Text/Little Frog
Recently, I, a "Hearthstone refugee", have run out of cards.
Remembering that not long ago, the national uniform of "The Witcher's Gwent" represented by Gaia was also closed, and my college memories of being killed twice within a year were also quite embarrassing.
Baidu searched for the emoji of the Quent brand, but I didn't expect to find this old picture of green to pulp:
But a card guy is somewhat addicted to cards, and it is inevitable that there will be some itching if you don't play for a long time.
So in my spare time, I opened Steam with the mentality of digging for goods, but I didn't expect to really let me see a new card game in front of me - "The Brave is in a Time".
This is a non-traditional meat pigeon card game, compared to other card games that mainly play static cards, this game combines real-time combat (ATB) and card building (DBG) elements, which brings me a bit of a different experience.
A card game of real-time battles?
The meaning of "real-time battle" is that the concept of "turns" in traditional card games is abandoned in this work, and instead, the characters in the game, whether they are enemies or protagonists, their actions have progress bars, and when the action bars are full, the actions of the cards can be executed.
For the player's faction in the game, the character's action bar recovers extremely quickly, but when performing most card effects, you must first move in front of the enemy, complete the attack, and then walk back to the original position. The whole process is uncontrollable, and no other cards can be used halfway.
During this time period, the enemy may attack. But fortunately, the enemy's head will show the intention to attack - it may be attack, defense, or stacked buff, debuff, or even daze, but as soon as the progress bar is full, the enemy will launch an offensive.
And for the sake of the "elderly" players in the card game, the game is not completely harsh "instant": the time magnification can be adjusted between 0.75~2 times at any time through the buttons at the top of the battle screen, and there are pause and restart buttons; Hovering over the hand area also puts the scene into "bullet time" for better decision-making.
But the official saying is called Sage Time (laughs)
We have all experienced that in the previous meat pigeon card games, the various skills and super damage of monsters can only be resisted by means such as armor and invincibility. In "The Brave in a Time", the "real-time" gameplay allows players to actively defuse enemy attacks, and use shields to perfectly defend when they are about to be beaten, which can also be roughly understood as "bounce back" in action games.
Of course, the determination of "bounce" in this game is much simpler - in "Brave Rush", when the enemy runs in front of the protagonist, the whole will turn red (need to be observed through the sage time), followed by the attack of the second stage. The time when the enemy turns red is the time to rebel.
If you use the controller to play, you can hold the trigger to maintain the sage time, which will also be easier to control than the current keyboard and mouse operation
In action games, if you can't bounce back, rolling up and out of position is also a good way to avoid damage.
In "Brave in a Time", dealing with enemy attacks not only has a perfect defense similar to reaction, but also relies on position movements to avoid damage.
Yes, you can even move positions in a card game.
For example, when the enemy's back row draws a bow and shoots arrows, players can also use some cards with movement effects, such as "sneak attack daggers" to leave the arrow landing point to achieve the effect of dodging attacks, and even use fast-moving cards such as "jumping strikes" to make the enemy's attacks fail.
In fact, this is another special feature of this game, which is that the sense of space is added to the battle scene. So in addition to positioning, players can also play interesting comb through the spatial position change generated by the card effect.
To give a few examples, a basic card in the game, "Strike Fly", as the name suggests, allows enemies who enter the attack range to be knocked out and float for a period of time. Not only can it interrupt incoming enemy attacks and extend its own action time; You can also use the knock-off effect to throw the opponent's front tank into the air, and then take advantage of the empty front row of the opponent to smash the head of the dog in the opposite C position.
However, this effect has a distance limit, and it cannot be used for enemies who stand farther away
The seemingly unrelated game types of "real-time" and "cards" are strangely integrated, and a series of comb derived from "space" has also been played in "Brave Rush", allowing players to feel the joy of operation in card games.
Quite interesting double brave and a bit mediocre card building
The game adopts the setting of two braves, and the braves have a total of eight classes, choose one brave at the beginning, and recruit another in the first chapter.
For example, the original horned adventurer Avward corresponds to a type similar to a ranger or assassin, using gray cards. Each time you use a gray card, you will receive a logo, and if you collect three gray badges, you can use his character special move "Three Emblem Skill";
Each character in the game has been carefully designed, and their game experience is clearly different. For example, Mr. Tang Ji is the representative of the melee reckless man who mainly uses red cards; The Archmage's Orb system can easily deal high damage, but its specialized blue cards must come at the cost of discarding other cards; Fat Sancho is a tank in the standard sense, and even the characters' lines reveal a sense of steadiness...
