- Our App Army readers take on Zoeti this week
- The game has drastically divided opinion among the group
- Ultimately, it seems that Slay the Spire remains the best choice.
Zoeti is the latest in a long line of deckbuilding roguelites trying to capture the popularity of Slay the Spire. But instead of inventing a bunch of cards, the developers have opted for a normal deck, which means you build combos using poker hands. It's an intriguing concept, but does it work? We handed the game over to our App Army to find out.
Here's what they said:
Abukoff scores
This is very similar to Slay the Spire in many ways. It's a roguelike deck builder where you can choose your path, fight monsters, take occasional breaks, and add cards to your arsenal. The background looks nicely hand-painted and the story is quite interesting. Eventually you'll play through the perspectives of three different characters in story mode, after which you can play through adventure mode, which is less about story and more about pure combat.
I liked the fact that during combat you are presented with poker hand options as different possible combos. This made it easier for me to pull off those good combo attacks. Just for taste, I didn't like some of the slightly childish dialogue in the cutscenes, and sometimes the dialogues went on longer than I liked. But there is a “skip” option, so it wasn't a big deal.
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Overall, it's not a bad deckbuilder. It looks good and has an interesting story and mechanics. I can't say it will turn me away from Slay the Spire, but if that's your style of play and you want to try some variations, Zoeti is a decent version.
My friend Jason Rosner
Zoeti is a new turn-based deck-building roguelite brought from PC to mobile, which I always love to see. Not only does it prove that the developers see a real audience for their games on one of my favorite platforms, but it also adds another quality premium app to an already crowded field of free-to-play titles. Zoeti will undoubtedly be compared to the great Slay the Spire, but it shakes up the formula in the way you use your cards. Essentially, you play cards from your hand and group them into pairs to use various abilities to defeat your opponents.
While the story gets a little tedious to follow, you soon find yourself tasked with defeating evil monsters that have come to your homeland. I enjoyed the hand-painted graphics and the excellent music really adds to the overall feel of the tense battlefield. There is also great replayability with three separate Story Mode campaigns for characters to unlock and Zoeti features a nice play history and an index that tracks your stats, skills, items and accessories. Fans of the genre will definitely want to check this one out!
Torbjorn Kamblad
The gameplay and story are interesting and different from the usual fighting games. It is really fun because of the ways in which the player can switch between characters. It offers a wide range of different characters and abilities. The ability to play different characters does not make it boring to start over again.
There aren't many moments where the tutorial felt pointless. It's clear what the task is and how to proceed. It's efficient to be able to skip dialogues, however, you shouldn't be able to skip dialogues that are crucial to the game. The first few games are tough, and it's generally quite difficult to get a win, even on easy mode and after several games. The graphics are really good, as are the sound effects. Highly recommended!
Roberto Maine
Zoeti is a frustrating Rogue lite that uses cards as a battle mechanic. The setting is fantasy, as you are given trials where you must defeat monsters to win. Each round you are given a random set of cards, which you play to fight each round. Depending on your skill level you can do more damage to opponents if you get pairs of cards or a color.
I guess it's a rogue-lite, but this game is hard from the start and you'll be playing the same trials over and over again, at least you can skip the cutscenes. As you level up you can progress further in the game. Graphically it looks nice, but the animation is very limited and the music is forgettable. If you like this type of game then you'll have a blast, but for me it was too frustrating to be fun.
Eduard Pandel
Zoeti is a fantasy-themed poker RPG. You fight against various monsters using regular playing cards. Each turn, you draw a certain number of cards, and if you get a poker hand, you can play it and deal damage, raise a shield, improve your stats, or lower your enemies' stats. The graphics are nice, the gameplay is basic, and it's fun for a while until you start to notice the lack of balance (it's too random, which means that the cannon fodder enemies can be MUCH stronger than the bosses, and you can't really build exactly the deck you want no matter what you do).
Anyway. If you've never played a roguelike deck builder before and if you like the typical tragic-romance fantasy visual novel stories, this is the game for you. Otherwise, don't get upset: the poker hand gameplay is basic, the writing is average and there's a LOT of it. Worse still, the game hasn't been adapted to mobile devices at all: the font is barely readable on my tablet (and obviously microscopic on my phone), the hotspots are too small (no, I don't have big, fat fingers), the icons are hard to distinguish.
Sorry, but if you ask me to recommend a roguelike deck builder for Android, my answers are still Slay the Spire and Meteorfall.
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