Children of Zodiarcs

Quite an interesting tactical deck-building game, there are dice and cards to upgrade, and coming from playing Midnight Suns, tactical combat + cards works for me. The game slowly build up a sense of wonder as you meet and control different characters. It made me hope that the two separate parties would eventually band together. But alas, the ending just gave a slap in the face. (Spoiler alert...) All that buildup and hope ultimately led to only two characters remaining, with the characters killing each other because of the "Zodiarcs". The game a bit hinting about the Zodiarcs throughout the story, made me hope, but it was left out unexplained/ unexplored in the end. The game just... ended, leaving an underwhelming and unsatisfying conclusion story and gameplay-wise. Honestly, better spend your time on some other game

I really want to like this game, it's right on the cusp of being fun and the first few missions are a great proof-of-concept, but after 2 attempted playthroughs stalling hard in the mid-late game, the balance just isn't there. past the first few missions, your party is just too weak defensively. if you can't destroy all the enemies around you in one turn, your only option is to retreat into a corner and play as defensively as you can, but even that is completely dependent on card draw RNG-- the basic Guard action doesn't scale well with level, and without a tall stack of buffs, even your tank will be unable to take more than 3 hits from enemies of their level before long. the complete lack of any way to remove debuffs is another huge contributor to this-- either there are few enough enemies to simply go all-out offense, you can largely ignore them, but if you're badly outnumbered, your defense suffers much more than your offense, and you can only waste turns waiting for the effects to end and hoping they aren't re-applied. it's a shame, because there's clearly a lot of love put into the story. I'll probably try to push through to see the ending, but I'm not sure if it'll be any fun.

Hmpf. Stacking dice rolls on top of cards is _NEVER_ a good idea. This game is yet another proof of it. I actually had fun for a few story levels because the story is entertaining and dice effects seemed negligible compared to the card effects. Unfortunately, this quickly turns into the opposite, and then the frustration starts. Especially annoying are the healing effects. They're way too strong. When everyone fully heals every turn, something's off (Story mission 8, I'm looking at you!). Also, there's no inherent card draw apart from dice effects, which sucks. It's not completely terrible, so I'll likely give it another chance, but I definitely hope the 'optional' skirmish battles don't turn out to be a required grind. Because without story elements, combats quickly get old. I consider it likely they're meant to be filler since there are only 20 story missions which equals about 10h of play. I.e. this game is way too short given it's not a rogue-lite.

Cards and dice entwine Young hearts challenge cruel empires Hope redraws the stars

I love card battlers and i love tactics. I can recommend this game if you have nothing else going on. I like the dice and card aspect to a point but a lot of times, especially in Hard Mode, you will come to hate this game. It's woefully unbalanced. The number vs number game makes you sit in the corner really thinking about how to move your characters(I know that's what makes it a tactics game), but! when you can't move characters even a space from each other or put them next to each other without watching one get absolutely terminated by 10 dudes when you only get 3 max is really ehhhhhhhh

Feels like half of a game. Everything could have been easily better. Unbalanced. Forces you to farm to catch up.

A good game that mixes great classic RPG and tabletop mechanics and the story is serviceable enough. It can be very challenging at times, especially in hard mode, when grinding is not as useful as it is in the normal mode. I would totally recommend this game to those who like turn-based rpgs and enjoy a good challenge.