Ranking of Roguelikes #8: City Wars: Tokyo Reign

You can check out the first entry in the series here, and the most recent entry here. This time we're looking at something that I really with I liked better.

I played this for a little over seven hours and did not complete a single run.

City Wars has some impeccable cyberpunk vibes. You're one against the system and the system is stacked against you. Every character design oozes style and the world has the kind of grimy sheen that sets the mood for your run perfectly.

It follows the template laid down by games like FTL and Slay the Spire: you move around a world map consisting of nodes of combat encounters, merchants, rest points, and the like. Prior to starting each level you assemble your combat deck of 20 cards from whatever you have unlocked. There's an impressive variety of card types that give you plenty of choices in your tactics and strategy. Do you want to poison your opponents? Weaken them with electric shocks? Build combos of cards that support and strengthen each other? There's a build for you.

Once you unlock enough cards, that is. You begin with a very limited collection and only get more through purchasing or finding them during runs. While a good idea in theory, in practice it means that it's next to impossible to make much progress until you've built up a strong deck through multiple failures. This feels like it's antithetical to good roguelike design, where knowledge of how things work is more important than what you have to work with.

This is made worse by the way the combat works. You and your opponent have parallel tracks that you lay your cards on. Cards have three main attributes: accuracy (card strength), size (the number of blocks it takes on the track), and damage per block. You take turns placing cards on the track. If you place a card with higher accuracy across from an opponent's, it will break those card blocks and they won't work. After you place five cards each, the cards take effect in order from left to right, dealing damage and triggering any special effects.

Image credit to Nintendo Life's review, which convinced me I should take a chance on it.

The bottom track is the player character. The yellow numbers are card accuracy, blue numbers are damage. You can see what blocks have been broken and rendered inert. It's possible to upgrade your cards during a run by getting copies of them, and that's a big part of the early stages. The problem is that once you hit the third stage the enemy card accuracy and attack power ramps up and makes it next to impossible to avoid taking damage from round to round. It makes entire classes of cards useless because they'll be nullified by the opponent no matter how upgraded they are, making several strategies that rely on them useless.

There are five areas and I've never gotten past the fourth no matter how much I've carefully chosen and upgraded my deck. I ran into opponents whose every card was more powerful than every card I had to play, more than once. There was literally nothing I could do. I didn't learn anything from that failure except frustration and it killed my desire to try again.

That's strike two and three as far as I'm concerned and it's what made me put the game down for good.

It's possible that with more unlocks and more experience that I'll find cards that work all the way through the game. I'll never know, because there's nothing that makes me want to keep playing to find them. The story is almost nonexistent and I've seen every kind of enemy the game has to offer.

Where does it rank?

City Wars: Tokyo Reign shares a lot of the same design problems that Crown Trick does but it's worse in almost every way. At least with Crown Trick I could see what I could have done differently. It's the new last on the list at #8. Congratulations, I guess?

I'm going to pick something better as a palate cleanser for the next installment. For now, the current ranking of Roguelikes is:

1. Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate

2. Nowhere Prophet

3. Has-Been Heroes

4. Steredenn: Binary Stars

5. Caveblazers

6. Dicey Dungeons

7. Crown Trick

8. City Wars: Tokyo Reign