Game: Elemental Exiles
Genre: Deck-Building, Roguelite
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Final Game Studio
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $TBC | UK £TBC | EU € TBC
Release Date: August 20th, 2024
A review code was used, and many thanks to Final Game Studio.
Elemental Exiles is a deckbuilding Rogue-like, a lot like Slay the Spire. So, let’s dive into the pros and cons of this new deckbuilder and how it compares to similar titles.
Gameplay in Elemental Exiles
I’ve played a lot of deckbuilding games. Just for LG, I’ve played a bunch, including Floppy Knights and Beecarbonize. I’ve even gotten to play some Rogue-like deckbuilders, like Castle Morihisa. On top of that, I have spent several hundred hours with Slay the Spire, so I know a little bit about deckbuilders and card games. So let’s see how Elemental Exiles lines up gameplay-wise to these.
Much like other similar titles, you start as a hero with a standard deck. Elemental Exiles has several more heroes to choose from, and each has a different starting deck and schtick. I played through most of Act 1 with several of these heroes, and they all moved through the game in similar ways. Here’s how it all works:
- You are on a map, and you can choose any space within one of any unlocked spaces you have been on.
- Tiles are things like Combats, Shops, Bosses, and Events. At shops, you can buy things; at combats and bosses, you fight one or more enemies, and events make something good or bad happen to you, but it’s kind of random.
- Most of what you’ll come across are battles, and you have to use your deck against the enemies. When you have won, you earn coins and a new card for your deck.
- With your new card added to your deck, you now have a slightly better deck to take to the next enemy.
In this way, Elemental Exiles plays a lot like others of its kind on its face. But under the surface, it’s made many interesting and risky changes to the status quo, and some of them paid off handsomely.
Elements, Light, and Dark
Each of the heroes starts with different decks, and several of those decks are element-themed. There are three elements in Elemental Exiles: Fire, Water, and Nature. Each of these elements is weak against one of the others and strong against the remaining element. When you play a card, it will be one of the elements or non-elemental, and it will deal that type of damage or give you that type of block. This means that if you are dealing with fire damage, it will do more damage against a water shield than it will against a nature shield.
This makes calculating what’s going to happen next a little bit more interesting and a little less cut and dry. It’s an interesting addition, changing up the idea of straight-themed decks. Each of the heroes has access to all three elemental cards and non-elemental cards without any tailoring for each deck that I saw.
On top of this, Elemental Exiles also has Light and Dark points. Many of the cards give you either dark points or light points, and there are positives and negatives to having either stacked up on your character. So not only do you have to keep track of the elements and their weaknesses, but you need to keep an eye on Light and Dark piling up on your hero, too.
Pros of Elemental Exiles
Elemental Exiles has some things that make it pretty unique. Unlike Slay the Spire, Elemental Exiles kind of lets you wander around the map wherever you want to go. There’s not a strict line of two or three things you have to choose from; you can jump around and interact with whatever you want, revisit shops, and change direction on a dime. It makes for an interesting difference; you can choose to meander around, or you can b-line for the next story beat, which is circled in yellow on the map. It’s pretty neat that you can revisit old stores, grind for money, or just go to the next quest as soon as possible. I like this a lot.
There are a lot of really interesting interactions between some of the more unique cards, too; water cards seem to focus a lot on defence, though not exclusively, while fire cards are more about damage, again, not exclusively. But there are some water cards that interact seamlessly with nature cards and vice versa, and some non-elemental cards that play really well with ones that give you light points.
And it’s not just the interactions on the cards that are interesting; the art is nice, too. A lot of work was put into making all the looks and movements of the cards feel really good. There’s a lot of polish in the way the cards are drawn, move through the screen, and are used and discarded. It feels really good to play, and it sounds really good, too. There’s some background music and good sound design that is present by not being intrusive, that matches with the setting and doesn’t pull you out of the story you are building.
As you wander around the gorgeous map, it will be a long time before you get repeat events, and all the nodes are randomized. It’s neat that things are all a little different each time and different for each of the heroes and their stories.
Overall, there is a lot to do, and it has the setup for good replayability. I saw a whole bunch of different kinds of enemies with different powers, like poison, water enemies, and things like that. Each had its own little movements and attack cycles that looked and felt real enough.
There seem to be 12 unlockable characters, and they all have unique looks, themes, and decks. Each hero has a unique story, and they all seemed interesting, and they came in a variety of shapes, races, etc. I didn’t unlock all of them, but I know how to unlock them because the opening menu where you choose your character shows you exactly how. It’s a neat way of making sure you get all the heroes you want to play. And you can also pick from four difficulty levels, making it even more customizable.
The Cons of Elemental Exiles
I didn’t run into any bugs while playing Elemental Exiles except one, but it really locks up your game, and you have to restart and reload your save. If you get an event with the Hypnotic Artifact and select the second option, which deals 11 damage to you and gives you a choice from three cards, it soft locks the game.
However, the biggest issue I had with Elemental Exiles was its durability system. There is a little number at the bottom of each card, and once it runs out, that card is destroyed. A lot of cards that are added to your deck mid-battle only have one durability, like wounds or poison cards from enemies. But every single card has durability, and it makes getting into battles really, really not worth it. If I only have three durability left on my best card, I just have a dead weight in my deck while I clear trash.
The durability isn’t interesting, it isn’t fun, and it doesn’t add anything worth having into a Rogue-lite deckbuilder like Elemental Exiles. I can’t decide why they would have chosen to do such a thing, especially since the repair items are so rare in the game, but I can’t fathom it. After you defeat the first boss, on the way to the second boss, basically all your cards you started, the game will be dying. This, coupled with the bad RNG on good cards, makes for terrible late-game battles that just aren’t fun to play.
Conclusion
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Elemental Exiles. There are a lot of cool things that the developers added to the Rogue-like deckbuilder that were fun and interesting, but there were just too many downsides. I love the way this game looks, and I like a lot about it, but there were just so many issues that made it less than fun to play. I’m pretty torn about Elemental Exiles because I love so many parts of it. However, the durability system and the card RNG are hard to overlook. I’m just not sure what to think about it.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure.
Do you like our content? Support LadiesGamers on Patreon!
Check out our Tiers and Benefits and join us.