very helpful when starting out, if you manage to finish one run you can see why anyone worth their salt would call this game too hard. Its a good 8-12 hour game for one, maybe 2-3 finished runs. I can't believe the game LETS YOU SOFTLOCK YOURSELF from progressing. No spoilers just sort of Blown away by this mechanic
I picked this up a couple of days ago after watching Johnny Chiodini playing it. I love deckbuilding games, and I've been enjoying this. There's a good level of challenge, and the board states can get very complicated. I'm not sure the game actually intends you to be thinking seven steps ahead and working out intricate escape plans. It seems to reward playing fast and loose, and taking your losses. My only real complaint would be that in some cases the card text is quite bad at explaining what the cards do, especially in unusual situations (e.g., how status effects interact with each other, how they affect different kinds of defences, whether or not the card affects both rows, etc). The outcomes can be counterintuitive. Overall, though -- a good game and worth your time.
Its really crazy watching people mald over the game being "too hard" while im also watching Reto get winstreaks on the true final boss while playing meme builds
I'm so tired of roguelikes being described as "you don't know what you're going up against, so sometimes you die because of rng because your 'build' is 'countered'" because most people think roguelikes are about gambling to get a good "build" handed to you early and then just picking synergies like a robot and praying you don't run into your counter isn't it so much better to instead think of roguelikes as a balance of trade-offs, making gambles about how much you want to get away with synergy versus shoring up weaknesses? i don't care about the story of a powerful hero or army just never running into their nightmares/counters/weaknesses/nemeses and wiping the final boss i care about how many different discoverable stories there are about HOW a hero faces against their nemeses, deals with their weaknesses, counters their counters there's so many different tools Wildfrost gives you to brace your way through its many difficulties and hurdles - recalling your frenzy unit so they don't impale themselves on teeth and slow-rolling the teeth enemies, and then summoning them at the right time to deal damage like you're kiting - leaving your damaged units on the field instead of recalling because you need to draw your best cards (finding the tipping point between prioritizing your units vs your own cards) - allowing weak enemies to stay alive because you can maximize overburn off them into the reinforcements, or to combo them cuz it's early game and enemies are still easy gold bags, or because your damage resources are better spent on the reinforcements there's no hardship more satisfying than a nightmare overcome right? In truth, there are mathematically impossible runs but they are far rarer than people think in well-designed difficult games and the stories of these doomed heroes are still valid and interesting, they're already non-intrusively rare, why nerf difficulties so there's never any danger? i'm also so tired of difficult games being given negative reviews for "bad balancing" or gamers begging for nerfs so they can play cheese strats over and over until they get bored of their own mediocrity and go for the next roguelike, i'm getting a little ad hominem but these gamers and their playstyles wouldn't be a problem at all if they just don't give great difficult games bad reviews or force devs into bad design choices and ruin the industry and markets for the gamers who do enjoy the journey of learning and growing through well-designed difficult games, it's actively harmful to the art and just stifles the growth of our beloved games i'm not saying The Escapist gave this a bad review or anything, but hearing the discourse on roguelikes over the years and seeing Wildfrost's mixed reviews rating on steam just makes my heart sink cuz we might have just discouraged the births of new subgenres and new devs' approaches to Wildfrost's awesome designs And no, making an easy mode for accessibility/inclusivity does not always work, some games are balanced and designed around a specific experience and making the game the best version of a journey through that experience so asking the devs to rebalance for an entirely different experience and journey just allows people to play mediocre versions of the game and tell others "oh it was ok i guess" and then moving on, that's wasted art, that's wasted effort, that's wasted design, that's someone and their community's dream game being marketed as "ok i guess" there's a bajillion casual games, there's a lot of great easy-to-learn but hard-to-master games, there's not many difficult games there's so much to explore in the design space of difficulty, i just wish we could give them more of a chance
Legit, so far the only thing I think is *slightly* overtuned is their final boss gimmick. Because you can end up with some *REAL* monsters. I lost to a minion with aimless, poison, snow, that attacks twice, and I didn't have enough power to actually kill it in time. XD Everything else about Wildfrost feels so perfectly tuned, and encourages you to thread the needle between shoring up your weaknesses, and building into a winning strategy.
