Infinity Wars: Reborn
Not a Marvel™ product
Developer Lightmare StudioS publisher Lightmare StudioS price F2P AvAilAble At Steam, www. Lightmare. com. au www.lightmare.com.au
As the name suggests, Infinity Wars: Reborn isn’t the first incarnation of Infinity Wars. The Australianmade trading card game (TCG) first hit the scene a few years back and was immediately recognisable for its spectacular art and simple but evocative animated cards. Although not enormously different from other TCGs on the market - the game still revolves around bringing out cards to play using a slowly growing pool of resources, and trying to balance defence with enough offensive might to damage the enemy player - there are more than enough interesting takes on convention to make it a worthwhile play.
Rather than tapping land to gain resources like Magic: The Gathering, Infinity Wars adopts a single resource that raises its maximum capacity every turn and refreshes. Each turn players can use the resource to pull cards out of their hand and put them in the Support zone. Unless the card has a special ability that negates it, no card can be played on the turn they are taken from the deck. The play area is broken into four zones: Command, Support, Assault and Defence. The Support zone is where summoned cards sit before they are activated, and is also the home of passive Support cards after they have been summoned. The Command zone contains command characters. These characters have special skills that can be used from Command while they are immune from hard and also set the groundwork for the type of deck a player can use. A Player with two red commanders and one green commander will have majority red cards (with some powerful cards
rounds are resolved simultaneously... changing how interrupts and reactive cards are used
that require two red commanders to summon) and a few green cards. The Assault and Defence zones do just what you think - cards placed in the defence zone block damage to the player’s keep, and cards in the assault zone are used to attack the enemy.
Rather than taking turns, all rounds are resolved simultaneously. It’s a nice twist that changes how interrupts and reactive cards are used. Another interesting twist is the fact that there are essentially two health bars in the game. Attacking the opponent’s keep reduces health, but losing a summoned card costs morale points equal to the cost to summon the card. What this means is that players can’t make cheap creature decks to chip down enemy health, as every little creature that is easily killed will whittle down your morale.
While Infinity Wars: Reborn is free to play and hands players weekly booster packs and allows players to buy additional boosters with real cash and in-game currency, the game also features a load of rather expensive DLC for the hardcore. As it stands there are currently seven DLC packs, the cheapest being $4.99, and the majority costing $49.99 each. These packs contain some alternate art, new battlefields, a bunch of themed boosters and some in-game currency. Whether or not that offers some value for money is best left up to you. TAVISH FORREST