Since combat is real-time, the tricky part is trying to use your cards on the fly. Tabletop CCGs allow players the luxury of inspecting cards to understand their capabilities, and RTS games usually limit their units to a handful of recognizable archetypes. Unless you can memorize the abilities of all 200 cards, you may not understand why your opponent’s units keep gaining health or why all of your towers are mysteriously exploding until it’s too late. You can read the details of enemy units, but that requires a few seconds of clicking and reading while your troops bleed out.

The 1-on-1 and 2-on-2 duels are incredibly easy to set up from the main lobby of players, and are the unquestionable highlights of BattleForge. As players clash over Power Wells and Monuments and establish lines of offense and defense, it becomes clear which players know how to manipulate the intricacies of their decks, and who is thoughtlessly clicking cards and sending units to be slaughtered. There is simply no substitute for the conscious ingenuity and improvisational tactics of a skilled, human opponent.

In single-player and co-op matches (from 2-12 players), the A.I. often takes lazy and formulaic approaches that turn strategies into a useless afterthoughts. Winning many of the battles is a straightforward matter of capturing Power Wells and Monuments, waiting until you have enough juice to call every card into play, and storming the enemy camps. Having a strong deck and the vigilance to destroy healers and defensive towers first are important, so my description is a bit oversimplified, but not by much. This really is a shame considering how much care obviously went into creating a world populated with detailed histories and heroes.

Whether or not you enjoy BattleForge depends largely on how much of a purist you are. It has the cunning and diverse combos of a CCG, but not the pacing for patient maneuvers. It has the tactics and resource-management of RTS, but not the stability in foes to plan for every possibility. If you can straddle both schools of thought, BattleForge is a uniquely enticing action game with unprecedented levels of customization, and it’ll only get better with future expansions.

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