[i](400+ at time of writing. Steam's hour counter keeps climbing even without edits, so if you're reading this way later, that's why the number looks weird.)[/i]
Quick context on where I'm coming from: over 600 hours combined in Worlds Beyond between Steam and mobile, plus about 5,000 hours in classic Shadowverse before that. I've spent money on this game (I am a whale), and I've tried getting friends into it too. Every one of them hit the same stuff I'm about to get into, which is honestly why I'm writing this. [b]WARNING: This review is going to be wordy, but I highly suggest you read all the way through[/b],
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[h2]Getting the meta out of the way first[/h2]
Before I get into my actual gripes, quick note on the meta since people will ask: yeah, it's stale right now. Most matches follow the same shape, turns 1-3 barely matter, 4-6 is trading evolves for board, 7 onward turns into storm or burn damage that ends things by turn 9 or 10. Part of that's expansion size, roughly 78 cards split across 8 classes (Neutral as the 8th class), so classes end up feeling different mostly by color and art instead of how they actually play.
Honestly, I'm pretty neutral on this. Competitive card games settle into solved patterns between balance patches/new expansions, that's just the genre, and it shifts with patches. It's not what's driving my score here. What's actually keeping this from a recommend is the monetization and how new players get treated, which is what the rest of this is about.
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[h2]How was it, actually[/h2]
Presentation is genuinely great, best this series has looked, no argument there. I'm not going to spend paragraphs on it. [b]Art's nice, animations are nice, moving on.[/b]
What I actually want to talk about is what happens if you download this today with zero experience, because that's the real test for a live-service card game, not whether some veteran like me still likes logging in.
You get handed a decent chunk of freebies right away: packs, rupees, vials, all from simulation mode(puzzles, vs. the AI, etc), story mode, battle dungeon, and the onboarding grid. That part's fine, even feels generous. You also get a [b]starter deck[/b] to start you off in a class of your choice. Here's the problem: that starter deck is very un-optimized having cards that are downright useless most of the time, and this is a game where the good decks run a ton of legendaries and golds. So you take those "free" resources and pour them into finishing a deck you probably didn't even pick, and you're still short.
And picking your class isn't really a clean choice either, because of how the whole system is set up. [b]Rerolling[/b] in this game is only really worth doing if you're chasing an exchange ticket, this game's reroll target being cosmetics rather than power, so it's aimed at people who want a particular waifu or husbando leader, not people trying to reroll into a better cards. For everyone else, the actual advice is: open your free packs first, see what you pulled, then choose your structure deck to match whatever class you ended up with the most of, and use your vials to fill in the gaps. Played smart, that's actually pretty F2P friendly, especially if you get lucky and pull a bunch of cards for whatever class happens to be strong right now. If you are okay with this, you can give the game a try...
But notice what's missing from that process: you. You wanted Forestcraft cards right? Welp, doesn't matter if the packs handed you a stack of Swordcraft cards instead. If you want to play efficiently and not waste resources, you pick the Swordcraft starter deck and build around what you already have, not what you actually wanted to learn. You can still technically play Forestcraft if you insist, you'll just be doing it the expensive, inefficient way while everyone who played the odds is already ahead of you. Most people aren't going to fight the system on principle, they're going to take the path that doesn't waste resources, and that means playing whatever class RNG decided for them.
That's the real new-player experience. It's not that the tutorial is confusing or anything like that. It's that the systems around building your first deck quietly steer you away from the class you actually wanted to play, and reward you for going along with it instead.
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[h2]A few more things pile on top of that[/h2]
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[*][b]Pull rates[/b] aren't stingy exactly, just random, same problem as above. You end up with whatever the game decides to give you, not what you wanted, and building a real deck around your actual pick takes either money or a lot of patience.
[*][b]Pack and bundle pricing[/b] leans predatory. Not the worst thing on this list, but it's there.
[*][b]Legendary pity[/b] sounds good on paper: guaranteed legendary every 10th pack, plus a free pack daily. Until you realize the free pack doesn't count toward that pity counter. So you can be one pack away from a guaranteed legendary, and that daily freebie won't get you there. You have to spend actual resources: rupees, crystals, or card packs, to close it out.
[*][b]Vialing[/b], this game's version of dusting if you've played Hearthstone, has worse rates than classic Shadowverse. On top of that, you can't even vial a card until you own 4 copies of it. Sitting on 3 copies of something from a class you'll never touch, or a card that's just bad? Doesn't matter, it's locked. I get why they do it, it stops people from dusting a card they'll regret losing once a new deck makes it relevant via its gets buffed or more support comes out for it later, and honestly, for my own stuff, I don't even disagree with the logic. But it's not the devs' call to make, it's the player's collection, regardless of whether I (or others) personally agree with the reasoning or not. That decision should belong to whoever owns the cards. On top of that, players already don't have much control over their collection to begin with because of how the vialing system is locked down, so making someone grind for weeks just to finish a deck, on top of having so little say over the cards they already own, is a lot to ask when there are a dozen other games out there competing for that same hour.
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[h2]The anniversary event[/h2]
This is the part that actually soured me on Cygames as a company, not just the game itself. It ran about two and a half weeks and gave out 120 packs total, 10 a day. Sounds generous until you realize the daily packs don't stack. Install on day 10 because a friend finally talked you into it, and you don't get days 1 through 9 back. You just start on day 1 of your own personal clock and lose the rest, no exceptions. Weird choice for an event that's supposed to be a new player's first impression. It basically tells you that you should've installed sooner, and that's aimed at exactly the people the game should be trying to pull in. They've talked about wanting this game to last 20 years. This event didn't feel like it backed that up.
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[h2]Would I tell a friend to play this?[/h2]
Depends entirely on the friend. If they don't mind grinding, don't care what specific class they end up playing, and just want something to mess around with for fun, sure, go for it, they'll probably have a decent time. But if they're the type who wants actual control over what they play, gets impatient easily, or wants things to come together fast, I'd tell them to skip it for now. I am not saying for Cygames to give us everything for free and easy, but give the playerbase something more to work with.