@@AegixDrakan Try a final boss with smackback, barrage, and apply 5 overburn ahahaha, one of my dumb deaths was accidentally letting my own smackback barrage unit hit the final boss so they triggered an infinite smackback bloodbath and my dumbass forgot my hero was in the same lane lmfao
I always think Roguelites are a mix of luck - a good build being handed to you, as you say - and skill in building a well rounded deck. But in this game and many others, I feel there are weaknesses that can't really be shored up unless you get the right card luck, or are superhumanly good at remembering what enemies exist, and then run a percentage calculation as to what card will change the break points. I think the game assumes, in terms of the numbers it expects in damage and health during certain fights, that you will have synergy in your deck. Without some sort of strong synergy, a bunch of decent cards can't survive a few good hits from certain bosses. You say you should shore up weaknesses, but I've had runs of Wildfrost where I simply didn't build enough damage into my team not because I wasn't trying to, but because I got a bunch of cards that had low damage potential, at least with my level of skill at the game. Then you run into a high health enemy, and bam, no chance. I also found it difficult to tell which leaders were truly terrible. Sure, some were obviously strong, but it often wasn't apparent to me until my team failed to come together that a certain leader type was hard to build around. Inherently, deckbuilders are more math-y than action roguelites. It's rare to get a "bad run" of Spelunky because you beat the whole game without good item luck, as long as you're experienced enough. Whereas, a deckbuilder run where you mathmatically roll bad cards, or pick a card that you think might be useful but doesn't synergize with your deck and instead sabotages you has less potential than other runs. This inherent mathmatical feeling of the games is what makes people declare runs to be more unfair than they are, I think. We're unable to see potential paths to victory if we didn't already use them to win, so we assume the run must have been 100% bad maths and not possible to win. I do feel that this is a pretty well balanced game, all things considered, and doesn't deserve the steam reviews saying it's brokenly unbalanced. There are certainly deckbuilders I've found to be unbalanced, but those games generally aren't fun for very long. They're either so easy I don't have to think deeply about the systems, or so hard that it feels rubbish to play and like my choices don't matter. I played this after I finished reviewing it because I was still having fun. I think Wildfrost does a good job of being hard, but encouraging you to optimize around its high difficulty rather than feel helpless.
@@Elisenaps once again, i don't really care about luck as a concept in roguelikes, literally if every run was winnable and there was never any potential for edge cases and losses then it's like we're actively lessening the number of stories we can experience from the game. i don't think most people understand that roguelikes are capable of so much more than offering a randomized winning puzzle. people judge roguelikes by the rng, the unluckiness, the "imbalance" as a concept in general but that's what roguelikes are. it's like criticizing an apple for being red. what separates good roguelikes from bad roguelikes is in how they ask the players to unravel this chaotic random ball of complexity is its approach and interpretation of the range of stories it can tell engaging and inspiring? many times i felt like im almost done exploring most of the stories of wildfrost (at least compared to slay the spire) but it still continues to surprise me with more intriguing stories that not even slay the spire or any other roguelike could supply. i used a sun rod on an enemy so it would hit my Kernel before the rest of the enemies wiped mi, giving shell to my monkey totem, but since my monkey totem had a charm that replaces all shell received with spice, it reached beyond 12 spice and triggered, killing all 4 attacking enemies before they could kill all my units. i think people come into roguelikes with a set picture and idea of how they want their journey and game to go and every "unlucky" event where a "lesser" thing happens instead just deviates from their ideal and they don't see the point the inherent design of roguelikes is not that the rng is one dice roll that decides everything, it's the constant choosing and rolling of dice, the subtle manipulation of everything, the omnipresent law of large numbers constantly renewing and transforming the experience, where will my frontloaded damage come from this time? where will my scaling damage come from this time? my frontloaded defense? my scaling defense? also in my experience i've found that even though damage output is the first thing i try to secure, i usually find more than enough and more often than not the difference between my winning runs and my close loss runs is that i over-drafted damage output after all, why draft and play a 10 damage card when i could instead draft a defense card that either let's 2 of my units get to their turn before the enemies, or let's them survive 2 extra enemy hits, letting them attack for 10-20 each?
This game is beautiful and has a great promise of fun, but I'm more then 10hrs in and have not had a single win, and only got close a couple times. The balance is AWFUL. RNG either carrys, or kills you with no chance of success. It's out now, but wait until the next content updates for the rebalancing.
