I’ve been a big fan of collectible card games ever since my friends and I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh! at school and in the public library. I developed an inch for the genre that just doesn’t seem to be satisfied no matter how many times I scratch it. Enter Cross Blitz, a new digital card game that absolutely ticks the boxes for great characters, interesting thematic, and fun mechanical combos. It hits my favorite aspects of TCGs are collecting cool-looking characters, building themed decks around them, and then devising fun strategies to achieve victory with, in that order.
While engaging in collectible card battles is Cross Blitz’s main gameplay loop, RPG and roguelike mechanics are baked deeply into the experience, allowing for a much more versatile card game that emphasizes experimenting with mechanics and collecting your favorite cards, instead of just rushing for the best meta deck available. Having a deck that’s ‘meta’ or powerful isn’t as important to me as getting to see cool pieces of art and initiating fun combos, even if these combos don’t necessarily guarantee a win.
Right off the bat, when you enter Cross Blitz you’re not going to immediately find any multiplayer mode. At least, that was the case in the early access version I played for this review, and could easily change in the future.
I only point this out because the single-player focus of the game opens it up to the aspect I find the most fun in these games: Fun, diverse, and varied deck combinations. You’re free to experiment more with the cards because there’s no defining meta to balance around when there’s no PVP. Not having to balance around player vs player matches also allows the game to give you some pretty crazy, fun modifiers to the standard deckbuilding mechanic. The deckbuilding is something I’ll get into more when I talk about the Tusk Tales mode.
Opening Cross Blitz, the first thing I did was enter the Fable game mode which is an RPG-like campaign where you play through the story of one of a handful of characters. Lion-Pirate Redcroft seemed to be the game’s chosen protagonist, but I immediately jumped into the campaign of Violet, the so-called pop-star bard which is a concept I immediately found super endearing.
Violet’s story seems to pick up some time after Redcroft’s, and sees her chasing an imposter doppelganger using her identity to spread misinformation and anger throughout the band scene. The chase for the appropriately named Shadow Violet sees you interacting with a huge host of interesting and surprisingly well-fleshed-out characters. Talking to said characters and learning their backstories makes it feel all the more special when you later add their iconic cards to your deck, giving some extra special meaning to what would otherwise just be playing cards.
The Fable mode takes an RPG approach to deckbuilding by locking certain cards behind recipes you must discover and then craft with the materials you earn. Adding a single copy of a card can be a demanding quest on its own, and thus feels all the more rewarding when it makes your deck synergy stronger. Other cards are locked behind experience points. By leveling up you can access cards and perks in a four-pronged skill tree representing different deck archetypes.
For Violet, I played her somewhere in between two of her archetypes. My deck mainly consisted of her Groupie cards, allowing me to fill my board with low-cost minions and then later buff them to overwhelm my foe with numbers. I also threw in some synergy with her Draconic spells, which allowed me to buff damaging spell cards to clear out the enemy’s board while drawing new cards of my own. Since most of the cards I would draw were the aforementioned low-cost minions, I was able to play a good balance of keeping my foe from filling the board while filling mine without using up too much mana in the process.
As interesting as the story and characters in Fable mode were, the main attraction for me was Cross Blitz’s roguelike Tusk Tales mode.
This game mode trades many of the game’s RPG mechanics and its story for a roguelike map crawler, where you build your deck and unlock game-changing relics by fighting across an increasingly difficult tree of card battles. The path is randomized each run, with different relics and cards to add to your deck to make for a different experience each time.
One particularly interesting run I had in Tusk Tales saw me building a deck focussed around the Canon archetype, a pirate-esque deck synergized around firing canons to widdle down your opponent’s health and board. This culminated in a battle against the run’s final boss, who used pretty much the same strategy, seeing us basically broadside each other with as many canons as possible.
When you lose a run (like I did there) you gain currency based on your progress used to upgrade or unlock new commanders to take into future runs. The sheer amount of available (but locked) commanders surprised me, and I’m determined to eventually unlock every single one of them.
What Tusk Tales really showed me was the astonishing variety of cards available in Cross Blitz, spanning across different archetypes and themes such as Pirates, Draconic, Demons, etc. I highly doubt I saw them all in my time with the game, as new cards and synergies continue to sprout up and surprise me. My particular favorites of these cards were anything fantasy or forest-related, with an armored fairy holding a special place in my heart.
I struggle to think of many flaws with Cross Blitz. Performance-wise, I noticed the game started to load a bit slower as my deck got more complicated. My deck was filled with tons of different modifiers from the roguelike augments I was picking up which led to some slower processing times for the computer. This ended up leading to longer turns, but not so long that it bothered me.
One small area I think the game could improve on is in ending battles. Currently, if you deal or take damage that drops a player’s health bar to zero or below, the game will continue to process the rest of the attack turn instead of simply ending the match there. This is a small flaw, and at worst it just leads to you having to watch a bit more animation than is necessary. It would be nice however to share the few extra seconds it takes for a turn to end when I know nothing that happens next will have any impact on the already decided game.
Usually, when I play games like this, I have to have YouTube on in the background to keep my ADHD-addled brain from feeling understimulated. However, Cross Blitz’s soundtrack was phenomenal, and while I’m sure it was the game’s highly engaging gameplay that kept me focused, the fantastic music certainly helped. The soundtrack jumps anywhere from rock tracks to jazzy beats, with a vibe that overall reminds me of some Japanese card games I would play on the PS2 when I was younger. Oh, and there’s an abundance of pirate-sounding tracks as well.
A review of Cross Blitz wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the wonderful art present throughout the game. Fantastic pixel art portraits of the game’s playable characters and many, many cards truly bring your deck to life. Cards even change appearance to represent buffs, and unique effects such as cannonball fire are fully animated clashing and burning with other cards.
As great as the art is, I can’t help but nitpick some of the framing choices. Some characters look a little awkward in their little card frame, despite looking great in an expanded view. I would have liked to see more backgrounds present in the card art as well, with the majority of cards simply sitting on a mono-color backdrop. Again, nitpicks, but ones I think would go a long way to making an already good game all the more enjoyable.
When it comes to TCGs, Cross Blitz stands out for its RPG mechanics, captivating characters, and emphasis on mechanical diversity and freedom. With a stellar soundtrack and a wealth of creatively designed and visually impressive cards, Cross Blitz isn’t just a card game; it’s a deckbuilding journey that continually surprises and delights.
Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC preview copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Cross Blitz is available on Steam.