Tainted Grail: Conquest – Review

What is Tainted Grail: Conquest about?

Whoa, a game that made me want to play it, right after seeing 20 minutes of Gameplay! Tainted Grail: Conquest is a very visual appealing deck building, RPG and rogue-like.

You life as it was, is no more. You awake on hearing the voice of a goat person? Strange monsters are conjured and now you have to fight? Whats happening? Lets explore! And that exploration is kinda unique for a card based rogue-like. You can travel through the land and decide which fight to take and when. But if you take too much time the Wyrdness will come get you. A mist that will not let you escape.

Summary:

• 9 different classes
• 460 cards and 340 passive skills
• great voice over and soundtrack
• fresh take on a deckbuilding rogue-like with through an open world

How to play Tainted Grail: Conquest?

The game starts with a character creation screen. The options are a little bit limited, but the choices for tattoo’s are quite cool. After our character has been created, we are thrown into the lore of the game. Everything vanished and suddenly a goat talks with us? That’s kinda confusing… I don’t want to spoil to much 😉

After some introductions and some best left unanswered questions, we are thrown into a fight against a huge knight. Our meager 100hp against a giant witch 1250hp! We learn the basics of combat. That we have to manage energy, card draw, blocks and attacks. Blocks will prevent 1 hit instead of a fixed amount of damage. Attacks could inflict ailments like stun, vulnerable or armor reduction. If the enemy has -10 armor, we do 10% more damage. The same is valid for our self. As we fight through this tutorial, we get more information. One of the last information is that each character class does have an ultimate attack. And the class we’re playing, the Wyrdhunter, can call an ethereal creature and deal damage. It is charged by inflicting hits onto enemies. So the more we hit, the more damage that ultimate attack does. So in order to win, we have to combine our turn with blocks with attack combos. Our second Wyrdhunter ability is, that if we hit the enemy 4 times, then we inflict Vulnerable for 1 turn. That means that we deal double damage. So in order to win, we stack vulnerable, a fully charged ultimate attack and an additional ability card for extra 100% damage. And then BAM! We win the tutorial 😀

Pretty easy? Nope, that was a hard fought fight. It was only scripted until a certain point, so it is not 100% that one can win that fight. But even if you lose, that just means losing the tutorial and missing an achievement. The story still continues.

After the tutorial we’re thrown into a village and our first area. Currently there is only one resident. He tells us our next target and purpose. To find others, invite them and beat the area boss. He also functions as our first shop. He sells us Healing Mixtures. Right after we tried to leave the village, the goat does appear again. He tells us, that there is a dangerous mist outside. Its called the Wyrdness and we should stay long in it without a Wyrdcandle. That candle is quite important to block negative effects from happening within the Wyrdness. If you run low on light, you can get a really bad card at the start on your turn. If you have high light you get a good card. I haven’t see yet that running on low or no light, does affect the battles. So managing the light is just another thing to care about.

As we fight through the new monster packs, we will get a level up soon. A level up does not increase our stats, but it gives us 2 things. First a choice of 1 out of 3 cards. After that we can choose 1 passive out of 3. The passive will be a background effect that will be always active. The new card will be added to you deck and can be played as usual.

Furthermore we will find events on the map, where we can find different things. A milestone as example gives us 1 out of 3 choices. We can banish the Wyrdness around this Milestone, get a Wyrdcandle or get a buff for the next battle. Pretty good. We’re also meeting people. Some have gone mad while wandering the Wyrdness, some others where “teleported” like us. The Blacksmith is one of them. He is the first resident we can talk to into joining us. He also gifts us some runestones and explains what they are. The thing is that there are no special weapons or armor for this game, but instead you can embed these runestones to get power ups. Runestones are our equipment and we do have 2 weapon slots and 3 armor slots. But currently we can only use 1 weapon and 1 armor slot. But still we get a nice damage and heal bonus out of these.

While continuing our journey we almost die, get healed up by a cat called Alice and then we face the area boss. The Awakened Golem is a hard nut to crack. Lets just say that we won by a small margin and continued our run. If you want to the full run, the VOD is down below. It was a great journey for the first run and i really did enjoy it.

But all rogue-likes will finally come to an end. We died to the second area boss and now we can see what happens. We are meeting Death who apparently plays chess?! After some story we are presented with a points screen and our unlocks. So with these points we did unlock cards, passives and our second class. The next class we can play is the Summoner. How he will be played? We will see.

It looks like in order to “win” the game, we have to:

• Recruit 7 villagers
• Find the True Bossfight
• Save 13 souls from corruption

Its a long way to go and i’m happy to be on this journey.

My Conclusion

Its such a great game, explanation is easy, visuals and soundtrack are great and the complexity is just right. For now 😀

I’m really looking forward in playing more of Tainted Grail. A huge recommendation from me!

Where to buy?

• HumbleBundle (Affiliate Link)
• Steam
• GOG

If you like this you might like

Well, if you have already played Tainted Grail: Conquest, and you are now looking for another game similar to it for you to play, I am here to help you with that! I will now share with you some games that might fill the void that Tainted Grail: Conquest might have left you with:

• Slay the Spire (Affiliate Link)
• Monster Train

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