Duelyst is an interesting game that doesn’t want to mess around with long tutorials and drawn out instructions; it simply wants to fight. You have to respect that a bit. Getting right to the brass tacks is sometimes the sign of a confident game, or a game that assumes you understand its simple process are willing to learn on the run, or possibly a terrible game that wants your money. Thankfully, Duelyst is not the latter.
Based on cards, and the luck of the draw, you go against other players on a jagged oval board that has three globes on it. While the cards are nice/neat, the game is mainly drive by a tactical turn-based action element that allows those cards to come to life on the oval board. Moving (limited spaces) and attacking (in limited ways) across the board makes the game fun and strategic. We’ll get to that in a second.
Right now, let’s talk about possible strategic methods when you’re looking for victory. There is no better place to start than those damn globes.
The globes give players a power-up on attacks and health, which seems like an advantage, but it’s merely a band-aid for temporary dominance. When you move your players onto the globe, they are powered-up. For the first few games I concentrated on those globes, almost depended on them. Thankfully after a few defeats (10-15), I found that their temporary advantage may not as been as big of advantage as them seemed on the surface. I have had far more success avoiding them and concentrating on the opponent’s move, rather than trying to concentrate all efforts on the globes.
In the end, there are far other more interesting advantages to concentrate on before you start taking the globes into consideration. They are pretty interesting on the board, though. What? They’re pretty to look at in Duelyst’s pixelated world.
Let’s take mana for example.
For me, the real advantage of this game is the amount of mana you collect per round and how that mana translates to cards. The more mana you have, the better cards you can use and the more powerful characters result from those cards. Each card has a certain number on it, the higher the number, the better the card. Having a powerful card, which costs more mana, has its place in battle. There is nothing quite like wiping the floor with your opponent with a couple of high level cards. Having a large ice beast with 10 attack and 10 health is something to behold, especially when you want to take out a general (main character) in one huge hit. Sometimes that works out really well. Other times, not so much.
Letting an enemy build a large amount of weaker characters on the board isn’t worth the wait (in my experience) for a better, more powerful card. Since this game is turned-based, you only get one good shot per card before your characters exhaust and you’ll have to wait until the next turn to use them. There are some ability cards out there that might restore/un-exhaust your characters or other ability cards that power-up weaker cards. Regardless, sometimes building a bigger army that is more disposal plays in strategic favor of the attacker. Whatever route you decide to choose, in the end there is an amazing amount of options to use when you fight in the game and all should be considered. Of course, which ones to consider depends on your opponent and their style of play. If you played a game like Magic: The Gathering, you get the concept.
Nonetheless, what is important in the game, or rather what you deem important makes for a fascinating bit of decision making. For strategy nutcases, like myself, Duelyst brings a fun game of cat and mouse. Knowing what type of cards to pack and how to distribute an even amount of pain to the opponent, while allowing one’s self to change on the fly is absolutely an intellectual stimulant. For gamers that enjoy non-linear ways to think, you’re going to be in for an absolute treat.
While the game mainly depends on online play for its enjoyment and longevity, and there is plenty of competition (as you can imagine) with online play, it also adds a few layers of solo challenge to the mix. For example, there is a mode called ‘Challenges’ (clever, right?) that gives you simple tasks to meet when you’re offline. Sometimes it will ask you to use a certain spell or character to eliminate an enemy, while other times it will restrict you to one-strike (a killing blow) on a general in the game. There is one solution for the challenges and you get gold that you can use as a reward for completing them. The challenges range from easy to oh-my-God-why-did-I-agree-to-review-this-I’m-so-gd-mad-right-now-,-kids-leave-the-room-dad-is-going-to-either-curse-or-break-into-tears. Regardless of difficulty, the challenges add depth to the game, a break from online play and a healthy reward for motivation. If a challenge is too difficult, there is an option where you can replace a difficult challenge per day, if I read that right (I’m almost sure I did). I could confirm that, but it has been a long day.
On top of challenges, you also get daily quests that equal out to gold. The quests can range from beating a certain amount of players online with a particular deck or just simply playing a certain amount of games. The more difficult the quests, the better the rewards.
Speaking of rewards, you want to earn gold to purchase Spirit Orbs. The Spirit Orbs open up new cards, five at a time to be exact. The cards are added to your card collection, which can be sorted and new decks are built from said collection. This is certainly incentive when it comes to doing well or completing quests, and for the most part the effort is certainly worth the end result. This also breeds an opportunity for microtransactions, which are fine, but never my cup of tea (I do understand developers have to eat, though — I want them to eat, especially if they can make games like this).
