Chrono Ark

TLDR: Initially, I did not like this game because I had been spoiled by games like Chaos Zero Nightmare and Darkest Dungeon. This game has a number of issues particularly in the UI/UX department, but overall it's quite solid in terms of story and unique character abilities. I'll do my best to elaborate without being too long winded. When I first jumped into this game, I was really interested in the world story and number of characters/unique abilities and animations. The game plays sort of like a hybrid of Darkest dungeon 1 and slay the spire and chaos zero nightmare style combat. However, once I got into actual battle and exploration I started to notice the issues. To preface this, I played the games mentioned above (STS, DD, and CZN) prior to ever playing this so I was a bit spoiled in the UI/UX department. But here are several issues that culminated to me almost wanting to refund the game: - Inability to view your deck from the deck number area in combat (or maybe any area as I haven't figured that out in combat). One of the most important aspects of any deck builder is to be able to see what's left in your deck to help you make decisions. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have yet to see a way to do so in combat. - During searches for other skills in the deck (Prophecy for example) you can hide the skills you're selecting from, but the on-hover of skills in your hand doesn't work. This one was really annoying because there were times I'm trying to determine if I have enough cards with Swiftness (enemy action count doesn't decrease when used) to take one skill over the other and I can't see it. - Not all definitions have an extended definition. This is absolutely MASSIVE for any deckbuilder. Explaining exactly what each key word means through on-hovers without a player having to click through an encyclopedia (which they technically do have in the game but it's through hitting the escape key as if to exit the game). I see a card that states it does 30 damage normally but if an opponent is debuffed it does another 30 damage. So naturally you'd ask, what is considered debuffed? I had to experiment with this and I still am not 100% certain. It triggered once when I had bleed an opponent. But there are also armor reductions, evade reductions, and other status ailments as well (i had an armor debuff on an opponent and it failed before as well). Do those count towards that? I still do not know 10 hours in (and I haven't looked in the encyclopedia as of yet). - Being unable to back out of a choice when presented with options in certain scenarios. There were multiple times I had to choose between two areas and I can only presume the game does not want to cache the choices within a level and you can't hit the escape button to leave and come back. - Upgrades do not tell/show you what cards the upgrade can be applied to until after you click it (and remember, you can't go back by hitting escape more often than not). Here's an example: you have an upgrade that says "When this is played from hand, silverstein's mark will trigger twice on the target". There's no small note that I've seen that states with that upgrade "Silverstein cards can not be chosen for this upgrade". That would immediately give you a lot more knowledge and control when it comes to choosing the upgrade. Instead, you click it and now you're locked in (at least that's how it was in the two runs I've done) and have to select another unit to apply it to. So if you've read this, you may be asking why the heck did this person still recommend the game? I pushed through two runs, the first getting to the end and losing to the initial final boss due to one mistake. The second beating said boss and getting an "ending". I was feeling really disappointed until a few cutscenes played and the game opened up a lot more after that. So ultimately, you have to beat the first run (5 bosses) to get the game to open up to the deeper more challenging depths. Additionally, there's like a dark souls style difficulty modifier attached to this game. You don't draw 5 cards per turn but just 2. TWO. Cards are retained across turns (unless it has a modifier that makes it so it doesn't) so you can blow your load on one turn and have absolutely nothing the following turn or two potentially getting absolutely destroyed for doing so. That makes this far more challenging in terms of strategy. Additionally, your characters have up to 6 levels and your leader (the character you play as) also has the ability to level up increasing either total mana or gambling on random card draw cards (you chose 1 of 3 each level into that) That's another layer of strategy that other games just don't have. If you choose to have no card draw, you will most certainly die. Same if you have low mana. But you also need to buff your character levels so they gain access to new skills and not just basic attacks and increase stats. Finally, after winning your first run and onward, you start unlocking new biomes, bosses, and characters to play that further increase the difficulty of the game as each boss has some unique mechanic that if you don't manage properly you will pretty much die. I've just beaten that previous final boss again and i think I can proceed past him now to additional challenges while revealing more of the world's story (I've only done 3 runs including this one). Ultimately if they could clean up a lot of the UI/UX issues, add some more animations and effects this game could easily be a top tier competitor in the deckbuilding market. As it is now, it's still solid, but it does come with its fair share of frustrations. 7/10.