Game: The Amazing American Circus
Genre: Deck Building, Adventure, Simulation, Indie, Exploration
System: Steam (also available for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, GOG, and PS4)
Developer | Publisher: Klabater, Juggler Games | Klabater
Age Rating: US T | EU 12+
Price: UK £14.05 | US $19.99 | EU € 16,35
Release Date: September 16th, 2021
Review code used, with many thanks to The Game Marketer
The Amazing American Circus is a deck-building card game where players have to successfully run a circus business while travelling around the dangerous American Wild West in the 1880s. With a cartoon feel and a cast of misfit characters, the circus will either win players tons of money or will be an absolute disaster.
Gameplay and Story
You play The Amazing American Circus as a young man whose father has just passed away. He left you Jones’ Circus, which is not worth much and is falling to pieces. The main character doesn’t want to bother with his inheritance, but he is convinced by his alcoholic uncle to take the show on the road. The end game is to compete in a Circus contest and win $100,000, or about $250,000,000 in current USD.
So you decide to take the circus on the road, gathering new actors, levelling your current staff, expanding their repertoire by adding new cards to their decks and taking on side quests to capture wild animals and renegades.
A standard circus round plays out like this: Three actors are chosen to entertain the crowd. The crowd will have “attacks” that keep the actors from performing, take away some of their cards, or even taking away their life total. The actors have “entertainment” attacks and defensive moves in the form of cards.
Audience attacks can knock cards from your hand, and you lose the round if you run out of cards to play. You win if the audience members lose all their HP and become “delighted” with the show. There are also special finales that allow players to take away chunks of the audience’s malcontent.
There are tons of in-between show things to deal with as well; players have to feed their troupe in between shows, be careful to avoid the dangers of the roads, and complete side quests to get new finales and misfits. You can also train your actors, upgrade your tents, give gifts or remove curse cards from actors, and do other management duties.
The Pros of The Amazing American Circus
There is a lot to learn and a lot to do in this game. The Amazing American Circus has all sorts of cards, levers, upgrades, and other buttons that need to be pressed to keep the circus running like a well-oiled machine. The actor’s decks need to be upgraded, and certain actors will line up better with certain kinds of crowds based on the actor’s cards.
The artwork, while a little creepy, looks hand-drawn and lends the game a real circus feel. You feel like you are a child again in a Barnum and Bailey’s tent watching a show. The lighting, the colors, the acts, the animals, the costumes, and the music all invoke this sort of magical feeling that brought back some nostalgia from my memories of going to live shows like this in my youth.
The Cons of The Amazing American Circus
Oh, where to start. This game was problematic from the very beginning. The tutorial is so front-loaded that I had a hard time taking all the instructions. A longer, more integrated tutorial would have made the game much easier to get a hold of; as it was, I played through the tutorial twice, played the game for a few rounds, then erased my game and went back and re-did the tutorial. And I still am not fully sure what all the card keywords mean.
Complicated games can be great to learn if the game inches players into it; being thrown into the deep end of the pool and trying to swim in The Amazing American Circus was too much and took away from the overall enjoyment of the title.
The music was so repetitive that I eventually turned it off. The difficulty level of the shows ramped up very hard, very fast to the point where it was deeply problematic. The characters were boring and stereotypical, and some of them ended up being incredibly annoying. And that wasn’t the end of The Amazing American Circus‘ problems.
The glitches were near-constant, forcing me to restart my game several times as the screen froze trying to load whatever cutscene was coming next. Also, there was a very annoying glitch where a card that I was trying to read would only load behind other cards, making it impossible.
That being said, did I mention how creepy and off color this game was? If you don’t like clowns, wind animals forced to do tricks, or people being mocked for looking different in the freak show, you won’t like this game at all. Also, if you don’t like weird and gross stereotypes of Native Americans or slurs about Romani people, you also won’t like this game.
I understand what the developers were going for, naming the Native tribes “Indians” as they would have been called in the 1880s, but there is a reason most people don’t use that type of problematic language anymore. Also, if the devs were aiming for “authentic” 1880s Wild West, there was little research on what the Wild West was actually like.
Conclusion
I did not care for this title. But I feel like most of my ire was centred on the weird Native American folks and the addition of the slur “g*psy.” It’s really easy to just say “fortuneteller” instead of insulting an entire population of humans that have been oppressed for generations.
Also, the tutorial was brutal; with a few changes, this could actually be a fantastic game. It has the makings of an interesting title if there had been just a little more care taken in the execution of the game.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure.
