Hybrid games are all over the place. What used to be clearly laid out in categories like “Action” and “RPG” and “Sports” has been replaced with “RPG FPS” and “Card Battle”. Well, Epic Arena joins the trend by merging card battle gaming with turn-based strategy and clans.
It’s like Hero Academy merged with Hearthstone, and it seems to work surprisingly well.
Epic Arena is a turn-based fantasy strategy game with card-based collection elements. The game takes place on hex-based 3D arenas, with players having 5 moves to place and shift characters around the board and perform actions. Moves can be offensive or defensive until one player wins, or can even be rewound before submitting to make last second changes. The visuals are clean, and the fantasy setting is less about realism and more like the cartoony classic D&D shows and books that we grew up with. Portly knights and portlier ogres battle it out on stubby legs as giant eyeballs on stalks send out shockwaves.
Or, they can include the drawing and placement of “cards”. This is where the game takes cues from card-based genres. Each player has a deck of twenty cards to draw from, starting with six, that include characters, weapons and power-ups. There are also five “power” cards included, providing unique skills, effects and transformations to the pieces on the arena board. The cards can be purchased or won in battle. Defining your deck ahead of a match is important, but only half of the gameplay.
It equates to a somewhat randomized loadout system, depending on how decks are arranged and cards used.
There’s a predictable cadre of characters to utilize; fighters, wizards, magicians and clerics are all a part of the collection, depending on which of the two “sides” (Chaos or Order) is chosen. They come with equally predictable attacks and defenses, which isn’t necessarily a knock against the game considering how all of the cards and the board layouts come together. Each side also has its own Super Unit to ramp up attacks.
It’s not going to wow you from that standpoint, but it’s not trying to. By making these initial sets of characters familiar, the developers hope that players will be able to jump right in to the various battle modes to focus on gameplay instead of learning skillsets. Though the crux of the game revolves around the same “5 moves” turn-based action found in the Standard Mode, the ideology behind its Blitz Mode is somewhat more novel. In it, players have the 5 moves but are also timed. The game allows for 10 minutes total of move selection per side, so for prolonged battles that may mean things get fairly hectic towards the end of the clock. It will force people to make mistakes as they hurry along, so capitalistic players may look towards just that happening.
I don’t think Epic Arena is designed to be a high impact, “play once and forget” kind of experience. It may have the slow tail of userbase growth as word spreads and more people are invited to play it by their friends, much like Hero Academy and Clan Wars before it. But, it aims to provide substantially more meat over those games, and could become one with league play that keeps a hardcore audience together over time.
Epic Arena is currently available in beta form on Facebook, and is seeking Greenlight on Steam. It’ll be cross-functional — meaning you’ll be able to play multiplayer against players on PC, mobile, or social all at once, and your account will be universal — when it arrives later this year.
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