4/5 ★ – JudgeDredd35's review of Slay the Spire.

Playtime: 74 Hours Score: 8/10 Finished and reviewed this game last year but I have played a lot more since then and I still absolutely love this game and recommend it to anyone who likes card games, but I have more to say. At the time of my original review I had only beaten the game once with one character. Now I have beaten the game with all 4 characters and beaten act 4 at least once, and seen the secret ending. To start with what I like, I love the different classes and builds you can make in this game. Each character has their own specific decks and unlockables you can get throughout the game and they can all have multiple different builds, depending on what cards and relics you get in a given run. My favorites are a poison focused Silent and a elemental core focused Defect who really are fun and devastating to play with. I also love that you can upgrade the cards you get and make them deadlier, It just makes the combat so much more fun and enjoyable for me as a long time fan of Hearthstone and Yu Gi Oh. And there's just so much to see and do. You have to beat the game with all the different characters, and then beat the secret act 4 with each of them. And then you still have the ascension levels to tackle, which add modifiers to your runs to make them harder. The amount of content and replayabilltiy here is staggering and its very commendable. And then the best part of the game is the mods. On the steam version of this game (which is the version I recommend), this game has full workshop support which makes this title even better. You can download things from new characters, new cards, quality of life enhancements and even full on fan expansions, like Downfall. It just adds so much more value to an already great package. Now onto the bad. While I said the mods are great for this game, it also works against it a bit, as I found this game to just be way too punishing. I legit wasn't able to finish this game until I downloaded a mod called easy mode (but still not really easy) that makes that you heal your health fully after each combat encounter. You can say its a skill issue on my part, but I just found this mod alone enhanced the experience so much more for me personally. The game isn't brain dead easy by this change as I still die constantly, but what it does do is make the game way more balanced and fair. In the base game, you can get relics and cards to help you heal but its often not by much. The main way to heal is by coming to campfires you find, where you can either upgrade your cards or heal, but you can only do one per campfire. I do not like this choice as 1, resting only heals your health partially anyway and 2, it deprives you of being able to upgrade your cards as you will almost always be low on health. And upgrading your cards I feel is essential to completing runs and making any progress in this game. When I had the mod installed I could focus more on upgrading my cards and because of that I was able to make way more progression, but not too much progress as I once again still die a lot in this game and I have only been able to beat act 4 once. Maybe if they made it so that if you do rest, you fully heal your health which it would make the choice more enticing, but otherwise this has basically become a game I would only ever play with mods, and would never play it on console where that's not an option. Otherwise most of my original complaints still stand. The animations are very limited and your character doesn't even change their pose when attacking. The game is also really unpredictable and a lot of times as there are certain bosses and elite enemies (mini-bosses) that if you don't have a super powerful deck and the right relics, you will almost always lose as the devs just made them way too powerful. My last major complaint is the ascension levels and the unlocks. As you play you earn XP and unlock 5 levels worth of unlocks for each character. The ascension levels go up to 20 and like I said they add modifiers. They also give you more XP compared to playing normally, but there's a huge flaw with this. For me, by the time I beat the game with a character and unlocked their ascension levels, I had already gotten most of the their unlocks. The ascension levels let me get the last few unlocks but after that there really is just no reason to do ascension, since theirs nothing more to unlock. All your doing at that point is making the game harder with no reward, which I get some will like but I don't. They should have made exclusive unlocks that you can only get by hitting certain ascension level milestones. That would make it more worth it in my opinion. Overall though, like I said at the beginning of this review, I still love this game. I think its easily one of the best card games I have ever played and other rogue lite card games I have played since like Banners of Ruin, haven't come to close to this games greatness for me. Its just now that I have played 4x the amount of hours that I did back in my original review, I felt like my opinion has refined, Still a great game though.