Taking a trip to hell has never looked so good as in Nadir: A Grimdark Deck Builder. The visuals are stunning enough to draw you in, while the card mechanics take a few seconds to learn but still provide a constant challenge. There are a lot of strengths to Nadir, but technical shortcomings and some odd design decisions keep it from achieving greatness.
Nadir: Grimdark Deck Builder won’t waste time throwing you into the fray. The tutorial features Jeanne d’Arc battling a trio of evil creatures, using card-based combat to advance deeper into the hellish city of Nadir. Mechanics are explained by the floating head of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps best known for his statement that “God is dead.”
The tutorial does a great job explaining the basics of the game, where players draw cards of the Blue and Red power. Which power you can play depends on how many Red or Blue cards the enemy has drawn. You can always know exactly how the enemy will react to your attacks, allowing you to plan your strategy appropriately.
However, this is a roguelike, so don’t expect things to be easy. Even the basic enemies you encounter can cause serious illness, all of them stacking up. While this can help you make some impressive combinations depending on how you’ve built your deck, it’s more common that your opponent will leave you bleeding, rusting, and rotting on your deck. way to another failed run.
Frustratingly, the instructions do little to explain the effects of these conditions, and the controls don’t make it easy to check. Since this is a port of the PC version of the game, you have to try to navigate to the correct condition for a summary of what it does, which can be a challenge for Joy-Con controllers. Other card powers, such as Invisibility, are not explained at all until you try to use them, which is a confusing decision in a game that requires you to change the rules in favor of the player. yourself to survive. Just being more careful in how the game presents this information will make Nadir more fun to play.
Between runs, you can use the resources you collect to build your home base. You can expand your deck, increase your healing as you go deeper into Hell, or you can unlock different characters for role-playing. Each character plays slightly differently, allowing you to choose how you will deal with the variety of demons you face.
You start as Jeanne d’Arc, the representative of Pride, and eventually unlock Vlad the Impaler who is the embodiment of Lust, and the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes, who later represents sin. error Greed for attacking natives in present-day Mexico. 16th century. It’s an interesting choice to include real-life historical figures in this way, especially those famous for their brutality. For example, the serious impact of Cortes’ actions is still being felt in the world today. Then again, he’s in Hell, so he’s barely glorified for what he’s done.
In classic Dante’s Inferno style, you must battle your way through four rounds of hell, each ruled by a different high-level demon. The game’s opening splash page shows a message from the developers, saying that they’re still working on balancing these battles, and it’s painfully clear when you get to the bottom of the circle and the opponent. face the final boss. They have a lot of health and deal with so many medical conditions that it feels impossible. We know that playing roguelike is often hard, but this only becomes annoying after half a dozen runs and still doesn’t feel closer to victory.
Some technical glitches appeared during our time playing the game. All the problems we had were minor, such as the explanation of the cards’ powers sometimes not showing up when you marked them, but they made Nadir feel inconsistent, unpolished and incomplete at this stage.
The only area where this game is consistently successful is in its visuals. If you’ve ever watched a metal album, you’ll probably be familiar with Nadir’s art style. It feels like the Guns N’ Roses or Iron Maiden album covers come to life and we mean it in the most rewarding way; The most formidable interweaving of life and death is displayed in thick folders at your local tattoo parlor. There are accents, such as thick outlines and liberal use of shading, that feel very Hell boy for us.
The Nadir looks best in dock mode, where the image has a chance to shine on the larger screen. The art still looks good in tablet mode, but it also makes some text too small to see clearly. Especially in the shop that occasionally popped up during runtime, we had to squint very closely to see what we were going to buy. Highlights like these reinforce the feeling that this is more of a rushed switch to Switch from PC than something the Switch was considered for early in its development.
At launch, it was hard to recommend Nadir: A Grimdark Deckbuilder based on its gameplay merits. The steep difficulty curve is more annoying than challenging, and the lack of information about some of the mechanics is simply baffling. If the developers come up with an art book with these character designs, we’ll be completely satisfied with it. However, the gameplay around it is almost like an afterthought, resulting in an inconsistent and frustrating experience, but with potential.
Conclusion
Nadir: A Grimdark Deckbuilder succeeds in delivering a beautiful visual experience, but the game around these gorgeous metallic images doesn’t seem as well-thought-out as the art design. It’s frustratingly difficult, a fact exacerbated by inconsistently presented information and issues surrounding how the game’s controls are ported to the Switch. It’s a game that feels unfinished, despite the visual flair it offers.