I think the balance is on the harder side, but fine. You wont beat it the first time since you dont know what to prepare for but there arent that many different encounters and after 5 playthroughs or so you know most of them and know what to prepare for. Agreeed that sometimes you jsut dont get good charms, which are essential, but thats just a few runs. For perspective: I played the game for 6 hours by now and have three wins while activating all the ascencions when they got available. So yeah, it´s definately winable with just a bit of knowledge if you apply it correctly. The game is hard, but thats not automatically a misbalance. Maybe it´s just balanced for people who think other deckbuilders are too easy? As a tip: Get a unit with multihits if you can and stack any attack bonus you can find on it, then focus on keeping it alive. Each won run I had had at least one unit that activated multiple times. First time was the fox that hit three times, second was the mushroom throwing guy and in the third it was that one girl from the gnome tribe that added the status that also increased the damage taken. Add to that some support that fits your damage dealer. For example for the mushroom guy I actually had the unit menitoned in the video that gave the shrooms to other units. And in the third run I had the unit that made everyone in the lane hit everyone. So three attacks that hit everyone every three cards played. Sometimes even more since I also had the card that reduced activation and increases damage. Which I gave a charm that increased every number on it. What I mean by describing that: You need some kind of crazy combo to win. Which I absolutely love. In other games when you get that crazy combo the game is already over because every fight is just a breeze afterwards. Here you need that combo to win. Dont go wide, go high. Dont buff everyone in your team. Have one starplayer and the rest is just there to block and support.
The game has tons of ways to contol fights. even if you dont hit the nuts, I've found it easy to win. Once you understand some basic strageties like farming gold/ buying as many crowns as possible its really not that hard. Currently on a winstreak and have won with all the different types of strategies.
@@SangerZonvolt As mentioned in the review, they often seemed to require or severely punish certain builds but I never knew which ones I’d be facing, so I couldn’t plan to overcome the boss and just felt like I had to rely on luck. The fact that everything except the bosses felt pretty straightforward definitely exacerbated the feeling because the runs just felt like they were wasting my time when, without warning, they pit me against a boss that was simply impossible for my build.
@@Shadowquacker This is the thing though: Dont overspezialise your build. You should have at least some utility in your build to react. If you dont then your build isnt good. Kinda like saying a strategy game is poorly balanced if you only build airforce and get countered by someone who had some anti air units. What most people probably miss is how extremely flexible the snowball debuff is. Not only does it freeze the enemies action counter, it also disables all counter attacks and reactions. Which means most problematic bosses can be snowballed in the right moment and countered. This works with every build since all tribes have access to this debuff in some way with multiple cards. Is there a specific boss you had in mind?
@@SangerZonvolt If the specific boss he has in mind is King Moko... I would just encourage him to read the full text of his card VERY carefully, and put together what his single glaring weakness is. Once you figure it out, he's no threat. (It's the one-attack-per-turn mini Moko monsters that are the real threat. XD)
@@AegixDrakan I think I lost to him once while never building anything specificto counter him. His minions died before doing serious damage. Otherwise I just snowballed or inked them. One thing you absolutely cant do in this game is playing defensive or enemies like that will overwhelm you. For those small guys its enough to have one unit with smackback or spikes. Or anything that triggers on hit. Since they hot every turn you get triggered every turn. Other trick is having jubk in front. Since they only lose 1 junk health per hit it doesnt matter how high the enmies attack is. So while you need some counter against him there are plenty enough to fit any build. Just finished the game against the secret boss. Against those guys you a lot of stuns and ridiculous damage. But with two multihit guys with two attacks each and over 10 damage after being done with buffing. My leader also applied 2 Frost, 2 snowball and curse with every attack. I manage to win with only my leader remainig at 3 hp at the end while only playing a snowball card and redrawing every other turn to stall the last enemy. To give an idea what kind of units you need at the endgame. Hard, but not impossible. To do this you need to focus on getting charms whenever possible and crowns for all your units or the start is too slow.
![YoungBoy Never Broke Again - Missing Everything [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dTYeMZGzOzw/mqdefault.jpg)
my friend made art for this im so incredibly proud of him
OK that's cool
Tell your friend that I fucking love the art so much. Whoa.
The art in this is incredibly satisfying and visually cohesive. Great job to your friend
who is the artist?
