The goal of the game is to build a battle deck powerful enough to defeat the enemy forces, by purchasing units and using their powers and synergies to your advantage.
Each turn, a hand of random unit cards is dealt from the player's deck, and their combined output is added to the player's resources for that turn. The two main resources that units can produce are gold (allows you to purchase more units) and blood (allows you to attack enemies). Units can also have a variety of other special effects when played, such as adding more cards to the hand, restocking resources, and much more.
After your turn ends, the enemies get the opportunity to do damage to you and may also use their own powers against you, making every game a race against time to defeat all enemies before your health runs out.
When enemies are defeated, they do not leave the game, but instead become part of your deck and will be played like regular units. Sometimes this is useful if the enemy has a good ability, but more often than not this is a liability - particularly since some enemy units harm you when played. Finding ways to efficiently rid your deck of enemies (or your own units once they have outlived their usefulness) is an important part of gameplay.
Killing an entire group of enemies yields loot, usually extra gold or supplies to replenish resources that have been lost during the fight.
The game contains an enormous number of different playable units with unique abilities. Many units can also combo with other units of their type, allowing players to adopt a specialist strategy with a particular unit type.
There are a few different modes of gameplay:
- Campaign: 100+ hand-picked scenarios, each pitting you against a different selection of enemies.
- Battle: 100+ hand-picked scenarios in which you can earn additional Battle Points by defeating difficult intruding monsters.
- Crawl: A roguelike mode in which you play through randomly-generated levels of increasing difficulty. After defeating a level, you can select two units who will be immediately available for purchase in the next level. In this mode, you can also loot skulls, a special currency that can be spent at the start of a level to obtain powerful special items.
- Daily: A randomly-generated daily scenario that can only be played once.
The game is completely free with no ads, and can be downloaded for Android from the Google Play store here
. The creator does not ask for payment, although he does give you a fun bonus level for the game as a thankyou.
This game contains the following tropes:
- Cat Folk: The Felinomad is an anthropomorphic lion.
- Colourful Theme Naming: Three of the ninja are simply named after their color: Black, Red, and White.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: The White is a ninja whose power is equal to the number of enemy groups remaining; he's great near the start of a battle, but his power dwindles as enemies are defeated.
- Critical Status Buff: The Berserk is a powerful unit, but can only attack when the player's health is low.
- Deck Clogger: Enemy units go into your deck when defeated, and some of them have no effect when played, effectively wasting a unit slot. Worse still are the units which inflict a detriment when played.
- Hydras, while they at least have a healing effect when played, become deck cloggers due to their ability to generate more of themselves.
- Defeat Means Playable: Literally, it's a core game mechanic - when you defeat an enemy, they go into your deck and will start showing up in hands.
- Evolving Attack: The Avatar's damage is based around Focus, which starts small but can be increased over several rounds by investing attack power into it.
- Flaming Hair: It's hard to tell with static pixel graphics, but the Pyromancer does appear to have flaming orange hair.
- Forced Transformation: The Polymorph spell granted by the Reconcocter has the potential to turn units into something useless, although you can't control its effects.
- Glowing Eyes: The Pyromancer has them, indicative of his fire magic.
- Increasingly Lethal Enemy:
- The Mad Scientist makes a random enemy stronger every other turn, making it essential to take him out quickly before the others become too powerful to defeat.
- The Fallen is particularly tricky as it can feed on your attack power to make itself stronger, which means that your attempts to defeat it might actually make things even worse.
- The Lich King transforms your starting units into skeletons one-by-one, causing your deck to start filling up with useless units that deal damage when drawn. If you don't stop him quickly you'll soon be overwhelmed.
- Kill It with Fire: The Pyromancer doesn't deal attack damage; he just straight-up incinerates enemies, eliminating them from the battle entirely.
- Necromancer: The Necromancer, a unit with the useful ability to remove defeated monsters from the deck, and doing so powers her up too.
