Eternal Card Game | a Review
originally published on 13/12/2024;
Hello everyone, I am the eternal G.E.M.Simov, a fellow so steeped in history that I’ve come to share the tale of “Eternal Card Game”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Eternal Card Game (henceforth just Eternal) is a digital card game. It features two modes of play - the first one occurs while using the cards to play, while the other occurs while figuring out in what manner the Player will be using the cards to play, or while obtaining cards to play.
The first mode, the “duel mode”, as I will call it from now on, is relatively simple. It features a two sided board, with the Player’s side facing the bottom of the screen and the enemy’s side facing the top of the screen. There are three important things on each side of the screen - one being the Enemy’s hand, showing how many cards they currently have, if the Player is willing to count them, as well as how much “Power” and how much Health they currently have.
On the Player’s side of the screen are also present their current Health and their current Power, as well as cards in their hand - which are visible. In addition to those things, there is also an “End Turn”, which does just that - ends the Player’s turn. However, it can transform into an “Attack” or “Block” button if the conditions are met.
Now, the goal is to make the enemy’s Health reach 0, while trying to make sure the Player’s Health does not reach 0. To do that, the Player draws a bunch of cards, which are either “Units”, “Spells”, “Relics” or “Power”.
Sigils increase the Player’s Power by 1, though there is another mechanic bound to Power - that being Influence. Cards, aside from Sigils, require Power to play, but they also require Influence. Influence is displayed next to the Player’s Power, and the amount of Influence the Player has is dictated by the number of times a Sigil has been played, though, again, it is dependent on the type of Sigil. There are many types of Influence - such as Shadow Influence or FIre Influence.
Now, Cards display their Power Cost in the upper left corner, and next to that they display their Influence requirement. Cards for which the Player has the Power, but not the Influence, cannot be played. As an example, if the Player has 3 Power, gained by using Fire Sigils, then they have 3 Fire Influence, and cannot play a Card that requires 1 Shadow Influence.
Aside from that, what is shown on a card is either its effect (if it is a Relic or a Spell, as well as if it is a Unit that has an effect) or its Attack and Health (if it is a Unit or a certain type of Spell [Weapon]).
So, with that much known, the rest is simple enough. Draw some cards, hoping that some of them are Sigils and the others are Units or Spells, and try to beat the enemy. Typically, that happens via Units - so how do they do damage to the enemy Player?
Well, when a Unit is played, it cannot Attack (exceptions exist). However, on the next turn, it can be clicked to be marked for Attacking. If the enemy has no Units of their own, or decides to not Block with them, the Attacking Unit will Attack the enemy, doing as much damage to the enemy’s health as the Unit has Attack.
After Attacking, a Unit becomes exhausted - which means it can not Block during the enemy’s turn. Now, if a Unit is selected to Block, it also gets to pick which Attacking Unit’s Attack it will Block. When that happens, the Attack and Health of both Units are measured up - if the Attacking Unit has more Health than the Blocking Unit has Attack, it will survive. If the Blocking Unit has less Health than the Attacking Unit has Attack, it will die.
An Attacking Unit’s Attack can be Blocked by multiple Units. When that happens, the first Block occurs as normal, but for the second Block the Attacking Unit’s Attack is reduced by an amount equal to the first Blocking Unit’s Health. Lastly, in regards to Attacking and Blocking, after it concludes all Units who survived replenish their Health. That means that if an Attacking Unit was Blocked by a Unit with 2 Attack, and the Attacking Unit had 3 Health, the Attacking Unit will have 3 Health for the next turn.
This is spiced up by a multitude of effects - from ones that are always active, so long as the Unit is on the board, to ones that occur once (whenever the Unit is played or whenever the Unit dies) - which can be very powerful or very unimpressive, ranging from restoring 1 Health to the controller of the Unit when it is played to giving its controller 2 Influence or drawing a card.
In addition to those Unit effects, there is also a lot that can change thanks to Spell cards. There are two types of spells - Quick and normal ones. Quick Spells can be used during the enemy’s turn, typically as a reaction to them using a Spell of their own, playing a Unit or Attacking with a Unit. The sheer fact that they can be used during the enemy’s turn makes them incredibly powerful, and then their effects are also quite potent, but so varied that it’s hard to properly encapsulate them in a few examples.
Still, they can prevent an Attack from occurring, they can mitigate a lot of damage, they can undo an effect or they can put a Unit back in its controller’s hand. Alternatively, they can do some damage.
Now, normal Spells come in a large number of different varieties. Some of them are temporary buffs, others are permanent buffs, others yet summon a number of Units, or they interact with Units in some weird and funky way, or perhaps they just do damage, or drawing cards, or adding effects to Units - everything.
