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With its distinctive art style and more real-time take on a deckbuilding roguelike base, The Tower manages to be compelling
Let’s face it, the roguelike deckbuilder space on the Switch is bursting at the seams with quite a number of at least decent up to great indie titles already, making it a little harder to drum up enthusiasm for yet another unless they’re doing things a bit differently. Thankfully, at least in terms of the card battles you’ll be having, Arcana of Paradise manages to bring a little distinctive flavor to the well-trod formula by adding more of a real-time element to combat. Tapping into a growing pool of gifted children you’ll be pairing them up and hitting the dungeons in search of resources to help keep everyone alive and ultimately hoping to get to the bottom of the massive tower they’ve been living on. Each child has their own base cards, and you’ll acquire new ones as you go as well. Where the variation on the normal theme comes in is that the combat is far more active than normal, with you executing cards being played, reshuffling when necessary, and trying to maximize what you have to work with. For example, if you’re able to play a shield card at the moment of an enemy attack you’ll be far more effective in reducing its impact than simply playing it and moving on. This does keep combat engaging, which is nice, but the longer you play there’s still a tendency more than with some competitors for it all to be a bit same-y given an overall lack of wide enough enemy variety as a whole. Still, if you’re a deckbuilding fan but also like a little action in your RPG play this may be a pretty unique option overall.
Justin Nation, Score:Good [7.2]