The Coliseum challenges on Hard (Legend?) are legit. You need to tailor your deck to each encounter pretty deliberately.
I’m still not a fan of the gauntlet format though. I don’t want to replay 1-4 because I didn’t know what 5 was going to be and so was unprepared. You can’t cache cards or skill points or anything between battles, so basically the only difference is HP handicapping depending on your previous performance.
This seems to be a weakness of the game overall. The system seems built around tailoring decks to enemy types (assuming sufficient difficulty), and there’s certainly not enough resources to buy/craft/upgrade everything, yet it’s basically impossible to know what you’re going to be up against in a given fight, especially the bosses. You can have a sense in a given chapter that you’ll encounter some enemies with physical resistance, say, but without a means to adjust the deck before an encounter, it’s not all that helpful.
They should have a side-board (ala Magic the Gathering) that can contain X cards from your collection (and maybe X can be raised with items?) that when a battle starts you can swap in and out of. Or maybe just go all in and let you tinker with your decks before every encounter, rather than only from the menu outside of combat.
I’d like the ability to store 2-3 different “builds” (read: decks) per character, and select from one at the start of each battle. I could see that being intimidating to the casual player though.
I understand the theory of the Coliseum being “make one deck that works for ALL of these encounters”, but that’s how the rest of the game also works in practice because of the interface tax of editing decks before every battle.
Also, some of them may simply be situational, but it really feels like there are some straight up bad cards. One of the Hearthstone designers was on the record as saying that you need bad cards to give deck building a high skill ceiling, so I guess that’s ok. There are only a couple of cards that seem to have a strictly-better version available.
Got to the last boss on Legend, and I’m not sure that it’s possible without some significant grinding for XP? (I’m sure there’s some guy on YouTube who’s done it).
Gilgamech has an attack that can one-shot me at anything below full health, and the Necronomicog itself might be manageable, but it’s like a 60 round battle to even get to the final form, and I have no interest on repeating that with different decks to see what might work. They clearly decided that what makes an epic battle is the overall duration, but like the later Arena challenges, only the latter half of the battle provides any challenge. The Arena has enemy levels associated with each challenge, so its possible that there’s just a level expectation associated with those (or similarly with the end boss) that I’m not hitting, but I don’t really want to grind for that, and that seems to just map difficulty levels being multipliers on HP and damage, which isn’t super fun.
It seems like the real challenge should be “can you build a deck to handle this situation”, but they make it hard to enjoy iterating in that way. Also, they let you skip cutscene dialog, but not animations, which feels punitive when you’re replaying the same battle.
Overall, this was pretty good? I think it may be my least favorite of the Steamworld games though (maybe better than Dig 1, just on account of scale and polish), but it’s still good.
I’m also a little disappointed there weren’t any new Steam Powered Giraffe songs.
Edit: the internet says that some useful approaches for Gilgamech include blind and debuffs, which may be true. I haven’t used blind at all, but I guess its another way to stack turn denial.
Now available on Steam!
Any idea when this will come to GOG? Their other games are on there and would prefer to buy DRM free.
Wishlisted!
Bought. I’m not really a card game fan, but I love the other games these developers have done, so here’s to hoping they continue making SteamWorld games.
I’m nearing the end of Steamworld Heist and have been loving it to pieces, so this is perfect timing for me.
Quick question from an ignorant PC gamer: is this linear? branching? overworld map? How’s it structured, basically?
I liked Steamworld Heist and like card games and RPG’s, so this seems like a potentially good get.
It’s totally linear. You occasionally have to decide between two paths but one of them is basically always going to dead-end at a treasure chest.
I had put this game on the back burner and recently came back to it. After some time to cool off on the initial excitement, I’m very lukewarm on it. Even the deckbuilding which left a strong first impression on me is kind of bland. They give you a ton of different options to craft your deck, but it feels so constrained by the shallow combat mechanics. I just don’t have any reason to put all of these damage/elemental mitigation cards in my deck because the battles are rarely dangerous enough where I need them. Even if I did put in a card that gave my character to resistance to frost damage for 3 turns, I have no way to make sure that the enemies who are casting frost spells are going to target that guy instead of some other character in my party. And even if I could, maybe I’m not even going to be in combat with enemies who have frost damage. It all comes down to the cards that can deal the most damage and then hope I get lucky that I have elemental types that the enemies are not resistant to.
Many times already I’ve stumbled into an inescapable boss battle where I have a character with a deck full of spell types that the enemy is resistant to. Even though I have a useless character in my party, I still can generally win these fights. It just ends up taking forever because my damage output is totally gimped. It feels bad wandering into these boss fights and bringing the wrong weapons, but somehow it feels even worse to win them under those conditions. Makes me feel like none of these decisions matter.
I’m playing on Legend and finding the combat to be pretty satisfying. I will say that I rarely beat bosses on the first try- I need to lose, carefully reconsider my loadout and team composition, then come back.
BTW, whoever was waiting for this to be released DRM-free on GOG (like me), wait no more:
https://www.gog.com/game/steamworld_quest_hand_of_gilgamech
I’ve put in a few hours and it’s fantastic. Image & Form do not disappoint. The card system here reminded me of Deep Sky Derelicts, but I like (prefer) the fact that the cards are tied to characters rather than weapons.
I’m also perfectly fine with how linear the game is. Enemies do seem to be sort of randomly selected? I lost one battle, then fought it again but the enemy party was slightly different from before.