Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four Review

Deckbuilding card games have experienced an explosion of titles in recent years. Each game has attempted to find its spin – games like Slay the Spire have tackled roguelites, and there is even a first-person shooter on the way. Cardaclysm looks to be following a traditional RPG outlook.

The player takes on the role of a dark wizard who, unwittingly, unleashes the four horsemen of the apocalypse. From there they are tasked with traversing through procedurally generated isometric/3D levels.  They start with a 14-card deck that will be used in combat; the composition is a mixture of spells and monsters each with their own cost. Some cards can be upgraded which improve them, but obviously increase their cost. The wizard can also be upgraded through gear, and the game encourages mixing up the combinations depending on the deck the player is using. New cards can be found as the player beats fight encounters or buys them in the hub between levels. There are also temporary perks to be collected, as well as special coins for buying cards and tiny incremental upgrades to the wizard’s resources.

Combat itself is played out in a manner like Magic the Gathering, with the player laying out cards that then turn into 3D representations and fighting set enemies. They win if they beat all enemies, defeat occurs if no friendly monster cards are in play as the enemy will kill the wizard with one hit.

Unfortunately, there are several wrinkles that become apparent in Cardaclysm. The first is the resource management – monsters normally cost a combination of Soul Shards and Golden Runes, but budget constraints are prohibitive. Golden Runes can be regenerated in battle, but Soul Shards require specific cards in order to generate more.

The next is that whenever all possible encounters have been completed a boss will spawn and proceed to chase the player to the exit. If the player does not exit, they will enter a boss fight which is considerably harder than standard encounters. In fact, it is pretty much guaranteed that the first battle will end in failure due to a new set of rules the boss will bring to the encounter. To win will require a solid deck that caters to the boss’s peculiarities, as well as some levelling up of your Golden Rune counter.

This is where the game fell apart for me. In most deck builders, smart deck building can make it possible for a player to beat any challenge. Because Cardaclysm is invested in its RPG aspect it is not possible to only play smart and the player must grind through levels to get enough upgrades to their Golden Runes before the game will notify them that they are ‘ready’ to fight the boss. This quickly becomes a chore, and it is made worse by the fact that it is not possible to leave a level until all monsters have been defeated. In many ways, this is a great deal worse than modern RPG design that tries to find ways to avoid grinding being so nakedly obvious.  

It doesn’t help that the only diversions from the levels are side missions dolled out by the people in the hub world are just ‘find this’ or ‘kill this’, which means more going into the dungeons and grinding.

My final complaint (other than some annoying minor bugs) is that Cardaclysm has no stakes – losing a card battle results in the player losing some cards, but those cards can be quickly regained. From a story perspective there isn’t much going on and so there was nothing for me to justify why I was doing this over and over again. Which is a shame because the deck building was interesting enough for the first 5 hours.  

Conclusion

Cardaclysm’s deck building and tweaks to the formula are good, but this is weighed down by far too much grinding and not enough excitement.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.