Things are bad. Monstrous colossi stride the earth, leaving naught but death and destruction in their wake. In the face of these awe-inspiring behemoths, only you have the skills and training required to take them on—if you fail, your people are surely doomed…
No, I’m not talking about that game. No, not that one either. Instead, we’re looking at Wraith & The Giants, a different card game about climbing and killing skyscraper-sized beasties. It’s a fairly novel premise, but several games in this hyper-specific genre have been released in recent years, so what does this iteration bring to the table?
Wraith & The Giants is a boss-battling card game for 1 player. Each individual boss takes about 30 minutes to fight.
Gameplay Overview:
Each session, your Wraith faces an enormous elemental giant, which you must defeat before it reaches town and wreaks havoc. On your turn, you play two cards, one to each row next to your player board. Each card has one or more actions printed on it, which let you move around the giant’s body or make various attacks. Most of these actions are powered by specific icons on the side of every card. As the game goes on, the cards played to each row generate more and more icons of each type, making future actions stronger and stronger.
After playing and resolving your cards, the giant takes its turn. The giant’s possible action space is represented by a row of five cards, each with a specific nasty effect, an area where that effect takes place, and some miscellaneous symbols. The leftmost card of the row always triggers (striking your Wraith if you end your turn in that area) and is then discarded. After that, a new card is added to the end of the row, and any other card with a matching symbol also triggers, potentially causing multiple attacks in a single round.
Each boss card also describes a specific weak point. You can only do damage to the boss while at one of these weak points, and damage is added to the specific card describing that point. If the amount of damage meets or exceeds the Wound Limit for that card, it gives the boss a scar, preventing the card from attacking you and bringing you closer to victory. You win if you can completely reduce the boss to zero health, or scar it enough times to bring it down.
Game Experience:
Wraith & the Giants has some neat stuff going on. The two card rows you build over the course of the game create some interesting decisions around potential output and necessary flexibility, and the row of giant cards give you the opportunity to get out of the way of most attacks, but with a constant hint of danger if you aren’t extremely cautious. It’s not revolutionary, but there are enough ideas here to create a decent solo game with a great theme. Unfortunately, Wraith suffers from a severe lack of focus, which undermines its potential at every turn.
See, this boss-battler is also a kind of campaign game. The three playable characters are actually the same person at different stages in her life, and the “full” game involves playing through all four bosses with each character, from Young to Elder. It’s an interesting narrative, but the game does not commit to it in any way. The older Wraiths don’t really play differently; they just have additional rules and abilities. Add to this the lack of actual campaign mechanisms (you can read through a story booklet, but it’s overlong and underwhelming), and the “campaign” just feels like an unbelievably long tutorial for playing the Elder Wraith.
The moment-to-moment gameplay then suffers from a lack of cohesion and balance. The tying of damage to specific weak points is a neat concept, for example, but there’s no real incentive to spread damage across multiple weak points, which means you don’t actually care about movement. Instead of zipping around the map, you spend most turns in the same general area, hitting the same point over and over until it breaks. Once the movement falls apart, the card play also loses its luster, with only a few card symbols actually mattering towards victory.
Finally, the individual bosses leave a lot to be desired. Though visually quite distinct, each giant feels mechanically indistinguishable from its sistren and brethren, with only the tiniest gameplay differences between each one. The system of boss cards is also less interesting than it first seems, partly due to the randomness of attacks, and partly due to the Rage system. Every attack you avoid actually pushes up a Rage meter, which makes the next attack more punishing. It’s a strange mechanical consideration that turns every successful dodge into a pointless gesture, rather than a cinematic escape.
Final Thoughts:
Wraith & the Giants would have benefited from a little more development and a lot more focus. The core mechanisms are promising, but they also feel too underdeveloped to support more than a few plays, and everything around that core actively detracts from the experience. The campaign completely homogenizes the playable characters without adding anything of interest, and the near-identical boss encounters reveal how unstable the underlying design is. When you strip away the bells and whistles, this is a boss battler with one hero, one boss, and one good idea—a tough sell even before you compare this to other games in its genre. There’s still some fun to be had here, but not really enough to justify seeking it out.
Final Score: 2.5 Stars – A melange of decent ideas, taken out of the oven too soon and adorned with pointless decorations.
Hits:
• Solid artwork
• Card play is simple and (theoretically) interesting
• Interesting narrative conceit
Misses:
• Almost no variety in characters and bosses
• Campaign is practically non-existent
• Boss attack system feels random and arbitrary
• Card play is diminished by lack of urgency