Not only are these characters very different in type and emblem skills, even if they are the same type of characters, the cards they can obtain are basically different, and they can play different genres with different cards and different equipment.
Even because of the double warrior setting in the game, you want the warrior to put magic on it, or the mage to run up and knock people in close combat, these can be achieved.
(You can use cards from different classes, but you can't accumulate the "Three Emblem Skills")
Compared with the "tower-climbing" map levels of traditional card games, this game uses a more free map design. The map itself is in a 5*6 format, the boss is in the upper left corner, the protagonist is in the lower right corner, you can freely choose the path, it is no problem to turn out of the S shape on the map, anyway, as long as you defeat the boss, you can enter the next layer.
On the map, players can see card shops, addition and deletion shops, treasure chests, springs for food and blood restoration, and hidden content such as branch routes, and if the exploration is not deep, it will skip those elements and enter a bad ending.
But you can't wander around unscrupulously while exploring, after all, the supply points on the map are far from enough to fill up your HP - you can't use up too much HP by triggering battles frequently, and you have to make sure you get enough gold, and it's important to buy card combination decks with gold. This process of exploration and collection effectively enriches the game experience and makes the game full of playability.
The color tone, interface distribution and graphic elements are all comfortable
However, the meat pigeon elements and card design of the game are mediocre - not bad, to be precise, they do not have their own characteristics. The overall build of the game from the early to the late stage is a bit small, and the types and numbers of single-class cards are not rich, in fact, each hero's cards are in the range of 20~30 cards, and many of them are very homogeneous, and even in special effects, animations are rarely different.
For example, many of the card designs of the ranged hero Tril are charged to increase damage, such as "Omen's Arrow", "Em's Longbow" and "Hunting Longbow" are all of this type, and the slight difference is only the difference in damage value or drawing different cards.
So playing the later levels may not feel cool enough - the reason is that the game can be stronger, but the growth is limited. There are not few cards in the game, but there are not many powerful and special cards to play until the end, and each card can only be upgraded once; Despite the lot of equipment, each character only has four equipment slots, and if you only have two characters, you can only pack eight if you get as much equipment as you get - which is often filled up in the first few maps in a chapter.
In addition, there are not many ways to obtain character skill points, which makes the character or deck seem to lack growth.
Not wanting to lose the princess, choose to become a master of time management
As can be seen from the title, the core of this work lies in time. Not only is it a race against time to rescue the princess, but a series of battles also keep players busy during the game. The prerequisite for becoming a brave person is to become a "time management master" first, which is reflected in the game. (laughs)
At the beginning, there is often only one enemy, and the difficulty of the game is not yet reflected at this time, but when the number of enemies increases, the difficulty of the game increases sharply. Players should not only consider the action slots of different enemies and the order of their attacks, but also consider which cards to use to fend off enemy attacks, and whether they will be counterattacked when they want to attack...
The design of the Double Brave also limits the character to accumulate imprints only when playing the type card that he specializes in, and finally unleashes the big move, in order not to throw the wrong card, we must frequently switch back and forth between characters, which is really a test operation.
Moreover, there are many cards in this game that will get a layer of "fatigue cards" after release, fatigue cards are not only useless in themselves but also occupy your card slots, launching them also requires a chance to act, and many offensive cards still generate fatigue in your deck, and once it appears in the lower right corner, you have to take time to get it.
Although the addition of real-time combat elements has made the combat part of the game more diverse and available to players to choose from, the time cost of thinking has also increased. In fact, the various mechanics superimpose on each other to make the thinking time very tight, players should always pay attention to the reading value of both enemies and friends, in the later part of the game, often when we are thinking about how to maximize damage, the enemy has already run to your face.
It's really easy to mess around
The overall experience of the game is very wonderful, and the biggest feeling is that the current game content seems to pay more attention to the control of timing, rather than to the core gameplay "construction" of traditional cards, but the shallower card construction also leads to insufficient play depth, and the production team needs to work hard in this regard.
However, this is my first experience of real-time card gameplay, and it is really fresh, and it can even be said that this game is slightly away from the direction of card games and more like a real-time strategy game. If you want to try a new, fun, less "conformist" card meat pigeon game, then this game is really worth playing.