RTS veterans will immediately recognize the first layer of strategic choices here. And all the while, everything your opponent is doing is immediately visible, with everything they build on the same one-turn delay as yours - meaning you generally don’t have any opportunity to immediately react, but you do have the opportunity to plan around it. Building more advanced units requires the construction of elaborate supply chains, sometimes including different units that play off each other in unexpected ways. Resource production units cost resources to make, meaning you can choose to make more than one in a turn - or none at all, if you need that income for something else. Here are some things you’ll deal with in Prismata that you won’t find as quickly in a game of Magic: Resource production units count as actual units, meaning they have potential combat value as well. If while reading this you started imagining the sound of booster packs being torn open, let me assure you: You’re not the only one.īut Prismata isn’t shy about the fact that its card game action flow and strategy considerations are inspired by, and/or derived from, real-time strategy games. Different colours of approach leading to different strategic considerations. Limited numbers of more powerful units, which take time and setup to bring out. Units that can attack or defend, but not both, and so you’re often weighing whether or not to do any of it. Summoning new units onto the field, that generally have to wait one turn before becoming effective. Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: Resources that you can gain every turn, from a collection of dedicated cards that slowly grows over time. Stacks of cards, weird-looking resources, attack points and life points, AI commentators that don’t know when to disappear. The whole thing takes place in the future, as of course it would. Prismata is a turn-based head-to-head semi-collectible card game that fancies itself an RTS, except it’s also a multiplayer online battle lobby with a single-player story, puzzle challenges, and unlockable unit skins. Mechanical, high-ish, but not really impacting the experience.)
( Spoiler levels: Narrative, Essentially none. For reasons you may or may not understand. I generally try to steer away from Early Access reviews, as it’s always tricky to determine what game aspect are and aren’t fair criticism game, but… let’s just say in that in the case of Prismata, I felled compelled to write something.
Being that it is, expect a shorter and more to-the-point review, like some other Early Access reviews I’ve done. In news that as far as you know may or may not be unrelated, I’m doing a review of Lunarch Studios‘s Prismata, which is currently in Steam Early Access. This combination of factors can lead to some unexpectedly awkward situations, sometimes, where (say) a key distributor might email me after several weeks asking about a link to my coverage, and all I have to reply is “oh yeah, that key… that’s probably somewhere in my three dozen unread ‘I should check these later’ emails.” A fun downside about being me is that I’m terrible absent-minded, which I genuinely can’t tell if I’ve made this joke on here before. Makes it a lot easier to get tapped into games you might otherwise overlook, let me tell you. A fun upside about regularly writing games columns is that I’ve become ‘eligible’ (in a ‘have a backlog to show for it’ sense) to request review keys from developers, as well as being tuned into the sorts of middleman operations that match needy developers and needy reviewers.