Reviews for Highgrounds

[CrimsonSpire]

I love the game, I really do. I absolutely understand the need to make money off creations as well. The major thing that forces me to rate this lower than I usually would, however, would be the pacing. You have all these wonderful cards, all these wonderful ways to play, but with gem pricing the way it is and gem rewards the way they are, it takes way too long to even have a chance at a pack, much less a viable deck. (Especially if you're going after the non-starter class decks.) I actually found it faster to create a second account to try and hope for a new deck because it would be much faster than trying my luck in the multiplayer and win 12-15 matches to get a single pack. (That, and please add a timer on the same people you can get randomly in multiplayer. If I have a deck that gets stomped by someone in five turns, playing them over and over again isn't going to change much.)

If the pacing gets fixed a bit, I'd gladly come back and rate this higher.

[WarpZone]

Pay-to-win is a cancer on the face of gaming, okay? Let's just get that rant out of the way up front. The day pay-to-win gambling games like Magic: The Gathering become a more reliable source of income than other genres of game is the day we lose everything we as gamers hold dear, handing over the keys of the kingdom to (slightly more) cynical marketeers who only care about sucking dry the 1% of human beings who live to spend money on conspicuous bullshit like booster packs and food spiked with inedible flavorless flakes of gold foil.

Having said that, this one actually has some gameplay in it, I guess. You can use that in an ad if you want to. " '- Actually has some gameplay in it, I guess,' - a core gamer." From building your deck to managing your income to choosing what to buy this turn, the game is constantly presenting the player with strategic, tactical, and immediate choices.

Unfortunately, after building up this strategic element, the game procedes to sabotage itself by making it impossible to actually use units you have fielded to solve problems. I got as far as the Wizards before I figured out that there's no actual way to counter anything what needs countering. The game "helpfully" advises me that I need to Wound units that can Bolt, but this advice is meaningless because the enemy gets to move its units after I have moved mine but before combat resolves. It doesn't matter if I own a unit that can Wound in the right place or not because the enemy will always move its bolters away from that unit and counter with a defensive unit.

Extrapolate this out to every other strategic scenario, and you'll see that nothing can ever reliably counter anything, unless you field an army that's all the same type of unit. (So it's like every other deck-building game in that regard.) Combine this with a two-tiered premium currency system, unreasonably slow server response times even if you're playing single-player with no login, and apparent lack of a Trainer, and you've got a nasty, spiky moneypit that doesn't even pretend to value the player's time or skill.

Is it a sad testament to the state of the games industry that this is not the most cynical wallet-emptying game I've seen this year. It's not even within the top ten. There's another quote for you. " '...not even within the top ten (most cynical wallet-emptying games I've seen this year) - a consumer' " Man, that's a great quote! It should play well on Gamasutra. I'm handing you gold, here. Just think of all the whales you could gut with a hook like that. I'm not surprised that deck-builders get critical acclaim these days, I'm just surprised that they have the gaul to market it on a free browser game portal like Newgrounds.

I could maybe see it if it was something like ROBOKILL or Creeper World that actually offers the player a legitimate gameplay experience, then I could see it. But this 'freemium' pay-to-win shit? That shit needs to go back to dying a slow death on mobile devices. PC gamers don't want it or need it. Broke gamers can't afford it. And no amount of box quotes from AAA reviewers is going to help you get blood out of a stone.

Three stars for graphics, stability, and obvious polish. But why the hell does this need to be on Newgrounds, of all places!?

spryfox responds:

With all due respect, we are practically killing ourselves trying to make a CCG that is *not* pay-to-win. We get crapped on by publishers who tell us this game will never succeed because uncommon units are just as powerful and useful as rare units. You saw booster packs in the game and got defeated by a single player mission and immediately assumed the worst. Please understand that this sort of thing is incredibly discouraging to the few indie developers like us who are trying to find a way to make the games we love, still give them away for free, and somehow eke out a modest living. Highgrounds is by no means a moneymaker. It doesn't even pay our bills.

Please don't take any of this the wrong way. We understand why people get so enraged by free-to-play games. Many f2p games are awful. But some of us are trying to do better.

Highgrounds is a very challenging game that requires a lot of skill and practice. The computer will kick your butt until you really internalize how to play. Veteran human players will kick your butt WAY worse. A large percentage of those veterans have not spent a dime and never will. And we're totally cool with that. (Pro-tip: if you want to succeed in multiplayer without spending money, make sure you complete the single player campaign. You get many free powerful units as reward for doing so.)

For anyone who is willing not to immediately jump to conclusions, please know that we're doing our best to be more like League of Legends and Team Fortress than the mountain of skeezy CCGs out there. We are trying to make a game of skill in which you pay for variety, not for an unfair advantage. And we have a pretty solid track record, having worked on two games, Triple Town and Realm of the Mad God, that have been widely praised for NOT being obnoxious pay-to-win games. (Note, we stopped working on Realm of the Mad God back in 2012, when Kabam took it over, and we've had nothing to do with how it has changed since then.)

You can read more about Highgrounds, and how to succeed in it, here: http://spryfox.com/forums/topic/introduction-to-highgrounds-faq/

[sonofplasam]

i played this a while back on another site but not alot has changed i assume you decided to upload here for more players

[17RaiLZ]

It's good, really good. Work on optimisation though. It's a bit slow on my lappy, just doesn't seem like a game that should be slow on the transitions and loading.

Other than that, this is a very solid game. But the loading is killing it for me.

[marc0902]

this game is the best out of all the strategy games i played