REVIEW: ‘Cross Blitz’ Delivers Fun And Unique Card Gameplay (PC)

Digital card games have become a common sight on both PC and mobile devices. With so much competition, a game has to carve out a special niche in the genre if it’s going to escape the shadow of the heavy hitters. Publishers The Arcade Crew along with developer Tako Boys Studios LLC, hope their new card-fueled adventure game Cross Blitz can succeed with its pair of game modes and quirky personality.

The player is given their choice of two different frameworks to experience Cross Blitz‘s card battles: a narrative-driven adventure mode, and a roguelike mode. These narratives are split into multiple chapters, following a central character as they go through a fun stary ranging from a pop diva searching out a doppelganger bent on ruining her reputation, to pirates on a quest for magical loot and freedom. The narratives are enjoyable stories filled with goofy characters. They provide some chuckles as well as the occasional moment of character development. While they manage to be more than a simple excuse to play the battles, they are never fantastic either. But the straightforward plots of silly characters were always good enough to warrant reading through the various dialogues, rather than skipping over them for the gameplay.

As players journey through each story, they are rewarded with money and resources they can use to purchase or craft new cards to add to their decks. There is a steady stream of new possibilities for players, so those open to experimenting will always find new goodies to toy with.

Most battles within a given story are not overly challenging. Occasionally, a deck will be particularly bad for a player’s given strategy, requiring changes to be made to face a certain foe’s deck. This reasonable level of difficulty delivers a stable gameplay experience right up until the player reaches the final battle of a story.

The final challenges in Cross Blitz‘s narratives see a huge difficulty spike. While these final confrontations are not unbeatable, they are far less forgiving than even the battle fought just prior to them. The power of the cards and consistency of the strategies employed make it so that often, there is a single strategy that will work against them, forcing players to abandon decks entirely for something new if they want to finish a story.

This difficulty spike feels off-putting, as it is contradictory to how the rest of the story is approached up to that point, making the final step far less enjoyable than it could’ve been. Happily, the roguelike mode doesn’t suffer from the same difficulty. With players working with a more random pool of cards, the developers keep the challenges to a more reasonable level, making defeats less punishing, even in the final battles.

The overall structure of this mode sees players moving from one node to the next, usually, with multiple options along the way, players choose whether to face battles to earn new cards, visit rest areas to restore health, visit event locations that can yield unique effects, or go to one of several shops to purchase relics or trinkets they can apply to cards, altering their effects. With individual play-throughs never lasting more than an hour, it’s easy to experiment with new combinations of cards, as the time investment is never high.

The core gameplay that players partake in during both of the above modes in Cross Blitz is the card battles. Players construct decks made up of minions and spells, taking turns playing cards and attacking opponents until one of them has run out of health. Within this familiar framework though, the game looks to leverage a number of twists to the formula, ranging from how players construct decks to the intricacies of gameplay within a match.

The first thing players will notice about deck building within the game is the wildly varying number of copies of cards they can have in their deck. Some cards are allowed as many as eight copies in decks, while others can have four, two, or a single copy present. These widely varying numbers reflect both the power level and the importance of a card to the theme within a given deck. These themes further interact with numerous archetypes for deck design that players can pick from. Whether they choose to focus on a single one exclusively or mix them up to provide versatility at the expense of consistency is up to them. Each of these archetypes feels unique and different, allowing for a wide variety of strategies to take shape.

The only problem with having such a wide variety of concepts present in the game is that some feel a bit less enjoyable to play against than others. Certain strategies feel far too dependent on luck to make for fulfilling matches. The worst instance is the evolve archetype. Whenever an evolve effect triggers, a random minion from either player is targeted. If it is a friendly minion, it gets changed into a minion whose cost is one higher. If it’s an enemy’s minion, it changes to one cost cheaper. There is no good way to defend against the deck, and the player is left hoping they don’t get completely upended by the results of any given evolve trigger.

The final element that goes into deck construction is relics. Relics are special passive abilities players acquire through the course of a game that alter how decks play. From providing extra mana to giving certain minion types extra abilities, these effects give players some extra spice to make their favorite combos hit. This extra element grants more rewarding choices to the player, further enriching the gameplay experience.

Once a player is in a match, they take turns playing cards and attacking, with most minions unable to attack on the turn they come into play. How much energy players have access to follows the tried and true growing mana pool system. On turn one, players have one mana to spend. Turn two, they have two, and so on. Each player has only two rows of four spaces to play minions to and they cannot opt to destroy a minion to play a new one, making space management a factor in approaching a battle.

The major element that makes the moment-to-moment gameplay in Cross Blitz different from many card battlers is that minions attack every round when able. This makes it so low-power minions with powerful abilities are harder to keep on the board since an opponent simply needs to play a strong minion across from it on the board to force the minion’s death. All of these elements are presented to the player through vibrant, pixel-style art. Basic attacks are shown as beams firing from characters. Special abilities like lifesteal and guard come with special animations to clearly show the player what is happening at any given moment.

The narrative mode takes the charming presentation even further. The area maps players cross to get to battles, events, and shops are made up of gorgeously crafted hexagonal pieces that bounce as the player character navigates them. Dialogue moments are shown through still images of characters, with numerous different poses utilized to show a range of highly expressive postures. There are also some short storybook-style moments when action happens between battles that deliver the more energetic moments of the stories.

When it all comes together, Cross Blitz delivers a fun and unique card game experience. While there are a few struggles with the difficulty curve, the overall presentation and gameplay are fun and varied, offering lots of replayability. Combined with a visual presentation that enhances the game’s charm and fun, you have a package that can provide loads of entertainment for the avid digital card game player.

Cross Blitz is available in early access now on Steam.