Faeria Switch Review
Abrakam has taken the foundation of card games and added a board into the mix; most card games require you to play your cards to the play area and attack either an opponent directly or another card they control however in Faeria games are played more like chess on an actual board. Faeria is classed as a living board game meaning you will need to keep buying DLC to own new card sets but you can only earn cards from the base game through playing and Abrakam has advertised that it only takes 50 hours to unlock all cards.
In Faeria you start out with 31 empty spaces where you and your opponent place your special (blue, red, yellow and green) and generic (non-coloured) land. The objective of the game is to defeat your opponent using creatures and events (spells) and to play these cards you must have the correct number of lands the same colour as the creature plus the mana requirement. At the start of every turn you gain 3 mana, but you can gain up to 4 extra per turn by placing your creatures near 1 of 4 ‘Faeria Wells’ spread across the board. Once you have set up your lands and begin to play your creatures the game starts to deliver that board game feeling; you can move and attack using the creatures you have summoned to the board so you have to think carefully where you want to place and move them.
The main aspect that shines about Faeria is the sheer amount of single player content available for casual players; there are missions where you face off against AI, puzzles, boss battles and even co-op levels you can play with friends. If you’re not a fan of facing off against opponents online, then I couldn’t recommend the single player content enough. Unfortunately you still have to be connected to the internet for single player mode meaning that mid game you could get kicked out for losing connection and the game restarts, so if you play on the go it can be annoying but at least you don’t need a Nintendo subscription to enjoy the single player content.
When you’re just starting out with card games it can be daunting knowing where to start and tutorials aren’t the easiest since card games are generally complicated. However, in Faeria they have done an excellent job at creating diverse missions about certain mechanics and tricks by implementing them into the battle and puzzles. By doing this you don’t feel overwhelmed by long, boring tutorials and instead learn to figure out the solutions for yourself and gain rewards for it.
In order to build up your collection you will need to complete daily challenges, missions, co-op mode and more to earn chests containing four random cards. You can also craft cards (the rarity depends on your level) making it easier to unlock cards for a specific deck however you are limited to do this once every roughly 5 hours. I’m happy that you don’t have access to all the cards straight away because it gives you a reason to do all the missions and further encouragement to keep playing. Despite this, I can understand why a lot of players might be discouraged from buying a game and having a lot of content locked from the get-go.
Faeria on the Nintendo Switch comes with a lot of annoying little problems that need to be addressed and despite none of them being game breaking they still can cause a lot of frustration. The game lags a lot during games which isn’t a major problem, but it can get irritating when it’s happening repeatedly during your game and not letting you select or place cards. Whilst playing I encountered some issues with controls, for example, I will be trying to move my cursor to target a different area and the game just doesn’t let me so instead I have to revert to touch controls for a second to continue. The controls can also be clunky when navigating menus and using touch controls doesn’t alleviate the problem because of how small everything is. The main issue that I believe will be the make it or break it for this game is the fact that you cannot play single player mode without being online; I understand that lots of card games are focussed on the online 1v1 game modes so it has some justification but when a game has this much single player content and is on the Switch, which is made to go portable, it does become a big issue.
Other than a few slight problems I would recommend this to any card game fans out there, it stays true to everything we love about card games while adding its own unique twist. Abrakam has done a great job accomplishing their goal for Faeria; by focussing development on its extensive single player mode, it gives me hope for developers to implement something similar in their own card games for the future increasing replayability and attracting more of a casual scene to an often competitive genre.
