Slay the Spire

So I love this game, new to the deck building genre, but I heard this one was the best. So I bought it right when I saw it drop. Everything good, except for a few bugs, small, but nonetheless need to be fixed. One is text in my the relics, when you have a relic that has a status the effect of the status stays popped up which will block the definition of the relic sometimes leaving you having to guess how it works or what triggers it, also the touch controls are a bit finicky when trying to read the card from your hand, I have iPhone X, and when you want to read what a card does you have to slide it up just a bit till it sticks up, when sometimes with a skill card is confused with playing it and in turn you play the card you wanted to read. This is bothersome, why not just hold the card to read? Other deck builders have that where you hold card and it magnifies it, this would be better honestly. Those 2 things fixed this Is by far a 5 star game, I wanted to give 5 star in Faith but I want to see if you’ll make changes.

First off, StS is a super fun game and has been one of my favorites since I bought it on Steam about a year ago. And if you don’t own it on PC or console, I highly recommend you get it there. With that said, the mobile version needs some work. Firstly, the icons and text is too hard to see on most devices. And the ability to select cards with fat, meaty fingers is way harder than with a mouse which leads to selecting the wrong card or accidentally playing a card. Furthermore, it’s very hard to read how much damage a card does. Many times I found myself trying to position my thumb awkwardly so I could look under it. Secondly, there are a few bugs (to be expected since the game was released on iOS this week as of writing). Occasionally the game will crash which forces you to re-do or re-fight whatever you just did. This especially happens in the last level, The Beyond, (my game crashed about 5 times alone so far in The Beyond). Also, I haven’t been able to beat the final boss yet. I fought it 2 times now and each time whenever I was about to play the final blow, the game crashed. I really look forward to what the devs will do with the mobile versions of this game. I think this game would work really well on mobile if these issues are fixed.

Slay the Spire and Dream Quest are probably my most played digital/PC games of all time. Fantastic gameplay, challenge, and replayability. And StS is a natural to have on your phone, as evidenced from the slew of other similar games (Pirates Outlaws, Night of the Full Moon, Dream Quest) that have already been smooth examples at the phone screen size (as well as StS via SteamLink). But this is where the long-awaited app was a bit of a disappointment, especially at its more premium price of $10 (which is still a steal for the title). The screen size doesn’t seem to be well used... there is ample space at the bottom for card text to be seen if they were just a little bit higher up. The UI that was fine on the PC version is a bit clunky and unwieldy here. I’m getting infrequent but fairly regular crashes. And most annoyingly, this app mutes your outside audio, which is a big no-no! The app is still very playable (well, not when it crashes), and still very much worth having, but I’ll gladly edit and add the other two stars with the audio/crashing fix, and also hope for some UI tweaks.

First things first, this game is amazing. Easily one of my favorite cards games (spent quite a bit of time playing on steam) and probably one of, if not the best, card games on iOS. This is probably also one of the best ports to mobile you can possibly find. It's basically a 1:1 recreation of the game, just smaller. However, there are some minor problems as a result of how faithful that recreation is. First one is that there is a clicky sound for certain buttons (menu, etc). It's really scratchy and irritating but that can be mitigated slightly by lowering effects volume. Second issue is that it's kinda of hard to switch cards. On Steam this is no issue, since the mouse has more fine controls and the screen is bigger, but on mobile the hit boxes are way smaller. It's questionable as to why this is an issue, since there's so much real estate on the bottom of the screen.

I had not played this game before the iOS port, and I’m having a blast. Not normally a roguelike fan but it’s easy to keep convincing myself to do just one more run. Top tier deck builder. Mostly this runs very smoothly, but there are two fairly frustrating issues I keep running into: -Being able to view cards before playing them. You tap them and they pop up, but not all the way sometimes. Also sometimes you try to tap away and it’s hard to do so or to select a different card. And sometimes when a new menu pops up a card is already selected. -Menu inconsistency. The text size is a little small but I can live with it as it’s on a phone. What is more jarring is when text spills off the menu and I can’t fully read it. Could be mitigated with a scrolling feature! Additionally, sometimes pop ups about features of a card or potion or relic pop up *over the top of* the actual description of the card or potion. For example, if I get an item that interacts with cursed relics, I might get a pop up over top of that telling me about curses, and there’s no visible way to close that. If these issues were fixed it would be a perfect game!