Gemblades

I'll play just about anything at the price point of $5 and I think this offers more than enough of a time sink. It's far from perfect- Merge is a just awful mechanic when there is no way for a new player to learn or strategize around it and the card pool isn't large enough to justify the number of identical effects across colors- but what's there is solid and justifies the cost. A reasonable impulse purchase to while away a couple of afternoons.

Fun game. Nice artwork. Good tutorial. There's a bunch of different synergies between cards. You balance gold, attack power and gems to buy and eliminate units across from your hand. Eliminating units will give you various rewards. Meanwhile you must generate enough gems throughout a run to satisfy that difficulty's requirements. The boss cards show up at predetermined times in your run and depending on the difficulty that you choose there will be more of them. They don't really attack you or your cards like in typical card battling games, they debuff until killed. I would say it was pretty easy aside from the final invasion. I cut the last run a bit close on account of bad a few bad card picks that I made. It was also very short. I beat all of the invasions in less than 2 hours. I don't regret buying it despite the low amount of content. Hopefully this dev adds a few more things later on. Just be aware that it is fairly short at the moment.

Great little game. If you are craving a good deck-building game, this is definitely for you.

Fun game! Albeit a little too easy.

Good game that makes good use of the mechanics of Ascension. The level of polish is high, so its replay value.

Fun deck builder with nice and juicy gameplay, also quite playable on Steam Deck with virtual mouse or touch input. Recommended!

Game is fun but far too easy. Completed all 5 difficulities first try with just over an hours gameplay. I did another run after and I am not sure if I am just gonna refund as I feel I have seen all the game has to offer already the only reason I am considering not refunding it is because its so cheap

I was too busy having fun with the game to realize I hadn't reviewed it yet! How silly. If you've got a part of your brain that itches to optimize things and get your turn count as low as it'll go, Gemblades is probably for you. The game itself isn't especially difficult, I'd go so far as to say getting a win is almost guaranteed. Whether you win or not isn't exactly the point though, the fun comes from score chasing, as everything you do has so much room to be done [i] better [/i]. From the list of cards you ban before even playing, to the usual deckbuilder decisions of which cards you bloat your deck with or trim, to even tiny things you wouldn't normally consider in the middle of your turn, it can all have such a huge impact on how much value you can squeeze out. The order in which you do [i] anything [/i] can easily be the difference between a dud turn or squeezing 30 extra gems out of nowhere and shaving another turn off your record, and when you do it just makes you wanna start another run right away to see if you can pull it off again! (The friendly people over on the official discord are also a good motivator :D) If that sounds fun I'll see you on the leaderboards :>