Cabals: Magic and Battles Cards Review
My first online match: my deck shuffles as I glance down at the cards in my hand. A solid hand, enough to start a steady production of conquest to push me towards victory, I quickly check the amount of cards still in my deck - 23, should be enough. All of my practice matches against AI, I feel like I have been trained for this and that I am able to contend with another player. I glance towards my opponents total deck, 60 cards… With more than double my total amount of cards I am unable to contend with him, in only a few turns I have run out of cards. Leaving my opponent to run rampant on the board and decimate me, next game? Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Outnumbered, outgunned and unable to contend with any of the ten or more opponents I am paired up against.
A single thought crosses my mind.
How am I supposed to progress?
I don’t.
So what is Cabals: Magic & Battle Cards? Simply put it is another card battle game, with many features similar to the rather cookie cutter genre. With the ability to conquer tiles and produce “conquest” as a method of victory, the other method being your units marching across the board and taking their stronghold, where their units deploy which is no small feat.
The tutorial is in-depth, it carefully guides you through the slight learning curve of all the above-mentioned features as well as the units special abilities as well as how the resources work. Summoning and other features are abundant but they don’t move away from the standard playstyle of battle card games. Simple damage and HP stats indicate just how much damage your card can take and deal, with this changing on your card’s special abilities.
So, what's my beef? Well, with the starter deck of cards you struggle to actually compete against another player, as far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many cards someone can field in their deck. I have been up against a few people with considerably over 40 cards to their deck to my meagre 20. As you can probably tell this puts the odds hugely against me regardless of how well I play. The reward for losing is very small, small enough that you could only really afford a booster pack after twenty or so games and even then that only gives you four additional cards of various quality, it wasn’t uncommon for me to find a full set of rather... Disappointing cards that only had HP and Attack values of 1. Hardly a valuable edition to my deck.
The game claims to be more enjoyable than Hearthstone, It isn’t. Ported over from mobile, in a very admirable way, it favours a lot of paying over playing. Able to purchase decks for a rather high amount of coins, it's only natural to venture towards the shop to realise that what they are really after is that sweet green in your back pocket. If you want to start a new deck without any grief or hassle in multiplayer games? Be prepared to fork out a fair bit of cash.
Whilst not truly a bad game, Cabals: Magic & Battle Cards fails to stand out in any way and blends into the rather bland genre already. With no particular exciting and unique features, I can’t see much of a future on the PC front, however for a mobile game? I would say it’s rather enjoyable.
Cabals: Magic & Battle Cards (Reviewed on Windows 8)
Game is enjoyable, outweighing the issues there may be.
I guess it's alright? I mean, starting is very unenjoyable, painfully so in fact. Perhaps the iOS version is better, but I am not reviewing that. Cabals is also no where near as enjoyable as Hearthstone.
COMMENTS
Effe - 09:51am, 30th July 2016
I'm a Cabals player. What I'll write will be naturally an apology of the game. I have started to play it almost a year ago, during the search of an enjoyable game in the wasteland Windows Store is, but that's another story.
Right to the point: the review catches well how a newbie feels at start, what I felt too, but it's nowhere near the real reasons of it.
You start with a starter deck and a booster that contains 10 cards (6 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare). Than you can buy other boosters with Influence, the in-game value. There are basic quest and more advanced ones that can give you up to 1200 Influence. Plus daily quests give you at least 100 Influence per day. I consider a week is a reasonable time to get really into the game and complete the quests so, considering booster costs 150 Influence a new player could obtain at least 10 booster in the first week, then completing dailies everyday can give you up to 5 booster per week, even not considering leaderboards rewards that gives you extra Influence.
The review points at the difference in quantity rather than quality between decks as if a 50 cards deck always win against a 30 cards one: that's completely wrong. The game blends ccg peculiarity with chess-like dynamics, giving depth to both: time gives you huge card collection, but you have to refine the quality of your deck due to the two way to win. You can storm opponent's stronghold, the tile your opponent starts from to deploy units or you can pile up to 60 domination points which originate from stronghold, tiles that give you resources and tiles from where you deploy units, one point from each relevant tile per turn. In a match you start controlling the stronghold, you usually get a relevant tile in 2 turns and another in 3-4. That's difficult to get a limit number of turns as abilities can boost the counter, but a 40 cards deck is really difficult to exhaust. Usually a good deck don't use more than 20 cards to win.
The real problem lies elsewhere, in basics and multiple strategies that are no so easy to be learned (that's the challenge anyway, what makes a game going on!), but more in gamers' base and matchmaking. As the game is now it seems to have a bit of attractive power but it doesn't last long plus the slowness of updates get people bored too at last. Gamers' base is so composed by high level hardcore players most of all. For this reason matchmaking can be really unfair, even if it's getting better nowadays thanks to a particular attention to the topic, probably thanks to this review. My suggestion is to give the game a second chance, a longer one. Precious things sometimes take their time to reveal themselves.