Recent reviews by The Complex

Very buggy game. Many buttons have issues being clicked and interacted with. The next turn button consistently says I need to select a card if I select a card and then click it without waiting for the full animation to complete. The audio controls are unresponsive. I had hoped that after I first played the game they would get around to patching and fixing this game, but years later and it is still having issues.

Would not recommend, even on sale. There are better games in this genre out there that has better deck mechanics and are better programmed.

EDIT: 1+ Years later: So I came back to this game recently to see what changes might of been made after a year away from it. While some of my core complaints have been dealt with, there are many that are still there.

1) Resolution effect layout: I see that there is now a resolution ui scaling slider, though altering it a little didn't seem to change anything. My largest complaint with this was that buildings icons were very large and a few categories needed to have scroll or pages (I don't remember which) when it wasn't needed if the image size scaled with the resolution. This has been fixed and in my recent game I didn't have any category have pages or scoll bar.

2) Scroll style view: this is pretty much still the same. The changes made to the pause and speed options make this more manageable, but it is still pretty annoying late game having to scroll back and forth from where you started and your end of map objective. The developer apparently commented on my review about this (never noticed) and their response is to use the scroll bar on the right which helps. Honestly I think the long map is just a core part of the gameplay and even though I find it annoying late game, the pause changes and the scroll bar help mitigate the frustration some.

I think that was my core complaints with the game, and so I am changing my non-recommendation to a recommendation (honestly more so if it is on sale then full price), with the caveat that there are still annoyances that users might face with the game, but if you can get past them it is an interesting implementation of the dice games that are on steam.

Oh and I haven't purchased the DLC and doubt I would pay full price for it.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

I feel like there are already many helpful and insightful reviews of this game telling you all the many good and bad points of this game. So instead I want to just talk about my experiences.

This is an interesting game. It is an original blend of existing concepts that other games have. I believe many people have pointed out how it could of blended those concepts better or differently to improve gameplay. That being said, gameplay is okay. Does it have issues that are annoying? Yes. Does it have some good points? Yes. Does the good points outweigh the annoying issues? In my opinion, they currently do not. The interesting thing is, that might not always be the case.

As of writing this, the game has only been out for 10 days. This game could easily change over the next year to become better than it's current version. At the moment I wouldn't recommend buying this game, but if the developers make changes and improve the issues that people have pointed out, then this game might become a great game that I could recommend other people to buy.

The current version of this game that exists feels like it could of used some constructive criticism with beta work before it went live. Many people have pointed out how the UI feels restrictive. I think part of that is because the UI doesn't change based on resolution. I loaded the game up and switched between 1440 and 720 and the UI was the same at both resolutions. So it feels like they made the UI for the smallest available resolution and then scaled it to higher resolutions without changing it rather than making the UI dynamically change and become more usable at higher resolutions. There are design choices for the game that when playing for the first 5-30 minutes might not be as annoying, but when reaching the end of a level and constantly having to move from the end of the map to start and back becomes extremely frustrating. The dice limit of 12 is a gameplay choice that is not well implemented. I actually got the popup for deleting dice during the ending movie three times when I completed the game for the first time.

It is my hope, that this game receives further development from the developers in forms of free patches and UI fixes before trying to sell DLC for this game. Hopefully within a year's time I can update this review and talk about how they fixed all the issues with this game.

TLDR: Lackluster gameplay, small card selection with card upgrades counted toward total, Relics/Mutators selection is extremely small, Not worth paying more than 5 dollars.

I was hoping this would have the replay value and enjoyment of Slay the Spire. This game is instead poorly made and extremely lacking in game balance and content. StS has a large selection of modifier (or mutators you could say) that make runs unique and enjoyable. RotS on the other hand I started seeing repeat mutators and the claim of "over 100 cards" is only true if you include card upgrades as unique cards. There is maybe 20-40 cards with some cards having between 2-5 upgrades, like the base sword and shield that just increase the value by 1 in most cases. The rebirth mechanic has you walking back and forth between 2 levels to select pets or upgrades with unspent gold from last run that honestly would of been far simpler to of just had select options on the screen that shows you everything that was selected (pet, card deck, and such) instead of just displaying something static. This feels like a cheap 5 dollar game with limited replay value. I played it for close to 8 hours and then uninstalled it. It only has 3 "decks" (Quotations since in actuality it is a standard deck and then 2 affinities that can be applied of either acid or fire that modifies the standard deck) and then a true random option that could give useful cards or completely random unusable cards.

And unusable cards are a common occurrence in this game. There is a card for both fire and acid that works on your own acid or fire stacks to do something, if you don't have any of those stacks then it does nothing. There is a single acid card that was design well that does X if you have acid stack otherwise does Y, but most are just worthless if you don't have the stack of damage dealing debuff on yourself. There is a card that does extra damage based on corruption in your hand, which sounds great. What you don't know unless you hover over it is that it has unstable and is destroyed for the encounter if it is used or discarded. It isn't in the card's text, it is just a popup that shows when you hover over it. There is a fire pet upgrade that is just "Molten Rock" without any definition of what that is. It wasn't until I saw an enemy use the ability did I finally get some text of what that was. After I had upgraded a pet a few times I started getting podiums to replace my current pet with a non upgraded one. What is the point of that? I don't know if that was just the game being true random or if the devs actually think that someone would want to replace an upgraded pet with a base version one?

Wingspan is a faithful adaptation of the board game. Not always the most well explained adaptation (the end score board could really use some mouse over tooltips), but it plays relatively quickly (When playing against AI, their first turn always takes longer then it feels like it should). If I would rank this game out of 5 stars, it would be 4 out of 5. It is a great game with room for improvement.

The best part of this game is the mod community that has constantly tried to imagine a bigger and better space agency, that may or not make it to space... God have mercy on those poor Kerbal souls.