Extremely predatory in terms of monetization, with punishing matchmaking and solo play.

It's like the worst trends of yesteryear's mobile loot games combined. A massive shop, hard to come by / randomly awarded currencies, level-locked high-rarity drops and so forth.

Rewards for winning matches? Sure. But unless you pay with premium currency, you'll be waiting 3-8 hours for your pack with a few cards to actually be available for opening. And that is after you've manually clicked it to start the opening countdown - and you'll need to do this for each following pack, too. Heck, you cannot even have more than 4 packs in the opening queue at a time, so any further wins will only grant you kill points towards global twice? a day free packs... which you'll also have to login for or miss out on. Chances are, you'll already have the next such "box" earned by the time you've won your 4th match and thus booster, rendering further wins outside of ranked pointless.

Ranked, meanwhile, only unlocks at player level 10. Getting there will be a slog, especially once you are currency-starved. The three daily missions reward you with some player exp, but the bulk of your leveling early on will be happening through upgrading cards by using duplicates.... which costs Gold as well as the duplicates you've painstakingly earned in the first place. At some point you'll be glad about getting a pittance of Gold coins from pack openings so you can at least buff your rares to stay relevant.

The matchmaking - even in casual mode - meanwhile, has no qualms about throwing a, say, level 6 player with a points limit of a little over 100 and low-statted cards into a battle against folks that run easily double the points, with more hitpoints on their leader, or sometimes even elites, than your entire 5-card deck combined - because of course, even your deck slots are level-gated, limiting viable deck builds especially for newer players who can neither field a few very strong, competitive units, nor a horde of middling ones.

Let me be clear: This game was designed for mobile devices, with all that entails. I honestly thought this level of predatory monetization had long since fallen out of favor even on smartphones, but I guess I was mistaken. Considering that Combat Cards actually was a simple throwaway top trumps-like card set Games Workshop put out a few backs for a tenner, you'd be surprised just how much money these developers would like you to spend just to be able to actually play the damned thing for more than 20 minutes two or three times a day.

But don't worry, they'll make sure to show you just how much better your experience could be if only you had higher-level cards (read: increasingly greater amounts of dupe-pulls and Gold), or any of the countless boxes and decks from the shop. The CPU battles may give you a few bonus levels on your cards when playing the mode, but don't worry - the difficulty will ramp up quickly, making sure the AI has both the numerical advantage as well as the qualitative. Gotta love those 200 HP elites with 100 point damage values smoking your entire board!

There could be a really fun game here, but I'm afraid the monetization model and pseudo-competitive design, playing wallet vs wallet, really do their damndest to discourage any sort of dabbling. I'd go so far as to say that even if you were masochistically inclined, this is not an experience you'll be able to enjoy for much longer than the early tutorial-ish sections. Even as a hardcore fan of the franchise, with far too many models and novels decorating the apartment, and a desire for decent card game engagement, the game fails to keep me playing - both through its non-conducive reward mechanics as well as its haywire monetization.

Extremely predatory in terms of monetization, with punishing matchmaking and solo play. It's like the worst trends of yesteryear's mobile loot games combined. A massive shop, hard to come by / randomly awarded currencies, level-locked high-rarity drops and so forth. Rewards for winning matches? Sure. But unless you pay with premium currency, you'll be waiting 3-8 hours for your pack with a few cards to actually be available for opening. And that is [i]after[/i] you've manually clicked it to start the opening countdown - and you'll need to do this for each following pack, too. Heck, you cannot even [i]have[/i] more than 4 packs in the opening queue at a time, so any further wins will only grant you kill points towards global twice? a day free packs... which you'll also have to login for or miss out on. Chances are, you'll already have the next such "box" earned by the time you've won your 4th match and thus booster, rendering further wins outside of ranked pointless. Ranked, meanwhile, only unlocks at player level 10. Getting there will be a slog, especially once you are currency-starved. The three daily missions reward you with some player exp, but the bulk of your leveling early on will be happening through upgrading cards by using duplicates.... which costs Gold as well as the duplicates you've painstakingly earned in the first place. At some point you'll be glad about getting a pittance of Gold coins from pack openings so you can at least buff your rares to stay relevant. The matchmaking - even in casual mode - meanwhile, has no qualms about throwing a, say, level 6 player with a points limit of a little over 100 and low-statted cards into a battle against folks that run easily double the points, with more hitpoints on their leader, or sometimes even elites, than your entire 5-card deck combined - because of course, even your deck slots are level-gated, limiting viable deck builds especially for newer players who can neither field a few very strong, competitive units, nor a horde of middling ones. Let me be clear: This game was designed for mobile devices, with all that entails. I honestly thought this level of predatory monetization had long since fallen out of favor even on smartphones, but I guess I was mistaken. Considering that Combat Cards actually was a simple throwaway top trumps-like card set Games Workshop put out a few backs for a tenner, you'd be surprised just how much money these developers would like you to spend just to be able to actually play the damned thing for more than 20 minutes two or three times a day. But don't worry, they'll make sure to show you just how much better your experience could be if only you had higher-level cards (read: increasingly greater amounts of dupe-pulls and Gold), or any of the countless boxes and decks from the shop. The CPU battles may give you a few bonus levels on your cards when playing the mode, but don't worry - the difficulty will ramp up quickly, making sure the AI has both the numerical advantage as well as the qualitative. Gotta love those 200 HP elites with 100 point damage values smoking your entire board! There [i]could[/i] be a really fun game here, but I'm afraid the monetization model and pseudo-competitive design, playing wallet vs wallet, really do their damndest to discourage any sort of dabbling. I'd go so far as to say that even if you were masochistically inclined, this is not an experience you'll be able to enjoy for much longer than the early tutorial-ish sections. Even as a hardcore fan of the franchise, with far too many models and novels decorating the apartment, and a desire for decent card game engagement, the game fails to keep me playing - both through its non-conducive reward mechanics as well as its haywire monetization.