Hex: Shards of Fate blends Trading Card Games with MMORPG elements, completely free to play is allows players to collect cards, build decks and customize their cards individually with various unique features and mechanics to tackle PVP matches and a diverse PVE story mode. Hex has been mired in some issues during its development, but let’s take a look to see if they’ve got past them yet!
The Good
Card Selling/Trading – In the majority of MMOs in this genre they are typically Card COLLECTING Games (CCGs), where players can only acquire their own cards; however like a true physical Trading Card Game (TCG) players can swap, sell and trade cards to one another or through an auction house feature
Artwork/Graphics – Everything from game graphics, visual effects, user interface design, artwork for cards; the game really looks incredible
PVE Campaign – Players can be part of one of 2 different factions and make their way through a story driven PVE campaign, the world map has been split up into hundreds of interconnecting nodes representing battles or events, with players able to choose their own unique path for their own unique adventure
Complicated Mechanics – The game uses a more traditional old school turn mechanics that allow players to counter an opponent’s cards during the phase, and even counter their counters; creating a high level of tactical strategy
Gems and Gear for Cards – To add the MMORPG flavour players can earn gems and different gear, weapons and items to equip to special cards to improve them or change how they work in battle
The Bad
Core Game is Unoriginal – The core mechanics of a match are, for the most part, essentially the same as Magic: The Gathering, many of the concepts, cards and actions are also very similar; so much so that Cryptozoic (Hex developers) were taken to court for copyright by Wizards of the Coast (MtG developer/publisher), though an out of court settlement was made
Slow Turns – With the added complexity/strategy that Hex has and the ability to react and counterplay during a turn, the time for different phases is extremely long and so matches can take a really long time and the pace slows down
Player Ran Economy – Although selling/trading cards is a great idea, the problem is that as with the real world players set the price, given that players can purchase platinum with cash it can drive up the price on a lot of cards and make getting anything decent from the Auction House practically impossible for F2P players
Didn’t Deliver – The game was crowdfunded on Kickstarter with many promises that the development team have fallen short on, slow turn out of card sets, dungeons and adventure zones to say the least, but the worst of all…
No Raids – The developers really hyped up “Raids”, multiplayer MMORPG style PVE content where players could work together in order to earn epic gear; so core an element to their Kickstarter campaign that one of the milestones ($600k) promised an additional three Raids if met; well even though they netted a final total of £2.3mill the game hasn’t even seen an initial raid, let alone another three on top of that…
Any thoughts on the article? Got more to add? Let us know in the below comments.
Deja tu comentario
You must be logged in to post a comment.