Pros: Unique gameplay mechanics for a card game, great 3D graphics, large variation of available cards, five different classes currently
Cons: Too much of a Hearthstone imitation visually, poor animations, small number of features
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We took some time to try Chronicle: RuneScape Legends from Jagex Game Studio recently, the new free to play trading/collecting card game from the makers of the iconic RuneScape MMORPG. The game has just gone into rounds of open beta, so to see what it was all about we gave it a few hours to see how it fit with the current competition in the card game genre.
Our first impression as a 3D popup book opened in front of us on a wooden desk, revealing what would be one of our battlegrounds was just how similar the entire style, card design, and UI elements were to Hearthstone. Given that none of the elements really seem like anything we’ve seen of the RuneScape IP from their previous titles it’s fair to say that it’s probably no accident that the similarity is there. All that said, whilst some of the graphical elements do look similar, we’ll happily concede that the map design for the game board goes above and beyond and really does look very impressive.
That is, however, about where any major similarities with Hearthstone end; Chronicle is definitely a game out there on its own and really has done something very different with the genre.
What starts out as a seemingly normal TCG/CCG where you build up your deck, use a character/class that has their own unique cards and playstyle, what we see when battle starts is a completely different style of strategy. The battles are broken up into five phases, at the beginning of each phase you choose four cards from those drawn into your hand and you place them onto the battlemap, from here your own hero character will make their way across the map fighting YOUR four cards in order. That’s right. Unlike other games you’re actually, in a way, fighting against yourself and placing obstacles in the way of your own hero who has healthpoints, damage, armor, weapons and gold coins (more on that). Your player opponent is also doing exactly the same thing and you can see their own journey and the state of their hero as they travel across the map as well.
When you defeat one of your cards you will typically get a drop from that card as per its details, this can be anything from increasing your armor score, healing your health, or any of the above stuff we mentioned. “Defeating” can come in two forms depending on the card type, if it is a Creature card then your Chronicle hero needs to fight it, exchanging blows and reduce its health whilst it deals damage to you, if it is a Support card then you need to have acquired some gold coins (again, which are drops from certain cards) to buy it.
Building our hero up initially seemed like the name of the game, placing down cards that would grant us extra damage on our attacks, so that we could fight stronger cards further into the stages that might give us large amounts of armor, etc. You can damage and defeat your player opponent throughout the stages, but in the event you both have health at the end then you actually fight each other using the boosts you acquired through the match.
However, we realised very early that getting tunnel vision on just building up your hero is quite possibly the worst thing you can do as your opponent (if they’re experienced) most definitely isn’t doing that. A lot of the cards have effects that also come into play when the card is defeated, they ranged from drawing an extra card, dismissing a card from your hand, reducing the next creatures health by <X> and then a wide variety of stuff to absolutely screw over your opponent. Whilst the direct damage stuff “Deal 2 damage to your opponent” was always a dead cert, we realised that you can get even more our out of your cards by messing up your opponents plans… we realised this after a particularly brutal play that was made… against us.
We’d drawn into our hand some dragon card that had pretty high hitpoints and damage, to take this sucker out was impossible for us as it would kill us before we killed it; however, we were going to have enough coins to drop 2 support cards that we could place prior to fighting it; one card reduced its health by 4 and the other its damage by 4, making it easier to kill and doing a lot less damage to us. In return once we defeated the dragon it would deal a whopping 10 damage to our rival and so we thought we had this one in the bag! The round begins and our opponent goes first.
He steals our coins.
We reach the first Support card and have no coins to activate the debuff to the dragon, we reach the second Support card and once more no coins to debuff. We then face the dragon that has full attack, full hitpoints and proceed to be turned into a red mist and die mid battle and lose the game.
Being able to make those types of plays and pre-empt when your rival is going to play a big Creature card is awesome when you suddenly back to back remove their weapon damage and their armor in two turns leaving them facing a vastly superior opponent. The different classes do a great job of this, whether The Thief robbing you of coins you needed to make your play, or The Smith building up her temporary weapon damage and making an attack on you mid fight before the weapon disappears. The constantly juggling the building up of your character whilst simultaneously trying to penalize your opponents’ is a very fine balancing act that, we’ll be honest, we hadn’t quite mastered and we placed cards in the wrong order way more than we should have.
The deck building portion of the game plays out like any other TCG and we unlocked new cards for our class deck as we levelled them up, but they’re also available from purchased booster packs. In a similar fashion to other games, but far more extreme, we found it really easy to make an absolutely useless deck by randomly picking cards and ending up in a situation where we couldn’t place any of the creature cards as they would kill us, nor the Support cards as we didn’t have the coins to activate them, essentially going two full stages in one particular match where we were unable to place any cards.
Our own shortcomings aside the game is extremely fun and has bridged that casual yet strategic gameplay style that Hearthstone has so carefully managed; it’s possible to win with the free cards and even the base deck that you unlock. Looking online to see how other people have found the beta there’s plenty of high ranked players saying (at this stage) they’ve not had to spend any cash to get better cards and so we can only hope that it stays that way between now and the official launch.
Our biggest criticism comes in the form of the otherwise amazing looking graphics, which really do look so much like Hearthstone’s own style that it’s a little too close for comfort. The lack of animation of your Chronicle is disappointing and the ones we do see are clunky and awkward, combined with some pixelated artwork on the cards that has been pulled from somewhere and upscaled to make it larger; hopefully all stuff that will be ironed out during the beta. These little niggles aside we’re happy to say that we think there will be a bright future for Chronicle: RuneScape Legends and it was a game we definitely enjoyed playing, the gameplay was refreshing, and the strategic twist is one that would definitely keep us coming back.
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