(Edit: found him @gaziter and @carlesdalmauart)
Amazing artwork 🙌🏼
this game is easily my fav deckbuilder this year
sad so many people on the steam reviews are complaining about the game being "too hard"
i think the problem lies in the artstyle which gives the vibe that this is a casual friendly game when it certainly isnt
Yeah, it's a shame so many people aren't doing so well at it. Like, I get it, Wildfrost is utterly BRUTAL, and the final boss gimmick they have going is kind of insane...
But that just makes me love it all the more.
complete an insane build run or complete a few standard runs and you'll see why its so 'hard'
Shame there's no mention of the funny card that has a pretty good chance of instantly ending your run every time you play it. It links a random ally and enemy so that if one dies, the other also goes, and yes, it can and will do that to your leader.
Doesnt that only target its own lane? So as long as you keep your leader in a different lane when it activates it doesnt hit them. I could remember wrong though since I only had that card once. I absolutely remember that I made sure that the leader and that card were in different lanes though and that it only ate my leader when I actively put him in the same lane to see what would happen, since I lost that fight anyway.
Happened to me 😂
At least it gives you the 100 damage in one hit achievement
Well there is a way to dodge it, the cube invincibility thing
@@SangerZonvolt nope it's random, which means any unit, instead of aimless which does consider lanes when targeting.
@@imatiu
Looked at it again and it literally says "eats allies in the row". So it is only its own lane.
I have a friend who’s a fan of slay the spire… this looks like up his alley
As someone who played StS after this, Wildfrost is much more appealing to me. It does seem alot of people are turned off because of the difficulty, though, so it might not be an instant like.
It's more like Into the Breach than StS tbh. More random, much harder.
@@bn5055 I totally agree about it being more like Into the Breach, but where's the randomness in ITB? Do you mean in terms of what cards/upgrades you have access to? But that's in StS too.
I also recommend Monster Train if they don't have it.
Lovely game and technically not the "Too hard" that people are complaining about. It's just the balance and RNG of the cards or allies you get. There are some serious hard counters that you can run into where what you've built in 2 battles has no chance in hell against the next enemy. The Devs have already stated they are looking at balance in upcoming patches. Good luck to them, that's some hard work.
Literally any of the first 3 fights (without ascension at least) can be beaten with the starter deck and any reasonable combination of comrades you can aquire till then, unless you pick a completely crippled leader at the start or build wrong on purpose for a challenge run. To be honest I would love to see how the people that complain about this play the game.
'No minute long card combos'
Awkward cough from Yu-Gi-Oh
Neat little game, i hope they will expand on it soon. My only gripe is metaprogression being tied to specific actions, like buying cards on sale or equipping charms. Well, difficulty do be going quite steep too. But I'm only few hours in, so I'm not sure yet.
I've been enjoying it a lot, not sure if there is an ascension system in place but the base game is hard!
There is. And some additional bonus.
@@SangerZonvolt is it the charm system or is there something else that I haven't found yet?
@@GeeDoggy123
Spoiler
Spoiler
Spoiler
Spoiler
After you fight the final Boss your winning team gets posessed and becomes the new final boss. Each time this happens you unlock a new difficulty. After three times you unlock two cards that together form a special card. If you have that in your deck and beat the final boss you block the posession and can go and fight the true final boss and win the game.
Yeah would love more tribes
Soooooo, it’s not Frost Gone Wild? Shame…
I gotta say Elise probably didn't get to the end of a run on this one.
While yes the game can be very random and many of the unlockables can be very helpful when starting out, if you manage to finish one run you can see why anyone worth their salt would call this game too hard.
Its a good 8-12 hour game for one, maybe 2-3 finished runs. I can't believe the game LETS YOU SOFTLOCK YOURSELF from progressing. No spoilers just sort of Blown away by this mechanic
Missed opportunity to have Frost 3MR this game 😜
I picked this up a couple of days ago after watching Johnny Chiodini playing it. I love deckbuilding games, and I've been enjoying this. There's a good level of challenge, and the board states can get very complicated. I'm not sure the game actually intends you to be thinking seven steps ahead and working out intricate escape plans. It seems to reward playing fast and loose, and taking your losses. My only real complaint would be that in some cases the card text is quite bad at explaining what the cards do, especially in unusual situations (e.g., how status effects interact with each other, how they affect different kinds of defences, whether or not the card affects both rows, etc). The outcomes can be counterintuitive. Overall, though -- a good game and worth your time.
