C.U.E. Cards, Universe & Everything

 

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Today we sit down at the card table to play: Cards, Universe & Everything

Today I bring you a game that I was initially excited for but kind of turned into a bit of a disappointment. The ads for this game hype up this game so much and it has a very bad and costly system to try to gain new cards. 

There are a lot of things on this screen. Most of it won't really be used starting out. There are 2 forms of currency, magenta gems, and coins. The gems are the premium currency needed to get a 'chance' to collect the better cards in the game. Coins are used to buy some card packs as well as a few different late game tasks.

When you click on the avatar icon in the top left of the screen you get a statistic of all the things you have done in the game. You can even toggle if you show online or not. 

The next tab is all the available avatars you can choose from. You may be able to possibly unlock new ones but I did not find anything as to unlocking them.

Lastly is the backgrounds that display on the main screen. These are high-detailed images of real-world places and this is the nice part about the app is spreading history.

The main part of the shop shows some deals that help you grab a specific theme of cards that could potentially give you hidden combos.

The next section has a set of packs that rotate out. There is a mix of premium currency or very expensive packs. This gives this game a very high pay to win feel and makes it seem rather unfair to the plays that can not pay into the game. Futher down are basic cards you can buy with the coins or gems.

The third section is the premium currency tab. It has a standard rate that I have seen among many online games.

The last page is the coins option. These are fairly inexpensive compared to the premium currency, but yet does use the premium currency to purchase.

As you level up you can gain coins, gems and free packs. These packs contain a small number of cards but nothing that will really get you too far because there is a large pool of cards that could possibly be obtained, and this makes it very hard to get any good combo cards to battle with.

Sometimes, you will get very strong and powerful rare cards. These cards normally require other rare cards to combo with or a matching set. There is a counter on the bottom left of the screen that shows you the remaining number of items in a pack.

Here is a quick example of the daily spin wheel. You have a chance of winning some rare cards or packs from them.

When you look at your collection, you can read all the information o a card here. I won't go over how the rules of the game work as there is an extensive tutorial that explains all of it. You can click on the card to learn about the history of the object, person or creature.

You can create several decks of 15 cards. These card have many different effects and affect your score differently. Some cards seem good initially but then end up actually harming your over-all score in the long run. Some of these cards really need better explanations on them.

There appears to be a way to craft random cards in this game but I did not make it far enough to figure out how to do these things.

There appears to be a system in this game if you have a set of a specific card you can transform all of them into very a single rarer card. This requires you to buy a LOT of random card packs and just hope you get what you need. This is unfair and reminds me of bad loot crates.

Here is a quick example of what it takes to fuse cards into stronger cards.

This is the crafting screen. You have to get rid of a LOT of copies of cards to get anything useful from this menu. It gives you a slight comfort as all those commons are not going to waste but it takes so much of them it's not worth it.

For the most part you can only play in causal mode until you get to a certain level. Here you could run into any cards or opponents. There are specific rules as listed here that affect how the game is played. Other battle modes have different rules that constantly rotate out and makes the whole game confusing to master.

And at last, the main battle screen you will see a lot of. The game explains everything here in a tutorial.

Overall:

 2 of 5 cogs.

This game had so much potential but... it is so hard to gain any strong cards to use against opponents and because of that, it makes it impossible to be competitive without spending a lot of money in this game.

Story:

 5 of 5 cogs.

I only mark this as 5 cogs because this game is based on real historical facts. As far as I can tell it appears to be accurate but there are thousands of cards in this game and fact-checking them all is impossible.

Amount of ads:

 

 optional only

This game has optional ads only and very limited amount of them.

Accurate Advertising?:

80%

Now, the ads for this game are very much click-baity. The mention you could learn a lot of information and just by playing this game you become smarter. They also mention specific things found in cards in this game that simply does not exist at all. The ads are over-hyped and is misleading as the information you learn about each card is nothing more than just small amount of flavor text.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

The game uses HD images of real-worl places, items, people, objects or animals. 

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

Asside from the fact that the game is pay to win, the main combat initially feels balanced in as you start off but at some point there is a significant amount of fall-off when you start to face higher level opponents that have better cards.

Free play:

50%

You can unlock some things slowly as you play but if you want to get access to the strong and powerful cards you have to spend premium currency, which isn't the easiest to get in this game without paying. The game is uses loot crate methods to get money out of people.

Fun factor:

😩 disappointment.

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted on my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

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EZPZ Saga

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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The mechanical troops march up with: EZPZ Saga

The game that I will be reviewing today is a semi-clone of AFK Arena. This game suffers from the exact same problems as AFK Areana and that you have random gotcha pulls for troops and you get a flood of unusable commmon troops that drain away your storage space. I had high hopes for this game but I was instantly put off by the burnout I sufferred from these kind of games.

