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Additionally, I appreciate being able to navigate conflicts without always resorting to violent tactics. I love seeing my conversations represented through game mechanics rather than the typical dialog tree. Negotiations, on the other hand, are my favorite part of the game. Adding this combat puzzle to encounters wonderfully extends agency into a system easily boiled down to kill or be killed and helped add additional stakes to each encounter. I enjoyed maintaining the delicate balance of keeping foes alive while dispatching of their cohorts to keep my character’s standing in the world as pristine as possible. Killing an enemy rewards you with cards to add to your deck, but their death makes the public aware of your pension for violence and can turn a victim’s friend into an enemy.
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This clever system gives you a powerful and intriguing choice to spare or execute your foes, though accidents happen, and people can die regardless of your intentions. Sentient enemies and allies have panic points and surrender once their health drops below a certain threshold. These augmentation cards do everything from apply damage over time to increase the power of other attacks and they do a great job adding strategic depth to the action. Battles are straight forward physical fights where you use attack, defense, and augmentation cards to defeat the opposing force. However, the combat and negotiation systems both have bespoke decks and mechanics. The bulk of Griftlands’ action revolves around card slinging during heated negotiations and battles. Griftlands presents a mostly satisfying narrative while scratching my itch for complex deck building roguelikes.
#GRIFTLANDS FULL#
Klei Entertainment’s card battler sounds similar to games like Slay the Spire, but the differentiator is an interconnected world full of characters and factions where your actions and relationships actually matter. Your tools to survive are shuffled into decks of cards that grow and evolve through the course of the adventure.
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Griftlands is a deck building game set on a cutthroat alien planet where conflicts require either a sharp dagger or sharper wit.
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