Its really crazy watching people mald over the game being "too hard" while im also watching Reto get winstreaks on the true final boss while playing meme builds
This definitely sold me on it, thank you!
I was hoping this would have been reviewed by The Other Frost. For the lulz. (No complaints about Avery, to be clear.)
Frost should‘ve reviewed this one
I've been playing the demo on my switch constantly. Once I get some extra money I'm totally buying this!
If only the game had rewind one turn the game will be so much better
I'm so tired of roguelikes being described as "you don't know what you're going up against, so sometimes you die because of rng because your 'build' is 'countered'"
because most people think roguelikes are about gambling to get a good "build" handed to you early and then just picking synergies like a robot and praying you don't run into your counter
isn't it so much better to instead think of roguelikes as a balance of trade-offs, making gambles about how much you want to get away with synergy versus shoring up weaknesses?
i don't care about the story of a powerful hero or army just never running into their nightmares/counters/weaknesses/nemeses and wiping the final boss
i care about how many different discoverable stories there are about HOW a hero faces against their nemeses, deals with their weaknesses, counters their counters
there's so many different tools Wildfrost gives you to brace your way through its many difficulties and hurdles
- recalling your frenzy unit so they don't impale themselves on teeth and slow-rolling the teeth enemies, and then summoning them at the right time to deal damage like you're kiting
- leaving your damaged units on the field instead of recalling because you need to draw your best cards (finding the tipping point between prioritizing your units vs your own cards)
- allowing weak enemies to stay alive because you can maximize overburn off them into the reinforcements, or to combo them cuz it's early game and enemies are still easy gold bags, or because your damage resources are better spent on the reinforcements
there's no hardship more satisfying than a nightmare overcome right?
In truth, there are mathematically impossible runs but they are far rarer than people think in well-designed difficult games and the stories of these doomed heroes are still valid and interesting, they're already non-intrusively rare, why nerf difficulties so there's never any danger?
i'm also so tired of difficult games being given negative reviews for "bad balancing" or gamers begging for nerfs so they can play cheese strats over and over until they get bored of their own mediocrity and go for the next roguelike, i'm getting a little ad hominem but these gamers and their playstyles wouldn't be a problem at all if they just don't give great difficult games bad reviews or force devs into bad design choices and ruin the industry and markets for the gamers who do enjoy the journey of learning and growing through well-designed difficult games, it's actively harmful to the art and just stifles the growth of our beloved games
i'm not saying The Escapist gave this a bad review or anything, but hearing the discourse on roguelikes over the years and seeing Wildfrost's mixed reviews rating on steam just makes my heart sink cuz we might have just discouraged the births of new subgenres and new devs' approaches to Wildfrost's awesome designs
And no, making an easy mode for accessibility/inclusivity does not always work, some games are balanced and designed around a specific experience and making the game the best version of a journey through that experience so asking the devs to rebalance for an entirely different experience and journey just allows people to play mediocre versions of the game and tell others "oh it was ok i guess" and then moving on, that's wasted art, that's wasted effort, that's wasted design, that's someone and their community's dream game being marketed as "ok i guess"
there's a bajillion casual games, there's a lot of great easy-to-learn but hard-to-master games, there's not many difficult games
there's so much to explore in the design space of difficulty, i just wish we could give them more of a chance
Legit, so far the only thing I think is *slightly* overtuned is their final boss gimmick. Because you can end up with some *REAL* monsters. I lost to a minion with aimless, poison, snow, that attacks twice, and I didn't have enough power to actually kill it in time. XD
Everything else about Wildfrost feels so perfectly tuned, and encourages you to thread the needle between shoring up your weaknesses, and building into a winning strategy.
@@AegixDrakan Try a final boss with smackback, barrage, and apply 5 overburn ahahaha, one of my dumb deaths was accidentally letting my own smackback barrage unit hit the final boss so they triggered an infinite smackback bloodbath and my dumbass forgot my hero was in the same lane lmfao
@@juamibenito2558 Oh ouch. XD
That DEFINITELY sounds too dangerous.
