This is an Early Access Review and as such opinions and scores are based solely on the state of the game at the time of review and subject to change as development progresses leading up to final release.
As a fan of card games for many years ranging from Digimon TCG, Yugioh!, Pokemon, DBZ, Hearthstone and of course Magic the Gathering, it’s safe to say I enjoy almost anything to do with cards and battling with them, so when Prismata, by Lunarch Studios, gave me the opportunity to get sucked into another one, I readily dove in. Prismata had a few years in development after reaching their Kickstarter goal of $140,000 and was released into early-access with a single player campaign and story to accompany it as well as multiplayer. It’s been called a combination of StarCraft and Hearthstone and I really can’t deny that comparison with the time I spent on it.
The campaign that released with Prismata has you defending an autonomous city as a “Swarmwielder”, which is basically a fancy word for drone controller, against crime in the far future. Turns out there isn’t much crime going on in the future, so it’s like having a single cop to make sure nothing bad happens in a city. Of course the autonomous drones around the city go wild and start attacking citizens and basically terrorizing the city. The last time there was any action was over 500 days ago, so as you can imagine, your character didn’t get much use.
The meat of Prismata is the combat using drones and weapons that you build during each battle. You don’t build your deck during the story; it just unlocks a ton of units as you progress and you use the units available to progress. There’s always a solution to the problem at hand using the units you are given, but you can definitely still make mistakes; you’re only human after all. Each turn consists of defending against enemy attacks, activate units to earn their resources and then spend it to buy new ones, either more resource units or combat ones such as infantry or shield walls.
One of the more interesting aspects of the game personally is that anything you don’t activate can’t be used to attack or defend, so you could find yourself sacrificing resource stations just to make it to the next turn knowing you’ve got a giant unit you can complete and knock the opponent out in a single turn. Resource management is key in Prismata, since it isn’t a matter of just building the unit and watching them churn out resources. Due to their ability to also be used in combat you have to really plan your matches out to make sure you don’t overspend or underutilize everything at your disposal and with four resources to keep track of at a given time in later missions it can be daunting.
Even during early access Prismata has a strong online community and after trying some of the multiplayer modes have found them to be the most balanced PvP in a card game you could ever hope for. Since you do not build decks prior to the match start you and your opponent each choose your units from the same pool, so that if you decide not to go for a certain unit it’s all on you and you have nobody to blame but yourself. It’s truly a skill based system with no pay to win. After your matches you can also check out the replay viewer and slow down the action to see what you could have done differently the next time you head into multiplayer, or you could even spectate the person that just beat you and watch them play a few games with other opponents as well. For a Kickstarter game with only $140,000, Prismata comes with all the bells and whistles one would expect out of much bigger strategy games and yet so many are missing.
While there are micro transactions ranging from $5 up to $49 and even higher in some cases there truly is no pay to win, as most of the unlocks are cosmetic such as emotes and unit skins which have no effect on gameplay and only serve to make you and your units stand out that much more when you decimate your opponents.
Overall Prismata has singled itself out as an entirely different kind of card based combat game and manages to keep it balanced and competitive at the same time. Prismata will be unlocking more of the story chapters in the future – Episode 2 arrives in just a few days – and Lunarch Studios has already released the initial introduction story at the time of this writing so get out there and save your city Swarmwielders.