When you you start up the game, you are given several troops as a start.You must then let them fight idly to level or you click on the attack to take on the level's boss. You have to do this every time to progress as I did not see any form of auto-advanced for this part of the game.

The game also features a season pass that has one set of free rewards and then paid rewards. Not only do you have this paid content, you also have several more microtransactions you can pay to progress more. This game is very much pay to win and just has many systems to drain money from you.

Back on the main screen when you click on the scroll in the top right of the screen you get this menu with several places to go and collect diffrent things including the previous screenshot with the season pass. Some of these screens I cover in the following screen shots, but there is a lot of hidden little rewards you have to find and scout for. These screenshots will be a bit all over the place as this game is very chaotic and it is very complicated to figure out what to do.

Another set of daily to weekly quests can be completed to earn varius rewards. These appear to be temporary quests for new players to do as a kind of catchup mechanic.

Another random timed even can be done to unlock a rare unit to help power up your team. These missions are very difficult as it requires many gotcha spins to complete them. I feel this is another poor attempt to force players to pay money just to get a possibly useful troop, but by the time you finish getting the required gotcha pulls you may have better troops anyways, making this quest feel quite useless.

Next Is the daily tasks that you can do to get the premium currency of these blue diamonds. I have not played long enough to see what these premium currencies can be used for beyond buying more spaces for troops.

We finally make it to the main screen. You can see a constant chat window that can not be closed off. In the middle of the screen you can watch the idle battle going on while you sit back and do nothing but wait. Right now the textbox in the top middle is covering up the button you have to click on to advance to a new area after taking on the area boss.

You click on the the player picture in the top left and you can see various options in the game. You can also change the music that is playing during the idle screen. This is the most unique thing I've seen done in any of the games.

Moving along when you click on the Line-up button on the bottom of the screen you can choose which troops to use and change thier battle positions. The problem with this game is every once in a while the enemies force you to change the positions as they can sometimes attack the back row first.

You can then click over to the charachter button you can focus on upgrading several aspects of your troops. Now the first troop you get is the main 'hero' and has additional buffs that you can train as you slowly level up the main account. There is many things you can power up here as well as attacks or stats.

Here is the list of the talents you can unlock. as you can see there there are several tabs at the bottom of this box that you can put points into. There is a lot here to decide and plan on as you progress through the game.

Here you can see each skill takes a certian number of skill points to unlock, I feel that an initial skill costing 2 points to unlock is very steep and in order to unlock skills further down the board you have to buy skills above it. I do not know if it is possible to unlock all the talents if you play enough or if you can even reset the skill tree.

Other units have a level of trust with the main hero. As you play along you can interact with the units to unlock stronger permanent bonuses for that character. Each one of these seem to take a unique resource to open up thes bonuses.

The ever growing need to find all the rarest equipment you can cram on a unit and then having to upgrade all of those pieces for even more stats. This game has several set bonuses from armors that all fall into that same set. This makes it even more complicated to find the right equipment for each unit to use.

Lastly, there is a special gotcha that you can roll to try to get rarer units easier but it takes a lot of a harder to obtain resource. These seem to be weekly events that change up and I do not know if these have improved rates or not.

Overall:

 1 of 5 cogs.

Overall, I am not happy with how this kind of game is contstructed. There are no ads but there are so many paywalls where you have to pay just to even catch up with other players. It is only possible to catch up with a lot of grinding and hoping all the top players become inactive long enough for you to close gap. There are many flawed things with this style of game that just leads to toxicity. I've had many bad experiences with this kind of game, that is more akin to gambling disguised as a game.

Story:

 3 of 5 cogs.

There's a fair bit of story as you progress through the story. There is an attempt at some comedy but it just doesn't rub well with me.

Amount of ads:

 

 None, there are no Ads because of the heavy paywalls.

Accurate Advertising?:

75%

I've seen several ads for this game and none of them were accurate enough to show this game is just a clone of AFK Arena. The ads made me think this game would be a different kind of idle game but no it was severely disappointing.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Arguably the best part of the game. All the art is HD and packs quite the punch to the storage of your phone.

Gameplay:

 1 of 5 cogs.

What else can I say? I was highly disappointed by this game. I was expecting something different and instead it was a carbon-copy of other types of games just like it that have many flawed systems designed to steal money from your wallet. The odds of getting decent troops would equate to lot of money to keep rolling gotchas. 

Free play:

10%

Just, no. This game is not very kind to f2p gamers. This game has many traps to make you spend large amounts of money with little to no actual value in return.

Fun factor:

😔 Disappointed.

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

Thank You for reading my blog. Please consider donating to the tip jar as these are tough times and every bit helps. You can get updates by joining my newsletter. If you enjoy these reviews please show others this blog by retweeting or liking my posts on social media.

Throw a cog(tip using PayPal) to your blogger.