I always think Roguelites are a mix of luck - a good build being handed to you, as you say - and skill in building a well rounded deck. But in this game and many others, I feel there are weaknesses that can't really be shored up unless you get the right card luck, or are superhumanly good at remembering what enemies exist, and then run a percentage calculation as to what card will change the break points. I think the game assumes, in terms of the numbers it expects in damage and health during certain fights, that you will have synergy in your deck. Without some sort of strong synergy, a bunch of decent cards can't survive a few good hits from certain bosses.
You say you should shore up weaknesses, but I've had runs of Wildfrost where I simply didn't build enough damage into my team not because I wasn't trying to, but because I got a bunch of cards that had low damage potential, at least with my level of skill at the game. Then you run into a high health enemy, and bam, no chance.
I also found it difficult to tell which leaders were truly terrible. Sure, some were obviously strong, but it often wasn't apparent to me until my team failed to come together that a certain leader type was hard to build around.
Inherently, deckbuilders are more math-y than action roguelites. It's rare to get a "bad run" of Spelunky because you beat the whole game without good item luck, as long as you're experienced enough. Whereas, a deckbuilder run where you mathmatically roll bad cards, or pick a card that you think might be useful but doesn't synergize with your deck and instead sabotages you has less potential than other runs. This inherent mathmatical feeling of the games is what makes people declare runs to be more unfair than they are, I think. We're unable to see potential paths to victory if we didn't already use them to win, so we assume the run must have been 100% bad maths and not possible to win.
I do feel that this is a pretty well balanced game, all things considered, and doesn't deserve the steam reviews saying it's brokenly unbalanced. There are certainly deckbuilders I've found to be unbalanced, but those games generally aren't fun for very long. They're either so easy I don't have to think deeply about the systems, or so hard that it feels rubbish to play and like my choices don't matter.
I played this after I finished reviewing it because I was still having fun. I think Wildfrost does a good job of being hard, but encouraging you to optimize around its high difficulty rather than feel helpless.
@@Elisenaps once again, i don't really care about luck as a concept in roguelikes, literally if every run was winnable and there was never any potential for edge cases and losses then it's like we're actively lessening the number of stories we can experience from the game. i don't think most people understand that roguelikes are capable of so much more than offering a randomized winning puzzle. people judge roguelikes by the rng, the unluckiness, the "imbalance" as a concept in general but that's what roguelikes are. it's like criticizing an apple for being red. what separates good roguelikes from bad roguelikes is in how they ask the players to unravel this chaotic random ball of complexity
is its approach and interpretation of the range of stories it can tell engaging and inspiring? many times i felt like im almost done exploring most of the stories of wildfrost (at least compared to slay the spire) but it still continues to surprise me with more intriguing stories that not even slay the spire or any other roguelike could supply.
i used a sun rod on an enemy so it would hit my Kernel before the rest of the enemies wiped mi, giving shell to my monkey totem, but since my monkey totem had a charm that replaces all shell received with spice, it reached beyond 12 spice and triggered, killing all 4 attacking enemies before they could kill all my units.
i think people come into roguelikes with a set picture and idea of how they want their journey and game to go and every "unlucky" event where a "lesser" thing happens instead just deviates from their ideal and they don't see the point
the inherent design of roguelikes is not that the rng is one dice roll that decides everything, it's the constant choosing and rolling of dice, the subtle manipulation of everything, the omnipresent law of large numbers constantly renewing and transforming the experience, where will my frontloaded damage come from this time? where will my scaling damage come from this time? my frontloaded defense? my scaling defense?
also in my experience i've found that even though damage output is the first thing i try to secure, i usually find more than enough and more often than not the difference between my winning runs and my close loss runs is that i over-drafted damage output
after all, why draft and play a 10 damage card when i could instead draft a defense card that either let's 2 of my units get to their turn before the enemies, or let's them survive 2 extra enemy hits, letting them attack for 10-20 each?
You can't explore much in three minutes. Gonna need a couple hours to actually see the madness this game has in store.
This game is beautiful and has a great promise of fun, but I'm more then 10hrs in and have not had a single win, and only got close a couple times. The balance is AWFUL. RNG either carrys, or kills you with no chance of success. It's out now, but wait until the next content updates for the rebalancing.
I think the balance is on the harder side, but fine. You wont beat it the first time since you dont know what to prepare for but there arent that many different encounters and after 5 playthroughs or so you know most of them and know what to prepare for. Agreeed that sometimes you jsut dont get good charms, which are essential, but thats just a few runs. For perspective: I played the game for 6 hours by now and have three wins while activating all the ascencions when they got available. So yeah, it´s definately winable with just a bit of knowledge if you apply it correctly. The game is hard, but thats not automatically a misbalance. Maybe it´s just balanced for people who think other deckbuilders are too easy?
