Star Realms

Update August 2021: the new campaign is the best one yet. Love the surprise at the end. App is crashing more often though. Super fun. Love the campaigns. Lots of variety. Satisfying challenge level. Not the sort of game where you can end up spending a ton of money without realizing it — technically there’s in app purchases but they’re for more campaigns, not for boosts or whatever. Some games constantly prompt you to buy things or force you to spend extra money to win or to just keep playing for as long as you want to, and this is not one of them. I’ve been mostly playing in campaign mode. An undo feature (e.g. if you play a scout and then realize you wanted to use patrol mech's ability to scrap it) would be good. Also ally ability draws happen automatically, whereas I believe proper gameplay is you should be able to put off using the ally ability, for instance if you want to buy a card first. Also the log is all but unreadable, which is a problem because the opponent's gameplay is often too fast to follow easily. So, yeah there's some things that could be cleaned up or improved but I don't care because it's really fun. Incidentally I appreciate that star realms (the card game and the app both) give a sense of being fast-paced and urgent but aren't actually time-sensitive; if I need to pay attention to something else for a moment I can do that and come back to the game without needing to pause or ruining my chance to do well. Some of the campaign achievements require a great deal of luck. As far as I can tell every level is winnable on hard mode as long as you’re willing to play enough times.

I really do like this game I think it’s an incredible deck builder and always have a ton of fun when I play in person with friends but the app has some problems. My biggest issue with the app is one specific bug that happens to me 1/3 games. As far as I can tell the bug happens when my turn starts in a live game (arena or just online) when I am looking at what’s in either my opponents or my own discard pile or deck. What the bug does is prevent you from playing any cards for your whole turn. The only thing you can do is watch the turn timer tick down or go into the pause menus and end your turn. It has been a part of me losing 2 arena games in a row two weeks ago and I was very frustrated because it was an arena I paid my previous winnings to get into. This bug is debilitating and game ruining. In a game today I lost a great hand that would have allowed me to get in an excellent position and buy a command ship but because of the bug I got steam rolled as my opponent was able To get out three outposts and destroy me. I hope this is something the devs can fix because I really do love the game and aside from a few other minor issues (not being able to unlock digital conent with codes or proof of purchase of the same physical cards, or arena being very expensive to play in) this could be a 5/5 app.