It’s difficult to talk about any collectible trading card game on PC without mentioning the elephant in the room. Look, I get it, these types of games have been around for ages, but when it comes to the PC you can’t ignore the presence of HearthStone on the community as a whole. Nobody here is saying that if you want to release a new CTCG on PC you have to be better than HearthStone, but you need to be aware of the market and develop and target accordingly.
Nightbanes is a collectible trading card game on the PC developed in the unity engine. Now, I still don’t understand the grand appeal of having to spend money to buy cards that you can never truly own, when the entire point of a Collectable Trading Card Game is to play and trade with friends in real life. That caveat aside, Nightbanes is at least interesting in design and concept.
The game is set in some sort of alternate universe earth where magic flows freely and monsters are as common as AOL disks were in the 90’s. Each deck contains a sort of faction within the world that has specialties of it own, much like the decks in Magic. These decks and their requisite cards look great and the artwork is a lot of fun, but it offers little over a real card game.
You see, if you are going to have a card game be solely digital, then you better be sure to have it do things you just couldn’t do at a table with real cards. This is where Nightbanes first really slips up as PC game. There just isn’t anything here to make it stand out over a regular card game or any of the ones already on PC. Sure, there are some visual effects here and there, but nothing that really makes it unique.
The game has zero dialogue from the deck masters (each deck has a player card that represents you) or cards, so all you’ll be hearing is the sliding of cards and the occasional attack sound. Nightbanes does give you a single-player mode that consists of “campaign quests”, but I’d be hard pressed to call this a story-mode of any kind. There just isn’t anything here to draw you into this world. Yes, the cards are cool, but there is no story of any kind here, so you just end up fighting for the sake of fighting in some world you have no connection with. Trust me when I say it gets very boring very quickly.
Like I said earlier, the cards themselves look great. Their designs really pop for the most part, and they all seem to really match their respective decks. The problem though, lies with the cards themselves. No matter how cool a card may look, none of them in the game have any animation whatsoever. Everything you see will be a static card just as a card in real life play would be. At least in the real would I can actually keep, hold, and show off my cards, in Nightbanes it sort of feels like I’m looking at a Google image search with a stat table thrown on top. The game was developed in the Unity engine so there is no excuse why it couldn’t have thrown us a bone or two.
“But how does that game play!” I hear you scream at me. Well, kind of weak if I’m being perfectly honest (and I always am). Nightbanes begins each match by randomly dealing each player five cards from their deck. Of these card each player will be allowed to place a single card on the playfield. The most essential cards to know will be the monster cards that each player has in their deck which will be the ones used to deal damage to your opponent. You can place down any monster card regardless of its level, but you won’t necessarily be able to use the card once it’s on the table.
Each monster card has “blood points” which are represented at the top on the card by an empty water/blood drop. A blood point will be earned at the end of each round of play and all monster cards in play will have one drop filled. When a monster has their blood points filled, they will be able to attack each round until they are destroyed. If there is no direct enemy card to attack your monster will deal direct damage to the player. Once the players HP is brought down to zero the match ends.
It’s all pretty standard fare and the mechanics of it all can be picked up in a few minutes, but there just isn’t much lasting fun to be had. There really isn’t much strategy involved in Nightbanes, because is you do lose a match odds are it was because of a weak draw and not a better opponent. One match I was wiped out in a handful of moves, while the very next match I utterly destroyed the very same AI opponent. It’s all just so very random. The developers seemed to be trying to make a game that is extremely easy to pick up and play, but in doing so sacrificed depth for pure dumb luck.
But there is hope deep inside Nightbanes, even if it doesn’t always show. The PvP play is done well and can be a lot of fun if you have some friends to play with. The game also has a really cool chat system implemented right into it so you can chat during a match which makes for an interesting experience. Nightbanes could have been something pretty awesome as it does have the foundation, but it’s the execution that really kills it in the end.
Not having any sort of story really disconnects you from the interesting world the art team put together; having to buy cards to be successful in the later levels is a pain; lackluster music that drones on and puts you to sleep is a bore; A shallow experience that pales in comparison to those YuGiOh PC games that came out 10+ years ago is a shame. There is just too much negative here to recommend this game to anyone. You’d be better off saving your money and go buy a deck TCG of some kind to play with friends.
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