Rise of Mythos (Web)

Addictive and strategic enough to keep you grinding....

Rise of Mythos is a freemium CCG where your goal is to defeat opponents using creature and skill cards.

Rise of Mythos takes the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to keeping players engaged. There are multiple types of card battles (Campaign, Weekly Tower, City Defense, Boss, PvP), a variety of sub mechanics (quests, city building, card alchemy, equipment enhancement, reputation, activity bonuses), and constant events.

Campaign, Tower, and City Defense battles are all variants of the standard 1v1 PvE battles. While the AI opponents aren't terribly clever, they do employ a variety of deck types that require different strategies to defeat.

Campaign battles are plotted on a series of maps. Each location is comprised of several battles of increasing difficulty. Players are rewarded with a card for each location they complete. Aside from a few notable maps that reward 5-star cards, players will generally receive much less desirable cards.

The weekly tower contains fifty floors of increasing difficulty (that's all I know of at least ~_^). On each floor players must defeat a random AI opponent to claim a reward. At the start of each week (oddly Tuesday) player progress is reset to the first floor. Players can only challenge the tower once per day unless they acquire additional tower tickets.

City Defense battles involve attempting to defeat the AI controlled defenses of another player for bonus resources. In the City Defense Manager players create a defense deck and place defensive units. These defenses can be modified at any time, but are always controlled by the AI during battles.

Boss battles involve challenging AI opponents in 4v1 PvE battles. These unique opponents have specially themed decks, powerful cards, and special attacks. Most boss battles consist of two stages that must be defeated to claim a reward. Occasionally there are special event boss battles or bonus rewards for completing standard boss battles.

PvP battle formats vary from 1v1 to 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4. These battles are often rather challenging and can be quite time consuming (4v4 matches often take an hour). Players earn daily and weekly participation rewards along with seasonal ranking rewards for participating in PvP battles.

Rise of Mythos includes automatic convenience methods for ending turns and playing cards, unfortunately they have some flaws. By default your turn automatically ends when you have no possible actions left. Aside from some glitches where it misses an available action, this feature is generally very handy and only needs to be turned off during more complicated battles with multiple players. On the other hand, the auto battle button is best avoided unless victory is 110% certain. The AI for the auto battle system is rather terrible and appears to simply play cards randomly, including blasting your own units with negative spells like petrify. Some skill cards, like premeditation, can also cause the AI to simply skip turns and play nothing @_@.

Staying competitive and being successful requires putting together a solid deck. This requires planning out good strategies, collecting good cards, and adjusting to keep up with power creep (which can be incredibly time consuming).

Getting cards with more than four stars is a serious undertaking that involves grinding to collect cards, silver, and reputation. For example, it takes approximately 120 1-star cards to create a 4-star card, and nearly 20 identical 4-star cards to create a 5-star card. Getting specific cards enhanced this high is quite difficult and costly.

Rise of Mythos offers a variety of card packs to players. The contents and costs of these packs vary widely, especially limited time event packs. Sadly, these packs employ the same vague odds found in many games in this genre. General player feedback is that the pack payouts are terrible and feel rather rigged against the players. This game and others in the genre typically follow the designs talked about in this GDC video. There are also blogs providing more detailed guides including payout analysis. Check out the Obscure Mechanism blog for player guides, detailed analysis of the pack payouts, and a wealth of other information.

Overall, I really enjoy Rise of Mythos. The variety of quests, battle types, and huge card collection really help fuel the game. Sadly, the awesome strategic battles and deck creation aspects are marred by the excessively expensive paywalls.

Summary:

• + high quality artwork
• + variety of battles and deck strategies
• + playing together with friends
• • requires quite a bit of grinding
• • difficulty jumps steeply
• • auto battle plays poorly
• - very expensive token/gold system
• - most events require $$$ to participate
• - sometimes feels more pay-to-win than strategy
• - vague undisclosed card pack odds

Rise of Mythos is available online at http://www.riseofmythos.com.