Hit the Big Screen to play your cards right in this new CCG
ScreenPlay is an independently developed collectible card card game with really big dreams in that it wants to become a competitive experience.
Before I go into too many details, I guess I should also give my own credentials and experience with the genre as a baseline. I play a lot of card games. I play ranked in Hearthstone where I’m a platinum player. I’ve reached Diamond in Magic the Gathering. I’ve reached Masters in Runeterra. I used to make my money writing guides for card games. I’m really in tune with this scene and these types of games, so this project is something that I was genuinely interested in because I kept seeing it pop up and thinking that it could be the next big thing.
But the moment we go through the tutorial, we’re introduced to gameplay mechanics that kind of trip over themselves. There are a lot of ideas from other games in here that I feel don’t inherently work with their core mechanics.
In ScreenPlay the core mechanic is that we have a team of four stars, heroes with their own in-game goals. And once we complete that actor’s goal, they get off our board, we put in a new one and keep going. Put a guy on the field, hit a guy five times, that guy hits his star limit, and he’s gone.
Their mana system, known here as frames, ties into the play of these heroes in a unique and interesting way. We each start out with five frames, and we and our opponent play at the same time. Different actions cost different frames, like attacking or dodging. And then some of them have activated effects. In the game we pass priority back and forth. So I may have defense while my opponent has the offense, but I have to always think on the aggressive side, planning against what they may plan. Playing the game at the same time as our opponent and essentially having a shared mana pool is a really neat back and forth.
But the mechanics of the cards is where the issue kind of gets in the way. Once we hit a card, they go on cooldown. So we have to think that maybe we have to play more cards because certain characters can attack. But we only have a reserved amount of frames that we can use. So the games go very long. They’re very slow because we have to manage this frame system and going back and forth… and waiting.
And I feel, besides all of that, is that this is an indie game but it lacks that indie like edge, focusing on the pop culture references more than the actual gameplay. It has references to movies, directors, characters .. and we’re hit with what feels like Reddit memes constantly. But it’s just a weird niche — Hollywood history thing is not something most people are into. And if a Hollywood history buff does play this game they may not be into it because it’s just sitting on a gloss instead of substance.
I think the best way for this game to survive is by removing all these other weird mechanics, improve on the dodge mechanic, make the game more aggro, and focus around that kind of counterplay back and forth. I think that would work. But that would require going back to the drawing board.
It’s a very interesting couple of weeks I’ve had with ScreenPlay; I’ve been trying to actually enjoy it, but I just can’t.
This review was based on a PC code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest LIVE on May 29, 2024. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
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