Freview - Card Hunter

Greetings, noble heroes of yore! Behold thine geek-fest that is Card Hunter by Blue Manchu! It’s simplified Dungeons and Dragons in a video game medium. Go on quests, kill monsters, collect the blood-soaked loot from their broken corpses, level up, rinse, repeat. Card Hunter’s core gameplay is the battle system, which is set up much like a standard DnD dungeon map with a grid array for movement and different obstacles breaking line of sight for ranged attacks. My team was situated on one side of the map and our loathsome enemies swarmed on the other. Attacks, movement and spells are all controlled via a card system. Each character begins with a standard movement and attack card set based on their race and class, which can be augmented with better armor and weapons, but more on that later.

You get three characters to create and name and dress and love as if they were your very own. You choose between the three standard Tolkien races, Dwarf, Elf, and Human, first creating a fighter, then a wizard and finally a paladin. The Dwarves move the least and can take a lot of damage, which obviously got put in my fighter slot, the Elves move the most and are very squishy, thus got tossed into the ranged attack wizard position, and Humans are pretty much center of the road, so for the sake of variety, won the paladin lottery.

Blue Manchu Ply Ltd.

Thing is, when choosing the characters’ sexes, it’s no Saints Row 2 where you can run the gambit from Bruce Jenner to Caitlyn Jenner and everything in between. You get to choose between male and female. There are no stat differences between the two, just pictures on the cardboard cut outs of the miniatures on the game board. Sorry, my trans and genderqueer friends, you can change the sex of the character later on if you want, but this game’s going minimalist.

All that aside, the adventures of Futtbutt the Dwarven Fighter, Laydee the Elven Wizard and Facepunch the Human Paladin was full of all the edge-of-your-seat action you can only get from playing Dungeons and Dragons by yourself. The game attempts to recreate the DnD group atmosphere with nerdy caricatures of a newbie Dungeon Master and his “alpha nerd” older brother, the latter spending most of the time scoffing at the former’s ability to DM. So, at least Blue Manchu cares about realism.

Blue Manchu Ply Ltd.

For the most part, the combat is fairly well-balanced and requires some thought and strategy in order to out-maneuver and out-gun your opponents with the random assortment of cards you’re dealt at the start of each round. The round ends when both you and the DM pass on your turns and discard unused cards until you’re down to two left in your hand. You continue cycling through rounds, maneuvering your characters around the enemies, trading blows and avoiding death until you emerge victorious by the skin of your teeth and collect the spoils of your monster murder-spree.

Here’s where things get a little odd. You get between two to four pieces of random loot between each battle, normally about two or three battles per quest, all of which are seemingly randomly spawned. My first finished quest ended with me getting three rare items, all of which were about ten levels above me and were thus useless. I can understand having a goal to shoot for, but it would be nice to get a piece of armor or a weapon that I can use right away because, while the items in the shop are pretty cheap even for upper level armor and weapons, you can’t sell anything equipable until “later in the campaign”, as the DM vaguely informs me, so these items are just sitting in my inventory, unused and mocking me with their snooty high levels. It gets particularly bothersome as you continue rampaging through quests, collecting more and more stuff that you can’t get rid of, even when you have three of the same shitty weapon you upgraded from four quests ago!

Blue Manchu Ply Ltd.

Freemium content once again rears its ugly head and no one is less surprised than me at this point. But, what's this? Blue Manchu appears to have done something a bit different in terms of milking us for cold, hard cash. You see, Card Hunter is not simply a free-to-play Steam game, but a club one can join for a measly $10-per-month subscription (about half the cost of a monthly World of Warcraft subscription, but you get what you pay for). Purchasing the basic bundle membership package costs an additional $10, but gets you a handful of new character skins, and special treasure hunts that net you an “epic level item” upon completion, so decide for yourself if it’s worth the cost.

If you’re tired of the lonely heart’s existence of meting out justice with only an insulting caricature to keep the ever encroaching darkness of solitude at bay, you can kidnap some friends to get in on the action with the co-op feature. Each of you takes control of a single character in your party and you spend your time yelling at them for doing everything wrong and getting your party killed. Just like a real game of DnD! Or you can simply hop on over to the multiplayer channel and pit your party against others for a chance at winning rare items. If you want, you don’t even have to embarrass yourself by using your own party and simply purchase a pre-made one to use instead!

Blue Manchu Ply Ltd.

This game may be right up your alley if you’re the type who plays RPGs solely for the purpose of leveling up characters and getting the best items possible, which is totally doable through the free single-player campaign if you can endure the DM and his older brother without scratching your own eyes out (better yet, just keep hitting the “continue” button until they go away). However, Dungeons and Dragons this is not; a well-constructed mimicry, perhaps, but an impersonation none-the-less. DnD is a game that’s limited solely by your own imagination and how you utilize it outside of combat as well as during. Puzzles, NPC encounters, story-driven plot twists, all of these things are, in my opinion, integral to the DnD experience and Card Hunter does not, and very likely cannot deliver in that respect. The quests do contain a bit of story to them, but they read more like a mission briefing than anything else and this is basically just built to be a fun little card battle board game. At the very least, it’ll save you a few bucks home repairs due to faulty dice.