While the card game at its heart is entirely familiar, Cross Blitz is decked out to the nines. This new indie deckbuilder by Tako Boy Studios brings a bubbly, attention-grabbing pixel art style to what essentially boils down to a snazzy version of Blizzard’s Hearthstone with lane-based gameplay. Cross Blitz offers plenty of space for deck experimentation alongside its colorful roster of anthropomorphic prima donna pirates.
Screen Rant recently explored a preview of the game covering Cross Blitz’s first playable “Fables” chapter, a story mode centered on replayable card duels on a cheerful world map. Centering on the besmirched lion pirate Redcroft, it spins a fun and quirky JRPG yarn about a down-on-his-luck privateer crawling back to notoriety with his feisty crew in tow. It’s somewhat reminiscent of One Piece in its narrative, emphasizing a world with a widespread pirate culture and wacky roster of temperamental fairies, mushroom creatures, and roguish backstabbing rodents.
Virtually every corner of Cross Blitz’s screen reveals a charming little animated flourish, bouncing along to its upbeat pirate-y chiptune soundtrack. While this movement doesn’t translate readily into screenshots, the game has an energetic aesthetic replete with passionate characters who resolve all of their problems and encounters with a card-based tête-à-tête.
Anyone who’s played a few rounds of Hearthstone will quickly pick up the basics here. Matches start with rock-paper-scissors to determine turn order, then players receive one single mana point for the first round, two for the second, and so on. Mana acceleration means that decks centered on high-cost cards may stumble in the early game, but thrive in round four and up as stakes and damage potential increases. Much of Cross Blitz is centered on players positioning minions in one of the four two-slot lanes on their side of the board, with relic bonuses, trigger effects, and other special card attributes adding complexity throughout.
Trickier conditions differentiate each duel, like trap cards which create new conditions in certain lanes when triggered. Some of Cross Blitz’s enemies arrive carrying relics which damage any minion after being played, which means saying goodbye to any one-HP pirate card put down on the board. Minions can drop heals, trigger cannon cards to fire, or stuff opponent decks with damage-inducing status cards, and special hero-specific Blitz abilities shut down matches on a dime.
2023-06-19 15:00:04
Post from screenrant.com
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