Guardian Tactics: Deck of the Chosen is an upcoming roguelike deck builder from the creators of Timelie, Urnique Studio. It functions a bit differently from what you might be used to from roguelikes. As of March 29th, Urnique Studio has released the demo for Guardian Tactics, and I got the chance to check it out. If you are ready for a decent challenge, let me tell you about Guardian Tactics: Deck of the Chosen.
Reasons We Fight
In Guardian Tactics, you command a team of guardians to protect your village from an android invasion. I was able to experience the battle system in the game. When leaving the town, the battles happen in waves, with the objective of each wave being to beat a certain number of enemies. If a guardian dies at any point during the battle, that’s game over. At least in the demo, that meant restarting from wave one or returning to the main menu.
Guardians, RNG, & You
One key to strategizing is understanding each guardian's unique trait. I found this aspect fun as it made positioning your guardians important. Falconia, the bird guardian, has the ability to attack the furthest enemy when it’s moved. On the other hand, Falkor, the dragon guardian gets a strength boost when it is moved forward. Utilizing these traits effectively can help take down enemies and mitigate damage.
With that said, having a good hand is also helpful. However, when I had to discard the hand each time, the RNG hand drawing in the next turn pulled many a fast one on me. This is not a downside but part of the fun as each turn, there needs to be a new strategy. The discarding hand has both saved me and screwed me over in kind. At one point, the latest hand provided me with the shields I needed to mitigate damage and keep my guardians alive. On another turn, it gave me attack cards for Falconia and Cameliott, the shield lizard. Both cards moved each guardian's position and did not deal enough damage to take out any androids. No matter what, with each guardian being low, one of the guardians would get hit and die.
Battle Strat & Rewards
While playing Guardian Tactics, at least with this set of guardians, the main strategy is to mitigate damage. None of their attack cards damage enough to take out enemies quickly enough. By wave two, android spiders get added to waves, which ups the difficulty. It has a bind attack where it starts at three stacks and deals damage proportionate to the amount of stacks. The only way to avoid that damage is to move whichever guardian is bound enough times to break the stacks or beat the spider. With the spider having seven health, it’s often impossible to beat it unless you get a good hand the turn you need.At the end of each wave,Tactics rewarded me with adding a new card to the deck and healing a bit. Depending on how good I could defend, the healing just topped them off; otherwise, if I didn’t do so well, healing two health made no difference. With the way the demo worked, there is no going back to town or unlocking anything from what I experienced. I could only restart from wave 1 so many times with nothing else to do before I needed to put it down for a bit. The highest wave I made it to was four and there are five waves in total you have to fight to beat the demo.
Overall, it was a fun experience for a while even though very limited with what is playable in the demo. Guardian Tactics: Deck of the Chosen presents an experience in which you must think on the fly as a new hand is drawn each turn. This made it challenging and complex. Especially because each time you beat an android, a new one with full health comes out until you take down the objective amount needed for each wave. If you seek to test your ability to critically think in a tough situation, I'm leaving you with some words of wisdom. Know your guardian's abilities, mitigating damage is key, and good luck with RNG card draw.
