IHC Game Reviews: Guardian Cross (iOS, iPad)

Well, it’s fair to say that I’ve found my new time sink. Guardian Cross is a collectible card based game developed by Square Enix.

The premise of this title is pretty standard. Start with a selection of base cards, acquire additional cards as you play, level them up to create your deck of 10. If you play Magic: The Gathering, or your a fan of the Culdcept series for consoles, then this game is definitely up your alley. Even if your not, I think you should still take a few minutes and try this out. It’s quite a fun, maybe even addicting, way to kill some time.

So on to the goodies!

GAMEPLAY

The whole idea of GC is building up your deck and leveling your creatures. There are multiple ways to go about this. And after playing for a day or so, I understood that there was an efficient way to go about leveling up. The good thing is that I never felt like I was penalized while I experimented.

The main portion of the gameplay is actually based on single player. You begin with a story mode that puts on a quest. As far as the quest portion is concerned, it’s basically several floors that have a handful of opponents on each floor. They are assigned an alphabetical number that represents their strength (A is the weakest opponent, and they gradually go up in difficulty). Once your first quest is over, it progresses the story and also unlocks side quests. Going through the story mode, I never really felt overmatched, but I had also put a good amount of time into upgrading my characters. During the battles, you don’t really do a thing. Just watch. You can speed up the action, but that’s as far as your input is concerned. Which kind of makes the management side of your deck that much more important.

Now getting those monsters is another part of your journey. There is a part of the game that allows you to spend hunting tickets to boost your deck. This has a two-fold importance. First, the better the monsters you have active, the better the chance you have progressing through the story as well as rising through the Coliseum (which I’ll cover). Second, you can sacrifice extra creatures to level up your active deck.

Now, there are also a couple aspects that I should point out. The multiplayer isn’t what you would necessarily associate with a CCG. But it is an important piece. The most notable is the Coliseum. You enter the arena via tickets you acquire throughout the game. This then gives you a list of 5 user created decks to do battle with. You can pick 3 of those to complete the round of the arena battle. After those battles, you are awarded points (which are used to level up cards) and/or “Magic Stones” which you can apply to a card to boost an ability.

The other aspect of the multiplayer that is worth pointing out is the social button. Here’s where you can add friends and search for others. The big perk about this is when you acquire Silver Slime, you can also friend one. The Silver Slime are unusable in your deck, but really help when you level up your characters. So the more friends you have sharing this creature, the quicker you can level up.

Other than that, there is no head to head (although you can friend battle, which gives you points that can go towards hunting tickets and the like). 

So, pros for this game is that it’s fun, addicting, and the card art is well put together.

My cons are that the story is common RPG fare and it relies on a time base accrual system for battles, so you have to let it recharge over the course of a couple hours. But, in reality, that’s not such a bad thing! 

I give this game 4 and a half out of 5 hearts! 

And if anyone is interested, we’ll both get a bonus character if you enter my invite code : CK32983