An excellent game by a very talented team of developers. Mystic Box has delivered the perfect blend between RPG and casual card games. I really dug the story and the graphics and the music was awesome as well. Bought it day one on Steam and have played it several times. Really cool.
Original Indie Game. PuzzleQuest-like game with Pokers Elements and Magic: The Gathering elements. Great music, a well-written story and pretty cool 3D Characters.
Combing two previously uncombined genres results in a challenging, strategic and addictive experience, which makes up for any storytelling shortcomings.
If you're looking for a card game and you're in love with the poker Runespell: Overture could be your game but keep in mind it has no multiplayer and the gameplay can be extremely repetitive.
Delivers an interesting and fun variation of a traditional card game and turns it into a competitive puzzle with myriad nuances to its strategy. Unfortunately, it doesn't do enough to keep the variation fresh throughout.
Runespell: Overture is a puzzle RPG with quite a compelling story. The Battles are fought using a card based duel mechanic that seemingly tries to emulate the success of Puzzle Quest, but despite the nice graphics and a not-too-generic fantasy backdrop it still doesn't quite make it.
An excellent game by a very talented team of developers. Mystic Box has delivered the perfect blend between RPG and casual card games. I really dug the story and the graphics and the music was awesome as well. Bought it day one on Steam and have played it several times. Really cool.
The core gameplay of Runespell is essentially a weird combination of poker solitaire and a trading card game. In each fight, you face the AI opponent in a card game where the goal is to take the other player's health to 0. You create poker hands from a solitaire style board, which can be used as attacks against enemies. The better the hand, the more damage the attack deals. Also, you can play cards from your sideboard, which have various effects such as dealing damage, blocking damage, or giving you extra actions on the current turn. While not as deep as either poker, or a typical trading card game, I still found it to be oddly addictive and fun. The card game is wrapped in an RPG story, which isn't particularly interesting. The dialog is painfully bad, and the story and quests are just an excuse to run you around the map fighting things. The artwork in the game does look really nice. The epic score almost seems like overkill for this game, but it's quite good. Overall, it's a neat little game, even if it doesn't quite reach its potential, and I applaud the developers for trying something different.
It took me five hours to finish this very uneven game. While the concept is intriguing the game suffers from two major problems. The first is that the game is unbalanced at times probably because the AI is poor. The monsters sometimes have much better cards and much more health points than you and even if you play well it's really is just a crap shoot. There is no real strategy to the card game and on the whole it just feels entirely too random to me. The second is that the story that strings these card games together is below average. It would have helped a lot if there had been voice overs. Anything to help bring the stale story to life. On the positive side the programming was good as I encountered no bugs and the graphics seemed quite relevant to the game. This is an OK game if you are looking for something that is a change of pace from your normal hack n slash. I didn't feel like I had wasted my time to play it to the end but I won't be playing it again, either.
As a avid player of Match-3 games, and appreciator of the Puzzle Quest saga, I convinced myself to give Runespell: Overture a shot, intrigued by the fact you play with a standard deck of cards instead of coloured gems.
The first battles were interesting, the poker-like combos felt novel. Diving more deeply into the game, it got more depth with the addition of magic cards and sidekicks.
Unfortunately, it appeared that most of the magic cards are just copies of the same basic spell (unlike other games where fire, ice, lightning and poison have different tactical effects).
From that point, the battles felt too much similar to sustain interest, and the constant sight of these clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades turned the fantasy background into the trivial one your regular Solitaire.
These kind of games are supposed to be easy to develop on a reasonable budget, deliberately limiting fancy graphics to focus solely on gameplay depth. Sadly, this game is a living testimony of a team being too lazy or too tired to make a truly great game.
Maybe they lost faith in this game at some point. No wonder this happened to me too.
Nothing but problems for me. The concept of the game is original and interesting at first, until you realize that an otherwise casual style of gameplay gets utterly dominated by all the strings attached to it. The story is useless. Nothing new, nothing artistic, no degree of presentation, and it's told only through written dialogue. Once the opening scene is through, there is no attempt to set the scene and the dialogue is flat and unimpressive at all levels. Don't want the story? Too bad, as that's the only thing you're able to do in the game. Want to play the game? Too bad, you'll have to read text-books worth of dialogue before you do, and none of it is interesting enough to be worth the time it takes to read. The length of game depends more on how quickly you can read than how good you are at it. In fact, this is a game that you can't be good at. There's no real strategy, as it uses poker mechanics to play. The downfall is that they had the bright idea of letting you and the other player see and steal from each other's hands, and since poker skill is based on NOT knowing everyone's cards, skill gets thrown on the back burner and is replaced by luck and a half-hatched system of "runespells" that discard all notion of balance. Although you and your enemy can both use them, they happen to be consumables, and since the computer is granted a nearly limitless supply of them whereas you only get 1 or 2 per fight, your odds of victory go down very steadily. Whether you win or not comes down to nothing but luck, and the developers basically admit that because every time you lose you can just retry infinitely with no penalty. It's like they're saying "here, roll this die, if you get a 6 you win, if you get less than a 6 you lose. Wait you didn't get a 6? Just keep rolling until you do." Basically, Runespell: Overture is a textbook with a fun-game-gone-horribly-wrong haphazardly glued to it. Had I not obtained the game through a steam indie bundle, I would have been sorely disappointed with any amount of money I spent on this game. Reviews aren't always right, but listen to the critics when it comes to this game. You can get the full experience of this game by reading a book where you have to roll dice to see if you can read the next page or not.