As a tip: Get a unit with multihits if you can and stack any attack bonus you can find on it, then focus on keeping it alive. Each won run I had had at least one unit that activated multiple times. First time was the fox that hit three times, second was the mushroom throwing guy and in the third it was that one girl from the gnome tribe that added the status that also increased the damage taken. Add to that some support that fits your damage dealer. For example for the mushroom guy I actually had the unit menitoned in the video that gave the shrooms to other units. And in the third run I had the unit that made everyone in the lane hit everyone. So three attacks that hit everyone every three cards played. Sometimes even more since I also had the card that reduced activation and increases damage. Which I gave a charm that increased every number on it.
What I mean by describing that: You need some kind of crazy combo to win. Which I absolutely love. In other games when you get that crazy combo the game is already over because every fight is just a breeze afterwards. Here you need that combo to win. Dont go wide, go high. Dont buff everyone in your team. Have one starplayer and the rest is just there to block and support.
Bro I played 3 runs (including the very first one), all 3 runs I narrowly lost on the final boss. Respectfully, skill issue.
@McDuckington nah, it's badly balanced
The game has tons of ways to contol fights. even if you dont hit the nuts, I've found it easy to win. Once you understand some basic strageties like farming gold/ buying as many crowns as possible its really not that hard.
Currently on a winstreak and have won with all the different types of strategies.
Or maybe you just suck.
Not into deck builders or roguelikes, so I'll be passing on this.
Looks pretty cool for timewasting.
The bosses in the demo felt super cheap, I’m sad to hear that this is also the case in the finished game.
Cheap in what way?
@@SangerZonvolt As mentioned in the review, they often seemed to require or severely punish certain builds but I never knew which ones I’d be facing, so I couldn’t plan to overcome the boss and just felt like I had to rely on luck. The fact that everything except the bosses felt pretty straightforward definitely exacerbated the feeling because the runs just felt like they were wasting my time when, without warning, they pit me against a boss that was simply impossible for my build.
@@Shadowquacker
This is the thing though: Dont overspezialise your build. You should have at least some utility in your build to react. If you dont then your build isnt good. Kinda like saying a strategy game is poorly balanced if you only build airforce and get countered by someone who had some anti air units.
What most people probably miss is how extremely flexible the snowball debuff is. Not only does it freeze the enemies action counter, it also disables all counter attacks and reactions. Which means most problematic bosses can be snowballed in the right moment and countered. This works with every build since all tribes have access to this debuff in some way with multiple cards.
Is there a specific boss you had in mind?
@@SangerZonvolt If the specific boss he has in mind is King Moko...
I would just encourage him to read the full text of his card VERY carefully, and put together what his single glaring weakness is. Once you figure it out, he's no threat. (It's the one-attack-per-turn mini Moko monsters that are the real threat. XD)
@@AegixDrakan
I think I lost to him once while never building anything specificto counter him. His minions died before doing serious damage. Otherwise I just snowballed or inked them. One thing you absolutely cant do in this game is playing defensive or enemies like that will overwhelm you. For those small guys its enough to have one unit with smackback or spikes. Or anything that triggers on hit. Since they hot every turn you get triggered every turn. Other trick is having jubk in front. Since they only lose 1 junk health per hit it doesnt matter how high the enmies attack is. So while you need some counter against him there are plenty enough to fit any build.
Just finished the game against the secret boss. Against those guys you a lot of stuns and ridiculous damage. But with two multihit guys with two attacks each and over 10 damage after being done with buffing. My leader also applied 2 Frost, 2 snowball and curse with every attack. I manage to win with only my leader remainig at 3 hp at the end while only playing a snowball card and redrawing every other turn to stall the last enemy. To give an idea what kind of units you need at the endgame. Hard, but not impossible. To do this you need to focus on getting charms whenever possible and crowns for all your units or the start is too slow.
not really into these kind of games
What a lame azz boring game
You've loste at rouglite deck builder.
First
Doing this got old 20 years ago
@@MrHalapino13 your mom got old 20 years ago
@@MrHalapino13 Second