KindFolx came out recently, and it claims to be a fast-paced deckbuilder where enemies attack you in real-time. Sounds interesting? It sure is! I didn’t expect it to be nearly as frantic as it is though, and I have some conflicting feelings about it. Let’s talk about the game real quick!
Full disclosure: I received a review copy of the game.
Innovative But Imperfect Concept
I’m a huge fan of roguelike deckbuilders, and part of it is because they often make it relatively easy for you to come up with these wombo combo type builds where you can delete a powerful enemy in a single turn.
Unless you’re trying to speed through them, these games will typically give you all the time in the world to calculate your next move and go for the “best” possible plays.
Well, Kindfolx makes this a little more complicated by having a more dynamic system in which enemies act when their action bar fills up, kinda like how some of those old JRPGs worked. It provides a high-octane twist to the normally more subdued and slow gameplay loop that the genre’s known for.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s an enjoyable and innovative twist, but I think it causes the game to suffer from some kind of, for the lack of a better term, an identity crisis.
On one hand, it keeps you on your toes and heavily rewards deep game knowledge and smart deck building. On the other hand, encounters very quickly devolve into frantic scuffles as soon as the action bars activate.
The combat system, ironically, makes it hard to actually build up that initial game knowledge required to act fast, as taking just a few seconds to think will cause you to eat a lot of unnecessary and uncontested damage.
Because of how fights work, I often found myself just throwing whatever cards I could use and hoping for the best. Of course, I still try to be a little smart with my plays whenever possible. As the Noble character, for example, I did eventually find ways to take advantage of the bleed mechanic.
Since the game works in real-time and enemies get an action bar boost whenever you draw a new hand, I figured that I could just stack a ton of dodge and bleed, then I could win by… not play anything as the mobs slowly die. It’s not exactly the most engaging strategy, but if it works, it works.
By around this point, something just kinda clicked. Sure, I was still getting shafted in certain fights, as my hand would turn into cards literally labeled “Useless Junk” before I could even act, but I started getting a feel for the mechanics and how to play around them.
However, while writing this review, I was in the middle of a run where I was just progressing smoothly with my stalling strategy. I made it all the way to what I believe is the third zone, getting myself the Gold City achievement. Unfortunately, that’s where the run eventually ended, but not by my own hand…
Rough Around the Edges
The game suffers from a lot of strange bugs, and I just can’t figure out why they happen or what I can try to do to avoid them.
Whether it be instructional text boxes persisting through screen transitions or literally every button in the game just refusing to work all of a sudden, there have been no shortage of issues throughout my attempts to finish a whole run.
The run I was describing earlier was a pretty solid one, but the game just kinda crashed out of the blue as I was inching towards the Gold City’s boss room. Good thing there’s a “Resume” option, right? Well, upon reloading the save, my character’s just kinda frozen in place, and nothing I click on will work. I have to force exit the game every time I try to reload it, so there goes that run, I guess.
It’s a shame, really, because I was genuinely starting to enjoy my time with it. But having my time wasted like that just kinda turned me off. It even happened again when I tried to start a new run, and all I did was examine my deck.
Now it’s entirely possible that my version of the game is an old one, or maybe something in my own system is acting up, as unlikely as that sounds. I’ve tried verifying the integrity of my files through Steam and even reinstalling the whole game, and nothing really changed. So yeah, no clue what’s going on.
I’m still playing through another run as I’m writing this section, because I do find the actual gameplay fun, but I’ll admit that I’m in a bit of a sour mood because of what happened earlier.
Wait And See
All the best to the developer, as they do seem to be working on refinements for the game. The whole concept, while probably not for me (though I initially thought it would be), is definitely something that will appeal to those who want a fast-paced challenge and can get past the initial learning curve.
I’d recommend giving it a bit of time to get some much-needed fixes before checking it out, though, unless you’re fine with potentially running into some frustrating quirks every now and then.