I must say I got easily intrigued by the promise of Nadir. It had everything that checks all the boxes for me, at least on the surface. Grimdark aesthetics? Check. Hand drawn art of gnarly demons? Super Check. A Roguelike Deck-Builder with a promise of unique combat mechanics? Absolute turbo-check! I was simply put, riveted with excitement to finally get my hands on it, and with that trembling anticipation I dived into the hellscape that is the city of Nadir, the demonic circles of hell and their iconic devils straight from the Greater Key of Solomon to see what’s what.
And unfortunately, in the very first hour of gameplay I managed to get completely disenchanted, in the most disappointing way possible for a game of this kind – I’ve managed to completely cheese a boss without any prep, without any game knowledge, with barely any unlocks, simply because I scrounged up a painful design flaw that, once found out, rendered the whole combat system mostly too broken to be enjoyed again.
But I am, as usual, getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the good stuff, because it’s not like Nadir is some cheap cash grab with clunk all over the place. The game has a lots of merits, which is why it managed to catch my eye in the first place. The art style is an obvious given worth – sure, not everyone will jive with this sort of aesthetic, but for me it was unique enough, good looking enough and inviting enough to get me into the game by the sheer visuals alone. Denizens of Hell are twisted beings of flesh and sinewy limbs, the colors are great and evocative, well suited to each cardinal sin that they stem from, the variety is cleverly implemented by reusing the core build of a few demon spawn and juggling limbs and other bits around to make each a unique entity. The music is fine, the sounds match what you see on screen well enough and in general, it is a pretty package to dive into.
Then you get into the promised, unique combat system, and even that has a few fun, interesting bits and gubbins going for it. The double card system with the Red and Blue colors that interact with enemy cards, make the combat somewhat cerebral – your opponents don’t really take action, but as you keep tossing attacks their way, as you use up your resources, slowly but surely you start to face the music in their reactions, deciding on your own pace what you will take to the face next; And making sure that you play your cards in a fashion that let you take the bruising without losing your precious life. It’s a clever system, in every way, giving you a lot of options to work around various actions as well as crafting cards, where you have a pretty hefty dose of control of what kind of deck you want to roll with and where your strength will lie. It’s hard to explain without going into details, but it is definitely a fresh system in the genre… However, and this is a big, painful issue, it is not thought out well.
Whatever ingenuity the system brings to the table is quite heavily squandered by either atrocious testing or lack of mathematical scrutiny behind its numbers and interactions. This rendered the game horribly, laughably trivial from the get go, stripping nearly all difficulty from it in the very first hour of play, as I mentioned before? How? Well, let me tell you about a boss of Wrath – Abaddon – with huge HP pool and devastatingly deadly attacks that rapidly grow into one-shot territory he should be a scourge of players, killer of runs, a true boss to test your mettle. However a simple mechanic in the game – Stealth – let you attack any opponents without triggering their reaction whatsoever. That, on itself, isn’t an issue, since you’ll likely have a limited amount of cards with this Keyword in your deck, so sooner or later you’ll run out of them and have to face the music. Right?
Wrong. One of the systems in the game is an ability to redraw and, ultimately, reshuffle your discards into a fresh deck without any limitations. There is, however, a punishment for it – usually opponents will gain some buffs, maybe even deal a bit of damage each time you shuffle. But in case of Abaddon, he does nothing that hurt you. Meaning, that I spend entire combat simply reshuffling my deck to get to my two Stealth attacks to chip him down to oblivion without the boss getting a single ‘turn’, a single reaction. This is applicable to many combat scenarios. Managed to kill Beelzebub on my very first run, playing the game completely blind, without losing a single HP.
Now I could puff my chest, jut my chin and claim I’m some superior gamer specimen, but that would be a complete and utter fantasy – Slay the Spire kick my nards so hard I might’ve cried here and there, for example. Here it’s not a matter of some godly gaming instinct, but simply broken mechanics, which, with ease and contempt, let you skim around combat challenges with laughable ease, stripping the game completely of all thrill. Some would say, gosh, maybe just don’t abuse the system then? Well… The systems shouldn’t be abusable in the first place, especially not in the very first few runs in a game, where steady progression and flow of unlocks should be the key of softening the challenge right?
This was a very disenchanting moment, but alas, wasn’t the only nail to this game coffin. Progression system is seemingly very haphazardly put together and feel both pointless and unimpactful – a terrible combination for any roguelike, doubly so for a deck builder I would say. There are only three characters, which might not have been bad, if they differ vasty from each other, but alas, they really don’t. While their card packs have a few unique bits scattered here and there the usual tactics do not change much between them. Building the city of Nadir is visually pleasing, but ultimately never felt like it has any major impact on my runs.
Putting all that together Nadir left a sour taste in my mouth. It isn’t a terrible game, it’s not even bad, per say. It feels, however, terribly undercooked… And by now, well abandoned. If you can snatch if for some hefty discount, I still would say go for it – even if just to check out that peculiar combat system with dual cards and juggling enemy reactions. But otherwise, all that great lustre, unfortunately, didn’t pan out to a great vision of hellish dives, but rather a stumbling down the stairs of another set of stairs, rattling with demonic laughter.
Comments