Then there are Relics and Relic Weapons. The former are Spell-like cards that, when used, go into play and occupy a small slot on the portrait of the Player or the Enemy, providing a beneficial effect for their controller. They are incredibly powerful and can potentially win a game by themselves - though then almost every other card with an effect is the same.
Relic Weapons are similar to Weapons (which are essentially a type of spell card) that, instead of getting equipped to a Unit and increasing their Attack and Health, are equipped by the Player (or Enemy), allowing them to Attack (dealing damage equal to their Attack). The Attacks these Relic Weapons are used to perform cannot be blocked, but, fortunately, they can only be performed as long as the Weapon has “health”, which is usually either 1 or 2.
With that said, this is pretty much everything that Eternal’s card game offers.
This game has some major issues. Not only is it a phone game that is poorly ported to PC - courtesy of the fact that the game needs to be running so that it can be fully downloaded and installed, which should never happen to a PC game - it also features horrendous practices.
An example would be needing to have an account to play, even if it were downloaded through Steam, and even if, at the start, the option to use one’s Steam Account is selected. Initially, the Player can play with just their Steam account, but as they near the end of the tutorial, they will be asked to make an account, even if they were already using their Steam Account. If they don’t, they can not keep playing - no PvP or PvE is available, and all the rewards from completing the tutorials (which totals at 5 decks) are not redeemable.
So, already the game does not like the Player and wants to do nasty things to said Player. With that first example out of the way, let me introduce the main reason why Eternal is, actually, not a good Trading Card Game - because to obtain cards, the Player needs to spend money, because cards are obtained from packs, and packs can be bought.
To buy a pack, the Player either spends 1000 coins (which are earned through arduous grinds) or 100 Gems. The Gems are the premium currency (that costs real money) and by merit of the sheer fact that the Player can buy packs, which contain cards, with real money, this TCG becomes a pay-to-win mess that also features 0 of the trading aspect of a TCG. What’s quite worse, however, is that mountainous amounts of content - literally every single campaign aside from the tutorial - needs to be purchased.
Either fork up 1000 Gems or, at the very least, 20000 coins. Now, sure, clearing a campaign does grant the Player a few new cards and up to 1000 coins, as well as access to the story of the game, but the sheer fact that the story of the game is walled off behind a steep pay-wall - since 1000 Gems cost 10$, and considering that there are 8 Campaigns that can be purchased, that’s 80$. Well, actually, it would be 70$, because the 10$ Gem pack provides 1100 Gems, not just 1000.
Still, the fact that a large part of the reason to play a card game - the building of a deck - is walled off behind gratuitous amounts unpleasant gameplay (that being playing against other Players who all run Meta decks that win by a landslide and are not enjoyable for the loser), for that is one way of getting coins, which then allows the Player to buy packs. Fortunately, each pack contains 12 cards, so that’s, at least, better than almost every other digital card game on the market.
Fortunately, again, there is a bit more room for opportunity when it comes to the collection aspect of a TCG, though that’s not something immaculate, in all honesty, as most other digital card games also feature that. Regardless, Eternal has another currency - Shiftstone - which is obtained by destroying any cards that the Player has more than 4 copies of. Shiftstone can then be used to make specific cards, but then we come into another issue.
There are 4 card rarities, and the rarer the card that is being destroyed, the less Shiftstone is awarded. Common cards - which are what the Player will, likely, have lots of, award 1 single Shifstone per copy destroyed. Oddly enough, crafting a common card costs 50 Shifstone. Uncommon Cards award 10 Shifstone per copy destroyed, and crafting such a card costs 100 Shifstone, which is a lot more manageable. Then there are the “funky” rarities - rare and Legendary.
A Legendary card costs 3200 Shifstone to craft, so that’s nearly inconceivable unless the Player spends at least 5 hours playing the game constantly, and winning on top of that. Rare cards require 800 Shifstone to craft, and provide 200 Shiftstone when destroyed, which is almost reaching reasonable quantities.
Fortunately, there are more means of getting things than just normally playing. In truth, the way to get things is relatively convoluted, as there are many sources of stuff. First would be leveling up. Whenever the Player makes a deck, that deck will have a main Faction, and whenever a match concludes, the Player will receive experience with that Faction. Leveling up one’s influence awards stuff, such as coins or Shiftstone or even card packs.
Unfortunately, the rate at which one levels up is incredibly odd - the first level requires just one game to level up, but then the second level requires upwards of three, while the third level requires at least five, going up with each subsequent level. Conversely, there is no indication as to how one earns experience, aside from winning a match - as, clearly, that ought to grant a better reward… Right?
Here comes an issue with the game’s Presentation that affects its Gameplay. So much information is left either unavailable or oddly out of the way that it feels as though Eternal does not want its player to know what’s up.
