Simply as a game, the moment to moment matches are one of the best strategic experiences I ever had in gaming.
You have your deck and your own gameplan, and you're agains someone else with their deck and their gameplan. Who can execute better? Who can make the correct plays? Knowing both your gameplan and your opponent's, and making correct plays based on that knowledge, feels amazing.
The tactile nature of the cards and their spawned minions on the board is a testament to the absurd level of polish that Blizzard can put into a game. This is a freaking card game, and even its sounds design is top-class.
People complain about the dreaded RNG, but the randomness in this game is 100% fun. It's not fun when you lose because of it, but then again nothing that makes you lose is fun. So people who complain about RNG, in my book, are just sore losers. Because at the end of the day, the randomness that's possible to be implemented in this game due to its digital nature is the life and soul of what makes Hearthstone special. It creates moments during matches that no physical card game could ever dream of creating.
If this was the end of my review, it would be a 5-star one and I'd end by saying Hearthstone is almost nothing short of a masterpiece.
But.
It's free-to-play.
Free-to-play games, by their own design, carry inescapable bullshit with them. And Hearthstone is no different. Card packs are nothing but gacha bullshit; grinding for gold if you don't want to spend real money turns a beautiful game into a tiresome second job; trying to keep current with powerful deck strategies at every expansion gets incredibly expensive really fast (I know I've cumulatively spend way more than $60 in this game, and I spend a couple of years completely away from it); and in time you are burdened with the weight of the sunken cost of all the time and/or money you're invested in the game becoming obsolete with new expansions.
In short: Hearthstone is an absolutely incredible strategy card game if and only if you are ok with thinking about it as a subscription game that costs an average of [price of average expansion divided by 3]/month. In this case, you will have fun and the game will be highly enjoyable... until you stop paying.
You have your deck and your own gameplan, and you're agains someone else with their deck and their gameplan. Who can execute better? Who can make the correct plays? Knowing both your gameplan and your opponent's, and making correct plays based on that knowledge, feels amazing.
The tactile nature of the cards and their spawned minions on the board is a testament to the absurd level of polish that Blizzard can put into a game. This is a freaking card game, and even its sounds design is top-class.
People complain about the dreaded RNG, but the randomness in this game is 100% fun. It's not fun when you lose because of it, but then again nothing that makes you lose is fun. So people who complain about RNG, in my book, are just sore losers. Because at the end of the day, the randomness that's possible to be implemented in this game due to its digital nature is the life and soul of what makes Hearthstone special. It creates moments during matches that no physical card game could ever dream of creating.
If this was the end of my review, it would be a 5-star one and I'd end by saying Hearthstone is almost nothing short of a masterpiece.
But.
It's free-to-play.
Free-to-play games, by their own design, carry inescapable bullshit with them. And Hearthstone is no different. Card packs are nothing but gacha bullshit; grinding for gold if you don't want to spend real money turns a beautiful game into a tiresome second job; trying to keep current with powerful deck strategies at every expansion gets incredibly expensive really fast (I know I've cumulatively spend way more than $60 in this game, and I spend a couple of years completely away from it); and in time you are burdened with the weight of the sunken cost of all the time and/or money you're invested in the game becoming obsolete with new expansions.
In short: Hearthstone is an absolutely incredible strategy card game if and only if you are ok with thinking about it as a subscription game that costs an average of [price of average expansion divided by 3]/month. In this case, you will have fun and the game will be highly enjoyable... until you stop paying.