- Nun Too Holy: While classed as Holy, the Nun is actually primarily a combat unit. Her sprite even carries a pair of nunchucks.
- One-Hit Kill:
- The Pyromancer's specialty, although it doesn't work on strong enemies.
- The Red ninja can also kill instantly, although less effectively than the Pyromancer, since it only works on relatively weak enemies and doesn't bury them for good.
- Our Hydras Are Different: Due to the way unit mechanics work in this game, the Hydra enemy doesn't regrow heads; it actually regrows new hydras. The effect is the same, though; if you can't kill the spawning hydras fast enough, you'll get nowhere, and just end up with a deck full of hydras. They do at least provide some healing when they're fighting on your side.
- Randomized Title Screen: The title screen shows a random unit from the game each time you visit.
- Randomized Transformation: This is the Reconcocter's power; they give you the Polymorph spell, which swaps the top unit of your deck for a random one. It's a way to get rid of useless units, although there's no guarantee that what you're left with will be helpful.
- Super Serum: The Researcher is a scrawny scientist; however, if you have any health potions when you purchase him, he consumes them all at once and transforms into a mighty Smasher, whose power is equal to the number of potions consumed.
- Shout-Out:
- Several to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- The Mutant is a pixel art version of Michaelangelo, nunchucks and all, with "Cowabunga dude!" as its flavor text. It is classed as a ninja in game, and purchasing one gives you a supply of mutagen that can be used to turn defeated monsters into Mutants.
- The Sensei is a ninja mouse reminiscent of Master Splinter.
- The Rasper enemy resembles Master Shredder.
- The Hunter is inspired by the Big Game Hunter from Hearthstone, with his ability to take down only larger threats. His flavor text is even the Big Game Hunter's quote: "I've got the beast in my sights".
- The Ultimate (a warrior unit) is a pixel art version of - well, The Ultimate Warrior. Fittingly, he has the highest base strength in the game, but is also the most expensive (aside from the Kami, which has a mechanic for lowering its cost).
- Many of the flavor texts for the units are shout outs to other franchises:
- Alpha: "The bite is a gift!"
- Ant: "Them! Them! Them!"
- The Barbarian invokes the name of Crom.
- Gladiator: "Are you not entertained?"
- Necromancer: "I see dead people"
- Raptor: "Clever girls"
- Shaman: "Asante sana squash banana wewe nugu mimi hapana"
- Spartan: "Where do we dine tonight?"
- Wizard: "Arrives precisely when he means to"
- The Spade Knight is obviously based on Shovel Knight, and wears very similar armor.
- The Hitman is based on... well, guess.
- The Slowcoach enemy is a pink monster reminiscent of Slowpoke.
- Several to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- Situational Damage Attack: Several units are based around this idea:
- The Spartan deals damage for every Warrior in the hand (including himself).
- The Sergeant deals more damage when supported by other Soldiers.
- The White ninja deals more damage the more enemies there are.
- The Hitman deals damage equal to the number of shurikens you have.
- The Avatar's damage depends on how much Focus you have. Focus is gained by investing increasing amounts of attack power in previous rounds.
- The Hunter does great damage for its cost, but it can't do anything unless all the weaker enemies have been taken care of first.
- Starting Units: At the start of each battle, the game supplies you with a meager starting deck containing stooges and pikemen - the weakest units in the game. They can just about earn you enough money to start purchasing new units and build your deck up. Some units are designed specifically to train up these weak units into something more useful.
- Take That!:
- The Farmer's flavor text suggests that he is "pleased with not being in a farming simulation social network game", a dig at Facebook's FarmVille.
- The special level that you get as a reward for donating is a satire of pay-to-win games.
- Timed Mission: All battles must be completed within a certain number of rounds - this prevents players from abusing life gain tactics to outlast the enemy. Some enemies can drain your rounds, hastening your defeat, but you can gain them back by purchasing hourglasses. You can also trade rounds for life gain by purchasing a Medic.
- Visual Pun: The Nun is holding nunchucks.
