Culdcept Revolt (Nintendo 3DS)

Product Information

The game does an effective job of making you dislike your rivals, so it's strange to receive helpful tidbits of information from them before charging into battle. Competitive card games are increasingly popular nowadays, with many major franchises even offering spin-off titles based around this, but Culdcept is a totally self-contained entity and bears years of history. They're vital checkpoints that make sure you keep moving around the board, forcing players to put themselves at risk. Eventually, Allen and his fellow Cepters, some from the Count's former army, discover a time portal. The spell cards can damage, buff or debuff monsters as appropriate as well as force specific dice rolls or draw additional cards, though “decking out” a player (having them use all their cards) just reshuffles them back into the deck.

This would have been excellent if it had released BEFORE I'd gotten into other digital card games and a slosher-load of other big-screen games! There's a decent soundtrack that ramps up as the score does, hitting peak crescendo as a player pulls into the 90% of a winning score territory. Those interested in Culdcept Revolt will likely find the most enjoyment in competing against others online, rather than NPCs who feel as though they’re wasting the player’s time going through every motion another human player would do in full detail.

The character sprites and portraits are nice looking, even if I did get confused about one character's gender in story mode. It successfully takes a couple of different approaches to traditional board and card games, and fuses them into something that you can spend a lot of time learning to master, and feeling really good about yourself as you do. We'd estimate that a standard game with a limit of 8000 magic takes around thirty minutes to complete on average, but there are plenty of options to mess around with to affect game length, alter card allowances (it's possible to ban Evo cards entirely, for example), as well as customise the look of your cepter and even the style of dice you roll. Here’s the gist of how Culdcept works: I challenge opponents in a match to see who can acquire the set amount of magic power and reach a gate first. Hopefully I’m wrong and Revolt rolls a 12 so that we keep getting more games with faster localizations.

After your payment has been processed, the content will be downloaded to the applicable system linked to the respective Nintendo Account, or respective Nintendo Network ID in the case of Wii U and Nintendo 3DS family systems. It's possible we'll see additional free DLC in the future, though the main game itself is still a fully-realised experience. Despite how genuinely helpful this can be, it does rely on the tired cliché of amnesia as an extra crutch. Each Cepter (player) has a “book” of 50 cards to work with, comprised of monsters in the four classic elements (wind, earth, fire, water) along with neutral monsters, items and spells. To be able to purchase content for Wii U or Nintendo 3DS family systems, a Nintendo Network ID is also required and your funds usable through the Nintendo Account must be merged with the funds tied to your Nintendo Network ID.

I remember a specific match where I own a necessary corner of the board – one all players have to pass through to reach a gate – controlling six of the eight spaces in the section. The AI turns can go pretty slow, and there's no way to skip them, so you end up spending a lot of time just watching the game play itself. With a likable cast of characters, interesting story and a wide variety of cards to create unique decks, Culdcept Revolt has a good premise that doesn’t pay off quite as well as intended. You can clearly see that they were able to make the game that they actually wanted to make, and it isn't just a cash grab.