Nightbanes Review

Are you tired of free-to-play games that use micro-transactions to beat other players? If so then Nightbanes… is sadly not the game you are looking for. Nightbanes is a turn-based card game much like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering so it has quite a lot of competition. Sadly the vampire game has about as much personality as Kristen Stewart’s performance in that god awful vampire film. One would think that they would want to make themselves stand out from the others, however it falls short almost immediately upon start up.

In Nightbanes you are thrown into a world filled with vampires, zombies, gargoyles, and many other monsters controlled by you and your opponent. The stronger the monster, the better chance you have of winning.While the game has blocking mechanics and attack boosts it would seem that the best strategy is to just play the strongest card in your hand each turn.

You begin with the choice between three starter decks which all contain a variety of card types from flying monsters, to monsters that have protection from one damage when a monster attacks it. Some of your monsters are capable of using weapons and armor equipment cards that boost your creature’s stats. You also have magic cards that can be played to deal damage to monsters at random, on your enemy’s field.

Your objective is to drain your enemy player’s life points, however you also have to make sure that your enemy doesn’t manage to take your points down. While the combat in this game is fairly smooth, it is so simple that it borders on the simplicity of tic-tac-toe. Your monsters fight whatever card is in front of them and if there is nothing on the enemy’s board, they get to deal damage to your enemy’s health points.

My starting experience with Nightbanes was a dull grind against NPCs that took hours. I found myself already being turned off of playing this game as fighting the NPCs literally involved me just putting my strongest cards out first and waiting for the match to be over. After defeating the computer players and finishing the solo tutorials, I figured the multiplayer would make the game far more interesting. Boy was I wrong.

This game has an insane pay-to-win element that puts anyone who wants to use the in-game currency to unlock cards at a huge disadvantage. Not only do players who pay for cards have an advantage, but the actual strategy behind winning in this game takes no skill whatsoever from what I experienced. When I played against an opponent I found myself just stacking my deck with high health and medium damage creatures. I just filled the board with so many creatures that by the time my opponent had taken the majority of them out, I had already taken out most of my opponents health points. It seems odd for a card game to have so little strategy and i was rather frustrated that i had no control over my own creatures. With so little thought put into the gameplay mechanics I would have also thought that the studio would put more work into the graphics of a game like this.

The creature cards do actually look nice with their portrait pictures and whatnot, however the overall look of the game is bland and uninventive. The field that your cards sit on is nothing more than a grey stone-like texture while games such as Hearthstone and Scrolls put far more work into making the play area interesting.

Nightbanes is a game that definitely appeals to the more casual card game enthusiast with very simple gameplay that is extremely slow and does not seem to require much skill. I cannot say that I would recommend playing this game unless you are willing to spend a decent amount of cash on it. If you are willing to be at a disadvantage and grind the weeks out getting cards that others have bought in a mere five minutes, then all the power to you. I believe that most people will find themselves bored with the simple mechanic of playing a card and ending your turn as the monsters attack whatever card is in front of them. Even victory feels hollow, when I defeated an opponent it was extremely unsatisfying as it felt like all I did was click my strongest card over and over again with about as much thought as a zombie. Honestly this should have been a zombie game instead of one about vampires as the game has as much thought as the mindless undead.