Seems confused about its identity. It was OK, I liked the music and the Viking-ness. I won but honestly it felt like the game just played itself most of the time, not very fun. I tried to look at the cards in my deck to see why i'd want an old guy over a blob bomb, but I couldn't discern any info about that. With some polish you might have something, but not for me like this.
Reviews for "Halla"
needs badges, to keep people playing more
This is a pretty cool looking game, but there's just so many bullshit units the enemy can deploy immediately that will instantly fuck you up without remedy it just becomes annoying. Sure you can also deploy said units, but the higher the level the more troops the enemy starts with and that can also fuck you up before you know it, unless you get the pinnacle of bullshit units right away.
The leveling system being randomized also plays against you, given that you might have been able to click on five cards before you level up even once and thus your units will still be weak and barely holding on a thread at the side of the screen.
There's also the thing with the "goal zone" the units have to reach being vaguely off-screen. It feels pretty pointless and you don't know where your units really are or if they're doing anything, I lost a round because the enemy managed to somehow hold my units barely on the line until I ran out of "souls".
By the way the passive banner powers seem to work whenever they feel like it, instead of when they should which is every 30 seconds if I'm to believe the description. If you changed that to being random because it would make the game way too easy why didn't you change the description as well? Or is it a bug? There's a bunch of bugs running wild in here too, like the music stopping out of nowhere, units floating over the pit trap, etc.
It could be a better game if the difficulty wasn't artificially inflated by spamming more units in a second than the player can in 20 and the units and skills were a bit more balanced.
I was immediately attracted to the awesome ascetic Norse aesthetics of the game. Beautiful! I really wanted to like the game because of it's looks and atmosphere, but the more I got into it the more disappointed I got.
First drawback is the lack of a full screen mode and being stuck with the simple windows cursor instead of something thematic like a hammer or sword. This doesn't let the beautiful graphics to reach their full effect.
The second bad thing is lack of story and character descriptions. I wanted to know at least the names of the guy's on my cards and a short one sentence story about them Magic the Gathering style would have been awesome, it's some missed opportunity to create a cool world and mythology that could become trademarks to the author.
However the main problem with the game is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. A strategy game? A collectable cards game? An upgrade game? A clicker? it has elements of all of these, but none aspect is developed to the full, so what the game is - it is a hybrid so artificial that it fails to occupy any natural niche and make sense and fun in any of these ways.
First of all clickers are boring and clicker mechanics should be reserved to specialized games for dull people. Clicker mechanics should not be mixed with any other mechanics. I don't enjoy clicking on the Odin's head all the time, I would rather issue battle orders or just watch the fight and enjoy the aesthetics. Theoretically clicking is not required, but since I know I will earn less for not clicking it seems lazy not to and in result it feels like it's damned if you do and damned if you don't.
As a strategy game this game fails because it is to luck dependent and since spells are a double aged sword they are generally useless, making this just about summoning units in time, pretty basic and not nuanced enough.
As a collectable cards game this game also fails, because you cannot build your own deck, by picking which cards from your collection to use and which to put away. You are just stuck with all the cards you have and the more you have the less likely you are to pick up a good one.
This game would be cooler if there were deck building and some replenishing mana cost of each summon and spell and you should build deck observing balance between costly and strong units and weak and cheap units - summon strong when mana is full, summon cheap when mana is low. Also there could be some different types of damage and resistances so that you ought to summon units reacting to what the enemy summons.
What stars I give for this game is all for the aesthetic only. The game stimulates imagination and dreaming about what it could have been, but what it sadly is not.
Potential. But seems kind of repetitive