Regardless, leveling one’s Factions can be a source of stuff, even if it starts taking obtuse amounts of time to get through. Another option could be beating a Campaign, but as previously said it costs around 100 times more to get access to a Campaign than what one gets in rewards from it. An alternative would be to do the “Gauntlet”, which is a PvE gamemode in which the Player picks a deck (that can be edited later) and fights a number of progressively harder enemies (controlled by the computer), culminating in a fight against a special enemy with a special effect in play (which could be beneficial for both the Player and the enemy, or it could be beneficial for only one of them).
The more enemies are beaten, the better the rewards the Player gets at the end of a Gauntlet (during which they can lose twice before being forced to end the Gauntlet early, subsequently getting lesser rewards). Those rewards are chests, the same as what one gets from completing a Campaign, and they contain some coins and a card, with sometimes there being a card pack instead of just a card, though the chest would have to be of a very high quality.
Gauntlets get harder and harder with every successful Gauntlet, rising in ranks, so this becomes increasingly more difficult to pull off as time goes on. Another solution to the “I need money” problem are the puzzles that the game features, which are unique situations on the board that require solutions - which solution is always to win within the current round. Those are really neat, as they help the Player learn some things, and also expose the Player to a plethora of cards.
Nicely enough, every completed Puzzle awards a small amount of coins - 20 - and they are some of the most fun a Player can have while playing Eternal, though they run out relatively quickly.
Another solution to the money problem could be playing the Forge mode… Though that requires money to deal with. Forge is like Gauntlet, but instead of picking one of the Player’s own decks, or building a new one out of the cards the Player has, the Player gets to pick 1 card out of 3 options, 25 times, and then uses those 25 cards to fight through the enemies in the Forge. When a Forge run ends, the Player gets to keep those 25 cards, so, in essence, the Player is paying 2500 coins for 25 cards of various rarities. It’s okay.
Now, problems. This game has loads of them - from the obtuse dependence on RNG, rooted in the fact that every deck has at minimum 75 cards and at least 33% of them need to be Sigils, to the fact that the Player needs to draw incredibly well not just in regards to Units and Spells, but also Sigils, through the fact that there is, as usual, monstrous power creep (which means that cards are being introduced by new expansions that are so much better than older cards that there’s no point in using the old cards).
The system of influence that is in effect somewhat helps alleviate the issue of power creep, but not quite. As with most card games, the main problem is always the dependence on RNG, which makes it nearly unbearable to play in many cases, because if the Player does not get the perfect hand on turn one, they will start losing very confidently almost right away.
Another issue with this game, which could be tied to its Presentation, is that EVERYTHING is incredibly slow. There are tons of animations that slowly go over, there are still frames that show up and serve no purpose other than requiring that the Player clicks them, there is nothing in the options that allows the Player to speed things up, and most egregious of all is that, whenever the Player attempts to “Retry” a Puzzle or a fight in a Campaign, they have to:
Watch their portrait explode and wait for the frame saying that they have lost show up;
Have the frame saying that they have lost show up and click it to proceed;
Go through a loading screen;
Wait for the animation of the Player and Enemy icons bumping into one another to play;
Wait for the animation of their cards being drawn to play;
And only after that - which takes at least 10 seconds - can the Player actually get to playing the game. It’s even more egregious with Puzzles, but it does not end here. There are multiple design choices that make no sense - such as the fact that when selecting a puzzle, the Player cannot double-click the puzzle to start it, instead needing to click a dedicated “play” button that’s on the other side of the screen. An alternative to that is the fact that the Player cannot open a pack upon receiving it from a chest, the Player needs to navigate through a bunch of menus to even get to being able to open their packs.
Overall, Eternal suffers from the same problems as every other card game that it might compete with. It forces the Player to pay so as to be able to experience anything remotely related to single-player, it forces the Player to pay gratuitous amounts of money, or spend even more ludicrous amounts of time grinding the game out so that they can assemble a collection of cards, and all the while does its best to waste as much of the Player’s time in the most unpleasant manner possible.
If those issues were not present, the game would have still been wracked by troubles - courtesy of the ever-increasing set of cards that are being played around with and the fact that power creep is a factor, as well as the dependence on RNG to make things “work” - but it would have been a lot better than it is currently. 1/3
Presentation
This game sucks as a card collection game, for it fails to display anything properly. Whenever the Player views their cards, they can only do so through either the lens of checking their collection out or through the lens of making a deck. The fact that these options are available is quite neat, but then immediately everything goes crashing down when the Player starts looking for cards that are not owned by them.
