I play a lot of mobile games, but if you’re a close observer of my gaming habits on iOS, you’ll notice that I spend a lot of time playing on my iPad. There are many reasons for this, but none of them are particularly relevant to this review. I brought this up to point out when I say games like Lost to the swords it’s the reason I started looking for games to play on mobile devices, it comes with an appropriate amount of added weight. This card game is fast, smart, replayable, and feels fresh despite being part of a genre that’s probably oversaturated at this point.
Lost to the swords is a deck-building roguelike dungeon crawler that wastes no time getting noticed. Each dungeon is essentially made up of three different decks: one for your hero, one for enemy creatures, and one for the dungeon itself. After choosing a hero and entering a certain tower, cards from each of these decks are played on a 5×5 grid that creates each individual floor of the dungeon.
Whichever hero character you choose will also be played on the grid, and you can tap on them to move them between empty spaces or cards to interact with them. For your cards, interaction typically means equipping gear or activating spells/abilities, while touching enemies initiates combat. The entire game is turn-based, but each interaction with the cards counts as a turn Lost to the swords both on deck construction and on space management and combat tactics.
In addition to the new mechanics for tab-based navigation, Lost to the swords he also has no qualms about creating unusual cards, items, and dungeon setups. The game’s excellent tutorial stages for each hero type do a great job of showing examples of these interactions and how they can be made the most of. This in turn makes each race feel full of potential to take one or more unconventional paths to victory.
As a quick example, one of my experiences as a mage put me in a situation where I could essentially deal an infinite loop of fire damage to enemies, but to get to that point I had to completely abandon all armor cards and be careful so as not to find myself in the radius of my firestorms. Plus, I only finalized the deck setup around the same time I reached the end of the tower I was fighting, which is another thing worth celebrating Lost to the swords: Its pace is such that you almost always reach the peak of the deck’s strength right around the time you face the boss.
This perfect pacing feels especially satisfying given how easy it is to play and keep track of any given sequence Lost to the swords AND. In addition to having extremely mobile-friendly layouts for both vertical and horizontal play, the game also features useful tools for inspecting cards and undoing accidental moves. The entire game design also has a pronounced tactile quality to the point that it feels like a game you could play with physical cards. There is very little in the way of abstract or hidden mechanics, and things like gear collection, card replacement, discarding, etc. they are constantly shown on the screen so you can always keep tabs on the game’s maintenance (and bend it to your advantage).
Lost to the swords It’s a free to download game, so you can try it out before you decide to pay $4.99 once to unlock the entire experience. Playing for this review, I tried it on both my iPad and my phone and ended up spending a lot more time on it on my smaller device. Something that would be a nice addition to the game would be some sort of iCloud sync so your progress can continue between devices, but given the one-off nature of racing in Lost to the swordsthis is not a big deal.
Just when I think there’s nothing left to explore or discover in the realm of card-based roguelikes, something like this Lost to the swords comes to prove me wrong. Its new approach to deckbuilding and dungeon exploration is as friendly and manageable as it is elegantly designed and carefully balanced.