It pains me to write a negative review for this game. I used to love this game, but something went wrong along the way. It seems that the old game with tight balance which felt like playing poker is long gone. Nothing in this game feels fair or fun anymore and it had fallen into same trappings like other TCG games.
For full review and discussion:
Calicifer’s Reviews
The Long Shadow of Magic the Gathering
This game seemingly draws a lot of inspiration from MTG. It is a very popular game, however, it is extremely unbalanced. Balance is achieved more through deck archetypes and trying to control the worst excesses through extremely powerful deck countering. Same design philosophy is adopted and in Infinity Wars. Pointless affinity system, cards which can obliterate your opponent in specific match ups, but are next to useless in others. While developers have lofty ideals, I would appreciate more solid gameplay foundations. Infinity Wars are making same mistakes as other TCGs did. Hard counters
I do not know what had happened along the way, but seemingly simple project had turned into a prolonged slog. All what we needed was relaunching of Infinity Wars servers and letting us to play with our beloved series. Maybe make one more expansion to flesh out factions and to make some hype for launch, but that is it. All the actual changes and improvements were meant to be reserved for a sequel.
Infinity Wars is still a game which I love in principle, but developers seemingly had went into entirely wrong direction. Focus and execute on your foundations first. We do not want your ideals about death to pay to win. We first and foremost want a bloody good card game to play.
- The best example of that are Heat Wave card. Red Dawn’s bread and butter is a Red Dawn Aspirant. Its stats are 4/2 with charge for 1 mana. Heat Wave is 3 mana spell card which deals 2 damage to all enemy units. This one card completely shuts down Red Dawn rush decks. When enemy has that card, I auto-lose. There is no counter-play to it despite developer’s marketing that game is decide by skill. No, it is not. If an enemy has this card, most of my basic units are easily killed. I cannot play a guess game if enemy has it. If I will pull out my Aspirants due to threat of it being there, I will not be able to rush down my opponent. Most decks do not have it, but ones who have it will auto-win a game against Red Dawn rush decks at turn 3.
There are quite a few similar cards in game which just outright shut down certain decks. It is damn if you do and damn if you do not kind of balancing which is awful for everyone. If you do not have a specific card, you feel awful playing against a deck which requires that card. If you do take that card, you feel awful in all the other match ups when that card is just a dead weight. This old balancing relic is left out of MTG balancing design. They create a paper cards which once printed can’t ever be changed, only banned. Thus they must have super powerful cards to keep tabs on unexpectedly powerful combos. If something breaks the meta, those cards would come in and provide crutch by hard countering a specific playstyle. However, in a digital card game such conscious or unconscious copying of MTG just make game feel worse.
Pointless interactions - Game in general has a lot of pointless interactions. A card with two lives which for some reason just dies. Flamestrikes which just deal extra damage afterwards. Minor attack boosts via buffs. Locations which gives you 4/2 recruits for 4 mana. However, we are talking about a game where enemy can bring 30/30 monsters in mid game… A lot of interactions for various factions tend to be rather useless. Red Dawn is the best example of this. It is a rush faction which has next to none late game, but has plenty of mid range buff options which often relies on having a lot of cards on a battlefield. Except, they have only 1 summoning card which is very expensive and does not provide too much value on the board. Game is filled with traits which were never developed properly and a lot of cards which you wonder why they are even there. Are going to use same excuses as Hearthstone devs who told that players should find useless cards and have fun with those cards?
Wacky stat balancing - This serves as a great example how stats in this game are busted. Red Dawn bread and butter Flame Dawn Aspirant is quite a terrible card. It dies to everything. Trades poorly. Are hard countered by any AoE. Unlike in better balanced games like Hearthstone, early aggressive drops usually can trade upwards to cards one mana above them. 3/2 will trade out to 3/3 with an ability thus allowing to keep tempo. However in this game there is no such stats curve. Faction which was supposed to get most stats for mana often gets least of it and have attached weird and pointless interactions next to their cards. Going upwards mana curve, 1 mana gets completely dominated by 2 mana drops. 2 mana drops gets completely dominated by 3 mana drops, etc. This game at its core is not designed to respect card’s statistics. This lack of balancing painfully shows if you try to play anything other than a slow combo deck.
Faction Purity - Now for the deck types. This game surprisingly has very few actually good cards locked under faction purity. I have only 2 Red Dawn cards which is decent pick. Flame Dawn Fanatic and Nix, The Justicar of Dawn. This is it… For dedicating yourself to a cause, you gain very little. However, super-powerful cards like Death Ray which are faction flagship card is only unlocked with 1 purity… This game actively punishes people from playing mono faction decks and gives most of the most powerful cards under 1 or 2 purity. As a result, meta is this abomination of miss-match of various factions. It is very rare for someone to play mono deck, it is especially so when it comes to actually being competitive. Balance seems on its head in this aspect or rather, complete lack of balance. Developer seemingly never got an idea to balance card’s power under its faction purity. The opposite is true, they love mixing factions so much that this bias is even shown in their other game, Infinity Heroes. In that game you do not even pick your cards. You mix whatever heroes you like into one meaningless blob. As a result, game feels chaotic, without structure. It is like playing a wild format where any card can be used and wildly unbalanced decks can be created.
Development of a game - I frankly have no idea what they are doing. They are small team with very limited resources. However, they had somehow managed to start 3 separate projects at a same time. Infinity Wars receives updates at a glacial pace. Infinite Heroes seemingly is dead. God knows how quickly Infinity War 2 is being worked on. Are they mad? Do they want to fail? I have no explanation of why they are working on so many projects at the same time when they do not have resources for even one game. As a result, everything they do seems extremely unrefined. Their games do not even feel like pre-alphas. More like concepts, prototypes. I even saw black and white card artwork done seemingly in microsoft paint! Imagine that!
Calicifer, the Final Hammer
The game which I know and loved is dead. Its remade only made me see it in completely different light. Pointless changes which just broke the game. Doing work which makes game look worse. To top it off, game is profoundly unbalanced and unfun to play. It already developed cancer decks which has no counter-play and are unfun to play against. For some reason I remembered it completely differently. Maybe meta wasn’t developed yet. Maybe most players did not had strongest cards in order to make experience horrible. I do not know what had happened along the way, but seemingly simple project had turned into a prolonged slog. All what we needed was relaunching of Infinity Wars servers and letting us to play with our beloved series. Maybe make one more expansion to flesh out factions and to make some hype for launch, but that is it. All the actual changes and improvements were meant to be reserved for a sequel.
Infinity Wars is still a game which I love in principle, but developers seemingly had went into entirely wrong direction. Focus and execute on your foundations first. We do not want your ideals about death to pay to win. We first and foremost want a bloody good card game to play.