4/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Final Stardust: Cosmic Nexus.

Today is release day, but the game has been EA for awhile. And it's been more or less in a finished state for a couple months now. Final Stardust: Cosmic Nexus is a singleplayer digital CCG based heavily on both Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. I found it to be quite a lot of fun. I think the actual battling mechanics are very good and somewhat unique, which feels hard to do in the card game genre nowadays. There's a clear inspiration here from major established card game brands but they're weaved together in a pleasing little combination of Pokémon style characters with Marvel Snap-meets-Yu-Gi-Oh! style gameplay that is really punchy and engaging. Winning close battles and opening new packs to build new decks is fun. There's a ton of deck variety and viability and most of the graphics feel pretty high quality. There's an endless amount of customization for you to find out what decks you like most, what decks play best and against what opponents. Because it's all singleplayer you can go back to the drawing board frequently to try out new stuff quickly with very little punishment. This really feels outstanding as a first entry for a new dev but there's a couple drawbacks here and there. There's only one real mode or campaign, and it's arduous to get through. You'll really have to love the game for the sake of the game to wanna 100% it and the AI isn't engaging enough to make it a real fun challenge. The pseudo-story of facing each AI opponent isn't all that interesting either, and really sorta unnecessary in the end. I didn't think it was very fun, time would've been better spent building another game mode. One with more lanes. Or less. Or a specific win condition or a draft mode. Just one other thing to keep the gameplay variety up. I know the game isn't built around multiplayer nor was that ever meant, but you'd also feel like multiplayer would freshen up and deepen the card game. Still notable credit is due for the dev and the singleplayer game he did manage to develop and ship. It is fun. It is worth your time. It is worth a pricepoint of $15 or so. You'll have fun, you'll like some of the characters, you'll like some of the mechanics. You'll like just about the whole game and wish there was a little more of it or a little more of something else to make it really special. Not the worst way to spend a week or so.