Prismata Review: Immersive

Prismata completely changes everything you’ve ever known about card dealers and will unite strategists once again. Intimidating at first, thanks to an accommodating campaign, Lunarch Studios has created one of the most engaging and addicting strategy games in years.

Unlike traditional card-dealer games, your deck will be exactly the same as everyone else’s; this isn’t a card-collecting game. This incentivizes repetitive play and enables you to improve from skill alone. This innovative approach to strategy card games is accessible, grind-free, and incredibly immersive.

Jumping straight into a practice or online match is ill-advised. Starting off with the well-paced campaign chapters will allow you to ease into the game’s most basic mechanics. You’ll gradually build up your battlefield with an array of unique and versatile cards, and before you know it you’ll be setting up your inventory without a second thought. Your source of currency to summon new cards are seeds. You’ll need drones to obtain seeds, but you need engineers to summon drones. The engineers and drones can act as lines of defense as well, but it’s best you’d summon some walls. Walls require both seeds and “blue resources.” To obtain blue resources every turn, you’ll need to spend seeds on “Blastforges.” “Steelsplitters” also require blue resources but they also require a lot of seeds at a time, so you can summon “Tarsiers,” but you’ll need “red sources” to summon them.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the game’s complexity. However, when you’re playing a match and get the basics down, you’ll never feel overwhelmed or lost playing Prismata because the game takes all this information and places it in the back of your mind. Now you’re just focused on taking down your enemies cards your own way. Everything work in congruence, so you can set up, play defensively or aggressively. It takes an unheard level of dedication to create such an ingenious strategy layout. Having everything at your disposal already makes Prismata feel like the fighting game of card-dealers.

Prismata is still in its alpha-build, yet it feels complete compared to most other strategy games attempted today. Though a team of only eight, they’ve managed to dish out an intelligent, addicting, and purely skill-based strategy game. Lunarch Studios will prove to the world you don’t need to rely on forking over dollars to big-budget companies to climb up the ranks.