A fast-playing, auto-battling, deckbuilding card game that lets you unearth devious combos to kill robot-hating aliens from outer space? I’m in, obviously.
Topdeck Automat is primarily a deck building game. I think of these as “Slay the Spire“-type games, but the concept goes way back to the tabletop game Dominion. Learning which cards to upgrade and which to discard is key to forming the combos that will win these types of game.
This is basically Topdeck Automat, except that in this game, deck building is your only activity — each battle plays out automatically. Your cards are shuffled and played one at a time, and when you run out, they are reshuffled and played again.
You will not survive until the end of the invasion with a weak deck. Buy wisely when you get the chance.
Winning the game
You are an A.C.E. (Automatic Card Ejector), a robot that was hacked by the Resistance to attack invading aliens with cards they print. This is fine; this is how aliens fight, too, they know this fight.
The game is played out over a period of ten days, and in each day are three battles, so thirty battles for a full game loop.
Your starting cards are very basic. A couple of attacks, some that build shields (normal attacks damage shields before they damage you), some that heal, and these will get you started. Several times each day, you will have the option of choosing or buying new cards with a much, much wider range of effects. Based on what the luck of the draw gives you, you’ll begin to figure out how you’re going to play the run.
You might, for instance, focus on overwhelming heals or shielding, or perhaps attacking with such force that they can’t respond. My winning runs, however, have been focused on stopping the enemy — slowing them, freezing them, loading them up with unresistable and unshieldable corruption. One run you might focus on crits; the next, you aren’t getting good attack cards, and so you focus on shielding so much that they mostly can’t damage you at all.
You earn currency by winning fights, “scrap”, that you can spend on new passive buffs, new cards, or trades taking a card or buff you own and giving you a new one in its place. Between certain battles, you’ll also have a chance to choose enhancements for your cards.
Cards have a cost called “load” to play. The total load of all your cards influences your card draw speed; typically, high load cards have a dramatic impact on the game, but you do have to balance that against how fast you can play. But then, maybe you have a lot of cards with haste, so it doesn’t matter so much.
The game advertises finding the broken combos, and when the enemy is frozen and can’t do anything while they lose health due to runaway corruption and dies before they can even do one attack? Feels good.
The game isn’t that original. I think I have three or four card-based deckbuilders in my Steam library. What sets Topdeck Automat apart from those is the speed. This is not a game that is going to take you a long time to win or lose. I felt sure I was going to lose my winning game, at first, as my opponents tended to have a lot of shielding and me without many cards to delete it. But then I started making enhanced freezing cards, which made it easier to survive enemies that didn’t use shielding but hit like a truck instead. If they can’t move, they can’t hit. I had barely any shielding, barely any healing, but I had a LOT of freeze and slow and my few attack cards hit HARD. Enhancements had them often hitting more than once, even.
Mr. Toad, boss of the demo, went down hard.
It’s a fun game! I’m looking forward to playing again when they have another playtest.
Just a small, final rant about roguelikes. I take issue with calling this game a “roguelike”. Every mention calls it that, probably the developers call it that. But is it turn based? Do you move from room to room? Do you drop your stuff when you die? Are the maps randomized? Do you get to fight your own ghost? Are you a huge “@” sign? In what possible way is this like the game of Rogue? Right now, as far as I can tell, any game where you can arrive at a “Game Over” screen is a roguelike.
So, bear with me, but I asked ChatGPT. It said,
A roguelike is a game built around repeated runs through procedurally varied challenges, where failure resets most progress but each run meaningfully changes the next.
Ah, okay. Well, in that case, Topdeck Automat isn’t even a roguelike by that definition, as each run seems to be entirely separate from the next with nothing carried over from game to game. At least, not yet.
Note: I didn’t notice until I started writing this review that there were additional bots beside the starting one available. If they were unlocked from my first few playthroughs, then I guess that would be a point for them being a “roguelike” as the term is currently used.
As someone who’s not only never played the original Rogue but has pretty much never played any “roguelike”, or at least not knowingly, I’d have to say ChatGPT’s definition is almost word for word what I’d have come up with. I very much doubt more than a few percent of gamers who use play the games that get called roguelikes even know there was a game called Rogue that supposedly started it all.
I mean, most MMORPG players apparently believe World of Warcraft was the first MMO. Or they used to. I bet nowadays half of them haven’t even heard of WoW.
Also, someone get those damn kids off my lawn!
Should point out, by that definition, the game Rogue wasn’t a roguelike. Every new game of Rogue started out at zero. The names and descriptions of all the items were randomized. Each level had nine areas, and there were 50 levels. Things moved when you moved. Death was game over and you dropped stuff where you stood.