February 8, 2008

Review Extravaganza Friday: Culdcept Saga

This almost hurts me to say.

Culdcept Saga sucks.

Now, maybe it’s great with a few people online you’d like to just chat with, and you can flip around some settings to adjust game length. But as a single player experience it is GOD AWFUL. I’m stuck on the fifth map, and I can’t beat it. And it’s not the difficulty that’s bothering me, especially because you get new cards even for losing. No, it is the game length. It is way the fuck too long. Most games again the computer can easily take 2 hours, especially with multiple computer opponents like the map I’m on. During these two hours, at any moment, you can be subjected to the Risk problem. (I guess I’m trying to coin that as a thing, because I do find myself referring to it all the time.) What I mean by this is, you can be struck a blow from which it is clear you will never recover, no matter how well you play from that point on. In most games, knowing you’re going to lose wouldn’t be too much of a problem. You’d just restart the scenario and try again, yes? But this is a card game. You need to finish matches so you can get access to new cards to improve yourself. Skill will only get you so far. You need to improve your deck, too. So you need to actually let someone finish the match, but you can easily be dealt this blow an hour into the match, with at least another hour to go before the end. And I know I’m not over-exaggerating the whole “Now I have lost” point in the games, either, because every time something happens to me that makes me think that, I can no longer do anything. They take the one property I was banking on keeping for the whole match and built it up big, and then it’s gone, and I no longer have the cash to make one to replace it and the dice are unlikely to be lucky enough to me to let me retake it. I’m dead. And then I play on and on in a game I don’t care about because I already lost it just to get 3 cards and then try again. Add this to the fact that you have to watch slow and long battle animations over and over again, as well as every animation of every action your opponents take, and you can see how it would become annoying.
Now I could take one of these things, just because of my love of card games. I can take arduous, overly long Mario-party-esque animations for a deep card game. I could finish up games that I lose in the middle of them if I had some way to zip through all the bullshit at that point. But I don’t. And so I find myself not wanting to play it.
This game desperately needs a limiting factor. There needs to be some sort of escalation to make the games end quicker. Every X turns, all the toll values need to go up by 10%, maybe. I don’t know, just something, Or if they don’t want to go with an elegant solution, a simple turn limit would help things quite a bit. Also, having smaller boards. The first level has a tiny board that is just perfect for me and another player. I can play that. But I think I get weaker cards just for beating that level over and over. However, the map quickly gets too big, and the score goal keeps going up. I don’t want that. At the same time, without that, the game has a lot less variety, so I don’t know what to do. But someone should have made a decision that “Games of Culdcept are an hour” or maybe even half an hour, and then tweaked the mechanics to make that happen.
I hope to gods the online play has a turn limit option to make it playable. I haven’t checked yet. I also hope that I get cards after finishing an online match. Because I’ll be honest, I’m pretty well done with the single player. I hope to play the game with my Talking Time friends sometime, because it would be fun with friends and a limit set up. But gods, I’ve pretty well had enough of it at this point. And that saddens me. Because I love card games, and I’ve heard so much about this series. But I just really can’t play it.

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