NEOVERSE PC Review

NEOVERSE is the latest deck builder trying to make it big after the surge that followed Slay the Spire’s release. Also, it’s Tino Games Inc.’s first venture onto consoles and PC. I’m a big fan of deck builders and card games in general, but the ultimate question is, will you still find yourself playing this game on and off for a long time to come?

Other than the additional mechanics, NEOVERSE plays pretty similar to Slay the Spire and other deck builders. You build a deck by winning fights and then collecting your reward, using the shop to purchase cards and completing optional objectives. However, unlike other deck builders, every time you play a card you draw a new one (unless there are no cards in your draw pile). You can also use items (you can only hold 3) that give you different benefits to swing the game in your favour and relying on skills to help you out.

NEOVERSE tries teaching you the core gameplay and new systems they’ve implemented using only a video. My suggestion would be to add an interactive tutorial because the UI is confusing enough and who wants to watch a video instead of actually playing?

Interesting new mechanics include:

Parry System – armour doesn’t disappear at the end of the turn like in other deck builders so the first thought is to get as much armour as possible, which is still completely viable! However, if you have the exact same amount of armour as the amount of damage the enemy is dealing, when they attack this will trigger a parry and they will be stunned for their next turn. I love how this system gives a buff to less armour heavy decks and characters; without this attack heavy decks would be much worse rendering a lot of the cards pointless.

Combo System – you randomly get provided colours and if you play the cards that correspond to the correct colours your next attack will deal double damage. This mechanic is great because it forces the player to think thrice when picking and playing cards.

Precision System – Killing an enemy with the precise amount of damage to drop their health to exactly 0 with result in more gold. A cool idea but who doesn’t love seeing how much damage they can do to an enemy even if they could defeat them easily?

Optional Objectives – Every normal battle has 3 reward choices and each one has a different objective and sometimes stronger (elite or super elite) enemies. There aren’t many objectives and it would be nice to see more game changing ones; for example a random card is added to your hand every turn.

All 3 characters have a different strategy, a skill tree and starting decks; at the start of the game you pick your character and the deck you want to play (deck A, deck B or a hybrid of the 2) although this doesn’t really change much apart from 2 cards in your starting deck. Overall the selection of cards is quite underwhelming with nearly every game ending with a similar deck. Unfortunately this limits the game from having many different synergies as you usually find in this genre, with the addition that there are several situational cards that I almost never take limiting your card choice. For me this was a little disappointing as the best part about card games is finding the best synergies between all the different cards.

No deck builder has the best story because it’s mostly irrelevant as long as the cards are fun, however, NEOVERSE doesn’t even have an intro or in game text introducing anything that’s happening. Even so you still have an adventure mode that takes you through the story for each character and plays pretty much the same as other deck builders. Hunter Mode is an additional game mode and starts with you drafting a deck, however, there are minimal rewards so you have to make sure your starting deck is good enough to take you far.

NEOVERSE lacks a unique, creative style that pulls players into a game; the characters, animations and backgrounds aren’t very interesting, of course this doesn’t affect the gameplay but it helps when bringing in new players. The user interface is confusing and takes some time to get used to and could do with some polishing, rather than the developers letting us unnecessarily control the camera during combat, meaning instead of playing a card or ending your turn you accidentally keep moving the camera! You can unlock costumes and accessories for your characters, costumes are cosmetic only while accessories mix up the rules.

I had a good time playing NEOVERSE – especially Hunter Mode – because at the end of the day the aesthetic of a deck builder doesn’t matter as it’s all about the cards. Finding the card synergies was fun, even though there weren’t too many to find, however because of the lack of cards I can’t see myself playing this game on and off for the next few years like I have with other deck builders. Hopefully NEOVERSE gets some attention from deck building fans, especially now it’s on Xbox Game Pass (at the time of writing), and Tino Games Inc. will add more cards as either a free update or paid DLC instead of charging for schoolgirl uniforms.