iOS Universal, PC •
We’ve talked about it, we’ve reviewed it, and today’s the day it finally arrived on the App Store. We’re talking about Missile Cards, which landed on the App Store last night and joined a handful of other card games that are trying their best to make 2017 the best year ever for mobile gaming.
Unlike Age of Rivals or Race for the Galaxy, Missile Cards is a strictly solitaire affair. The goal is to defend your base from comets, asteroids, and other inbound terrors by shooting lasers and missiles of your own. So, it’s basically Missile Command from the early 80’s, but it’s mixed with a turn-based card game which complicates everything. Instead of seeing how fast you can move the trackball and hit “Fire”, you’re hoping that offensive cards come up and you have enough turns to charge them before half your base is All-Blowed-Up(TM).
Cards are dealt along a short conveyor belt which moves cards to the right. When cards hit the end, two things can happen. If the card is beneficial to you, it is reshuffled into the deck. If it’s something terrible, it activates and begins its slow descent to your death. You’ll be drawing cards from the conveyor belt and placing them into slots where they begin charging. Once charged, you can fire weapons at the nearest danger, but that’s it. The weapons are all one-shot, so you need to constantly be arming and charging new weapons, which cost Action Points to acquire, and Action Points aren’t a limitless resource.
Sound hectic? It is. Sound hard? It is. Sound fun? It is.
I only got my hands on Missile Cards last night, but I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. It’s another one of those solo time wasters like Card Crawl or Card Thief that work when you only have a minute or two to check in, or when you have more time to play and you suddenly realize it’s 2am and you should have stopped a couple hours ago. It’s hard, though, and strategy seems to be eluding me. I haven’t come close to winning even at the easiet level, and there are four levels where the threat level only gets worse. I’m not complaining about the difficulty–not at all. In fact, I consider it a huge plus. There’s a ton of game here, and I’ve only scratched the surface. Hooray!
I haven’t even mentioned the tractor beam and unlocking new cards. As you blow stuff up, it leaves debris which has a very short half life. If you can activate a tractor beam card, you can suck up all the space junk which you can use to unlock new, more powerful cards. It’s a cool system that makes you feel involved in crafting your deck rather than the usual method in which you’re thrown rewards after a game ends. Here, there’s junk to get which will make you better…can you get it or will it pass you by?
Missile Cards was designed by Nathan Meunier and it’s his first foray onto the App Store. Let’s get out there and buy the hell out of this one so we can see more designs from his evil brain on our iPads.
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