Adventure Time Card Wars is an okay CCG. It uses some tropes of other card games with a few twists and some dubious design choices that made me scratch my head about their presence in the game. Some expected iOS game bloat - energy timers, premium currencies and random card packs - bummed me down a little, but otherwise I had fun with it. I still know nothing of Adventure Time, but it sure added some flavor to the cards and characters. Maybe I would've enjoyed it a tiny bit more if I knew what this was all about.
Playing on a huge map - that I'll never finish - you spend energy to attempt fighting various Adventure Time characters of different levels and decks. Each level has three challenges that unlocks stars if you complete them and getting all three stars gives you one unit of the premium currency. Some levels require you to absolutely use a specific character, which is a bit weird since it only forces you to dilute your experience progression, manage multiple decks and give you different character-specific special abilities, but in terms of advantage to the player, I find almost none.
You start a duel by placing lands on the 4 spaces of the map. Much like colors in Magic, you can make your deck of different land types - corn fields, plains, swamps - and you can only cast your creatures and buildings on the matching land types - except certain 'colorless' ones. The goal is to lower your opponent's HP to 0 by using creatures, buildings and spells. Creatures can have 'floop' abilities and everything - summoning, using spells, abilities - cost magic points, which you slowly get more of turn after turn, much like Heartstone. The first player is determined semi-randomly and you don't get an attack turn, so you can place your two creatures and the opponent more or less gets a free turn of direct attacks in since creatures can only attack and defend in the lane they've been summoned in.
The weirdest mechanic for me was the Battle Wheel. Whenever you attack or defend, there's a spinning wheel with a red, dark green and light green zone on it. Tap the screen at the right time and your attack will deal double damage - or you'll take no damage from the enemy - or even counterattack! This is all well and good but the detection of when you tap and when the arrow stops seems really imprecise, so it's more or less down to luck and weirder still, you can disable that mechanic entirely, replacing it with... nothing. Is that mechanic important or not? Is the game balanced around you hitting the mark all the time, half the time, or not at all? The game gets pretty difficult after a while and the rewards you get mid-battles are forfeited if you lose.
Oh, but you can spend premium currency to just revive to max health, reshuffle your deck and keep fighting as if nothing had happened. So you can just plow through the game using your wallet, which is never a good sign. Even if the game is beatable in its humongous entirety without spending a single cent, how was the balance decided? Is there a spot in the difficulty curve with only "??? the player spends money here I guess" scribbled? Probably not, but it still makes me wary. You can also buy card packs and card bundles, you can also combine cards together, but as with any game of this scope it's tough to say if these systems are worth it or just overkill. Do I need to combine cards? Should these cards just be reward won from fights?
In any case, ATCW is a neat little game with tons of content if you can stomach the difficulty and the energy timers and everything else. It's strategic enough to make deck building an actual decision process but the battle wheel makes the line between pure strategy and dumb luck a bit muddy. I had an okay time with it, even with some small glitches here and there.
