Adventure Time Card Wars has everything you’d expect in a game based on the show. Fans will appreciate being able to control Jake or Finn and fight everyone from Lady Rainicorn to BMO, enjoying the great graphics, sound effects and voices. The card combat is simple and fun and gamers will love expanding their card collection and deck-building until they have the perfect, solid deck. What they won’t appreciate is the way the game forces in-app purchases upon you despite being a premium app.
But the game itself is solid! As shown in episode 92 of the tv series (titled simply “Card Wars”) it features one on one battles, with both competitors placing cards onto a holographic battlefield and watching the action play out in front of them. You'll construct your side of the battlefield with four lanes with various terrains and place creatures of the same terrain type on top of them. Like Magic: The Gathering, the objective is to break through your enemy’s defending creatures and whittle down your opponent’s hit points. Creatures can be flooped to access their unique powers- of course.
Besides creature cards you also have buildings that can be placed on any of the four terrain locations to buff your creatures, and spell cards that can do everything from heal your creatures to destroy everything in a lane. Combat is handled with a battle wheel that spins a la Wheel of Fortune. Stop it in the green zones and you can defend or counter enemy creature attacks or critical hit or miss your own. There’s a huge amount of cards available and each terrain has its own speciality and tactics. You gain new cards by defeating creatures and finding treasure chests and you can even craft better cards by combining two or more specific cards in your digital card box.
Adventure Time Card Wars Released for Tabletop [IMAGES]
The game doesn’t offer multiplayer modes but it does offer a campaign of sorts that lets you go through a number of levels (one on one matches), each of which offer up three stars of challenges. To get the first star and advance to the next level you simply have to defeat your opponent, but the next two require specific challenges to be met. You might need to only play with a specific type of terrain card, or not get damaged, or defeat your opponent in a set number of turns. Gain all three stars and you’ll also get a single gem. More on that in a bit...
The matches are fun and fast, and getting new cards allows you to build up your deck and try different combinations. There’s definitely some deck-building involved with this game- you’ll start with the bare minimum of cards and get more and more as you play, the progression allowing you to really try out each card and learn their strengths and weaknesses. Like any deckbuilding or collectible card game each player will have their own prefered playstyle and will pick the type of landscape cards that fits, mixing and matching as they so choose. It all adds up to a card game that can stand with the best of them, even it its digital form.
Yet all of this is threatened and nearly ruined by greed. Although Adventure Time Card Wars is a premium app at $3.99 it still features the type of premium in-game currency that’s found in free-to-play games. You know the type- the kind of currency (in this instance, Gems) that is required to advance in the game but comes along very rarely- think of Gems in Clash of Clans or donuts in The Simpsons: Tapped Out for examples. Here you need Gems to buy rare cards (at three for a random card!) or expand the number of cards you can hold in your box (a gem for a stinkin’ five extra cards!) or to cheat and continue a game you lost. That last one’s the most offensive because the game tells you all the stuff you’re going to lose if you don’t spend a gem, and then pretty blatantly calls you a dweeb if you decide not to spend the rare thing.
There’s also a timer in place that can prevent you from playing the game as much as you’d like, which is an acceptable evil in FTP titles but is infuriating in a game that you’ll pay cold hard cash for. To play a level you have to expend a number of hearts, and it takes 15 minutes for you to regenerate one. Don’t have any more hearts? Well then you have to wait to play- UNLESS you want to spend a gem to restore your energy! Don’t have any gems? Well they can be purchased for a buck apiece or in bundles of up to $50 for 85!
In all fairness- you can gain more hearts to spend as you level up your characters, and your energy gets refreshed in the campaign mode every three levels after beating a boss, but, but the number of hearts required for a level just goes up and up as you get to the later levels, so it’s moot. It’s a pretty evil mechanism that doesn’t fit with the rest of the game.
It’s a shame because Adventure Time Card Wars itself is a blast and really fits the show well. Other games like Where's My Water 2 have dropped their timers based on user feedback, so there's certainly a chance that things could get fixed in the future. Hopefully it will be, because despite these issues you'll really enjoy your time playing the game. You’ll want to keep playing and get frustrated that you can’t, because you’re being nickle and dimed. Floop the pig, indeed.
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Adventure Time Card Wars was developed by D3Publisher and is available in the Apple App Store for $3.99. It was reviewed from a code provided by the publisher.