Everything that is not owned is grayed out - including some very key information, that being the tiny little gem which indicates what the rarity of the card is. When that looks the exact same for every card rarity, with the only difference being its color, and whenever it is grayed out, that means the Player has no idea of whether or not the card in question is common, uncommon or rare. Fortunately, there are two special rarities that have funky visual artifacts that float around the gem and maintain their colors, so there are only three rarities to worry about…
Actually, no. There are also some cards that, for whatever reason, have differently shaped gems attached to them, even though those cards can be of any rarity, which makes it even more mind-boggling when it comes to figuring out what everything is. That inconsistency is problematic, but it goes along quite well with the rest of the game’s inconsistencies.
There is a very real hiccup that occurs during the game’s Presentation of its Story. While this is related to both, I will say that it affects the Presentation more - as sometimes, during the tutorial, certain bits of dialogue - which are the one of the two ways of getting any story - will be cut off by other bits of dialogue or, even worse, by the narrator explaining the game. It works both ways - a bit of the game’s dialogue can cut off the tutorial, or the tutorial can cut off the dialogue. That’s quite dreadful.
What else could I say? The card art is decent, though there are some exceptionally caricature-esque shapes - mainly jawlines that look like bricks. The environments in which the card matches take place are all very samey, though they, too, look decent. The spell effects, visually, are also decent, though there is nothing overwhelmingly engaging.
In regards to the way Units Attack, there is a lot left to be desired, as the only thing that really changes depending on the Unit’s Attack Value is the amount of time it winds up its attack. Unfortunately, there is very bad hit feedback as a result of that.
Sound-wise, though, the game is very good. The voice acting is quite pleasant, though there is a limited amount of it. The sound effects are good, and the musical tracks are also satisfactory. Unfortunately, though, the grunting and groaning that the humanoid units do becomes grating relatively quickly, as rather than having a statement whenever they attack or get killed, they just let out a battle cry or a battle moan.
The means through which the story is presented is also quite quaint - there being comic strips at the start and end of campaigns and, in between them, stills of Characters over whom someone talks. It is not bad, but it could have been better.
Unfortunately, the most overwhelming part of Eternal is the User Interface, and just how dreadful it is. Everything glows - but that, which glows, is always related to stuff that the Player can spend money on. The special element in the UI that shows how many packs the Player has glows whenever the Player has packs that can be open. The special element in the UI that shows how many Shiftstones the Player has glows constantly.
Half the special bundles that can be purchased, which are present on screen in the “home menu”, through which everything is accessed, glow. There are countless calls to action urging the Player to do things - such as register if they haven’t.
Overall, it is passable. It is okay, it is decent, but there’s so much that could have been done a lot better that I’m almost uncertain about this score. 2/3
Story
The story of Eternal is told through Campaigns that the Player plays through. They start off with a comic strip and are then followed by a voice-over occurring over a slightly animated image of a Character. Then, there are brief bits of text that are read out loud to the Player in between matches, during which matches the Player’s Character and the Enemy exchange a few bits of dialogue. The conclusion of the campaign is another comic strip (that is voiced over).
Additionally, more story can be experienced in the “Chapters” gamemode, which, much like the Campaigns, costs money to play.
The fact that the story is gated off behind large multitudes of hours of grinding or real money is atrocious and takes away from any enjoyment that the story could otherwise provide. However, the story itself is not something too exceptional - the king has died, leaving the throne empty. His heir does not want the throne, but his bastard does, however he cannot claim it due to lack of proof that he is, actually, the king’s bastard. Rebellions brew and secrets start unraveling, and there is a small amount of intrigue to be experienced.
However, the medium through which the story is conveyed limits it tremendously. Aside from having five lines of dialogue per campaign, most Characters are not even actual Characters and are, instead, just entities that carry some shard of the story with themselves. Unfortunate as it is, the story is not very coherent. Things happen, characters interact with others, but it is all so well situated on the surface that there is absolutely nothing beneath - there is no depth to be found.
There is something - a massive world into which a lot of effort has gone - but the stories through which it is explored are middling at best and simply baffling, in the least pleasant manner possible, at worst. Overall, it’s less enjoyable than it is not. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? No, it does not get the Legendary Point. There is something buried beneath the horribly User Unfriendly UI, there is something beneath the clunky Presentation that makes one want for more, there is something under the piles of micro-transactions that are required to reach it… But it is not exceptional. 0/1
Conclusion
4/10. Eternal Card Game is a digital card game that’s almost done by the book. There are some interesting things to look at, and I might be willing to recommend it to fans of card games, but I’d definitely urge anyone not clinically addicted to that type of game to try it.
In the bag of mediocrity it goes, so steeped in dirt that it was almost worthy of the wall of shame. Alas, it was too middling for that.