Honest opinion after over 40 hours and "beating" quest mode as well as doing some normal runs:
Is the game fun? It CAN be. Does it offer enough content for the price? I'd say so IF you like that content. Is the game even remotely balanced? No, not at all. This is what I'm going to focus on.
For the time being there are the titular 9 Kings, all of them decently different, but ultimately all the same anyway. Herein lies the main issue. Each King has like 9 different cards to play around with, plus the neutral "Jack" and later "Chaos" cards you can get at some points. As well as unique starting bonuses and unique (and neutral) decrees (passive bonuses you can get during a run).
A typical run sees you start off on a 3 by 3 square with your starting cards. Place them down, fight a King, every few rounds you will declare war on another king, or make peace with a different one, fight the Jack of Rainbows, select a decree or enter a shop. You will earn money in between and build up your base/army with the cards you get. Beat a King and you get a selection of 3 of their cards to choose from, or your "base card", the building that is your capital. If an enemy unit reaches said capital you will lose a life. You have 3 lives. Survive for 30 odd years of increasingly difficult enemies and you will fight the "final battle" against one buffed enemy King and their super unit. Survive that and you've either won or can play ad infinitum. Year 99 is currently the somewhat balanced "max." year where the game truly ends, everything afterwards is officially just for fun and a total cluster ♥♥♥♥.
Graphics, Sound & UI ... Not much to see here. Literally. Individual units, different units can barely be told apart, especially on higher speeds. It's just two big blobs of pixels crashing into one another. Sound design is equally disappointing. UI is a total mess. Up until recently you couldn't even get a lot of vital information easily, but there is also nothing that tells you how strong an enemy is or how strong YOU are on the battlefield. One turn your units will wipe the floor with the enemy, the next they will get wiped out instantly, without you ever knowing ... why. It would be nice to have a detailed overview what you're actually fighting and how strong these units are. And maybe a breakdown after a fight. All you get is a rudimentary number how much damage each of your units did, and that number is sometimes totally broken.
Quest Mode is, unfortunately, an absolute waste of time and I do not know why it is included in the Early Access. SOMEHOW I suffered through it. Not on high difficulties or anything, no the "intended" difficulty. Some quests are so laughably easy they aren't fun, some are tuned just right and are actually fun, but most are SO overtuned and RNG dependant that they're not only not fun, but downright frustrating. What I mean by that is that this mode was clearly released without any balancing in mind. Each quest is supposed to be a kind of "puzzle" to figure out, yet most turn out to be the opposite, and it's just about luck. And by luck I mean finding the ONE card among dozens/hundreds you need to actually get the ball rolling and stand a chance. I was able to beat all but one quest, that one I actually had to cheat to survive long enough, because you instantly lose your 1st life in the very first round, no way around it. Not even changing the difficulty to easy. Your existing buildings also deal like 50% less damage than newly plopped down buildings, which hopefully isn't intentional. With every balance pass and addition to the game the quest mode becomes more and more broken, that's why it shouldn't have been in the Early Access. Even in the future, they will have to manually check EACH of the 99 quests (I think it's 9x9) to guarantee they're somewhat balanced, especially on higher difficulties and I have severe doubts about this.
This leads me to the conclusion that the game is fundamentally flawed in its design. While it can definitely be fun, it relies on ONE strategy, and one strategy alone: scale exponentially. If you cannot scale exponentially you will lose. Simple as that. And that, to me, is a bit dull and too much dependant on RNG. You have little influence over this. And this is the same for every King. The strategy is such:
- Get a tanky unit (Defender, Paladin, Demon, Wallmaker)
- Scale that health with +% as soon as possible (Forests, Shields, Overinvest, Gigantify later on)
- Increase numbers (Procreate, Farms)
- Preferentially get ONE specific card from Progress to grant % based (!!!!!) self healing (Reinforce, 2% of YOUR unit's HP with EACH card!)
- Maybe get Balance to increase your unit's attack to your unit's max. HP ... Or Cauldron for Poison ... or Adrenaline for attack speed
- Win
You do not need anything else. You want anything that increases health and numbers, 1 troop is more than enough. The rest is just "helpful" until that unit can scale effectively. The alternative is max. damage scaling instead, but it's nowhere near as good to start with. Tanky units are always tanky, damage dealers start off incredibly weak and often die before they can even dish out their damage. Effectively, that means, that out of all the different cards you have, you will always want to pick the same 2 or 3 for each King.
Practical example:
You start off with 30 HP Paladins from Nothing, get Forests from Nature, bam, 2-6% (based on level) more HP per turn. That's negligible at 30 HP, but as soon as you can get your hands on any HP increasing cards, plus some passive healing, the game plays itself. Literally. Suddenly your Paladins don't get like 2 HP per round, but 20,000, then 200,000, then 2,000,000 and so on. That's what I mean by exponentially. With a Balance they now also deal like 10,000,000 damage. It really is that absurd.
Another example:
Get Demon Altars and any numerous fodder units plus a Graveyard or two ... your Demons gain 0.1 in every stat for each unit you lose. They're harder to buff otherwise, though.
Another example:
Get a Wallmaker plus Forests, and your castle will be surrounded by a several thousand HP strong wall pretty soon. Put some catapults behind them or Ballistas and give them Poison and they shred everything before it even comes close.
All of this works flawlessly for the main 30 years, then you need to scale even more exponentially to get any farther. It works every time, and there is no reason to do it differently, unless you are forced to by RNG, which, in my opinion, makes for a pretty boring experience down the line. That is why I think there shouldn't be any % based scaling here, but instead flat increases that do not result in such ridiculous numbers. And they're only ridiculous, because they NEED to be. You cannot win otherwise.
That doesn't even touch on the fact that some card descriptions are outright wrong or misleading, like how "Migrate" actually "destroys" and "places" the unit that is moved, which isn't explained anywhere, and which has brutal synergy with ONE other specific unit in the game. A strategy you will likely ever use in that specific quest. Or how Defenders have no attack, but reflect the damage they receive back to the enemy, so you assume that poison, which is usually only ever applied by ATTACKING other units, suddenly works on a card with no attack, because the enemies attacking that card, now poison themselves?
TL;DR: Fun for a while, until you figure it out and realize the entire game depends completely on RNG, and that most cards are on their own extremely pointless, because they DO NOT SCALE well enough, no matter what you do.
