Ancient Enemy Review — Russell Troxel

Apr 18

Apr 18 Ancient Enemy Review

Depending on where you are in the world, you may be experiencing different levels of quarantining, but in my neck of the woods we’ve been under a shelter in place order for about a month now, so I’ve been working from home for my day job. Similarly, a lot of folks who work on video games have been sent to work at home, which means that development has been slowed down thanks to the distance between individual developers. This all translates into a sedated rate of new video game releases, at least those made by larger teams, which means it’s time for indie games to shine. Thanks to smaller development teams, it seems like indie games are less impeded by isolation, making for greater exposure on release. Last week, like many before it, had fewer big releases so I got to explore more of the creative indies that would’ve otherwise been overshadowed by big releases, and I decided to check out Ancient Enemy.

Ancient Enemy is a combination of an RPG and a solitaire card game set in a medieval fantasy post-apocalypse. The player takes on the mantle of The Mage, the sole survivor of a catastrophe. For some unknown reason, The Mage slept for 200 years, through the worst of the apocalypse, and awakes to find everyone and everything he held dear either twisted or destroyed. In response, The Mage pulls a John Wick, vowing revenge against the enigmatic Enemy, who is apparently responsible for the world-ending disaster. To this end, The Mage must travel from the ruins of his home to the stronghold of The Enemy, carving a bloody path through the various horrors employed by The Enemy and gathering power from places of ancient magic.

Everything in Ancient Enemy is done through a solitaire card game, but it’s unlike any solitaire I’ve ever played. Instead of seven stacks containing an increasing number of cards, Ancient Enemy has stacks of cards in elaborate curves and overlapping piles. There’s no matching cards to others with a higher number, but instead players can match cards with a value one higher or lower. Additionally, suits don’t dictate which cards can be matched to which. On top of these alternate rules, additional mechanics come in to play depending on whether the player is in a Combat encounter or a Gathering encounter. During a Combat encounter, players are set against a foe with the objective of reducing the enemy’s life to zero, while avoiding the same fate themselves. To do this, players charge up three different powers by matching cards of the appropriate suits on their turn. These powers can be anything from calling lightning from the sky to stabbing the enemy with a dagger, but they all result in either damaging the enemy, or protecting the player from damage and are more effective the more cards the player has matched that turn. Once a player has run out of possible plays or decides to use a power, the enemy gets a turn to either prepare an attack or execute a prepared attack, so players are motivated to match the longest string of cards possible to not only power up their abilities, but also to keep the enemy from acting. In Gathering encounters, The Mage has found some ley line, stone circle, or other suitably mystical place from which he can draw power to unlock new abilities. During these encounters, the player is unopposed and the objective is to clear as many cards from the play field as possible. Since there’s no enemy, the player doesn’t use their spells, so the suits of the matched cards don’t matter.

Being the core of the game, Ancient Enemy really needs the solitaire card game to be engaging, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. A lot of the time I had fun with Ancient Enemy, but just as often I ran into frustration while playing because often times I felt like I would strategize and prepare, adapting the spells and items I brought into an encounter, but then be foiled by the deck feeding me cards I couldn’t use. This randomness is inherent to a deck of cards, and to Ancient Enemy, so anyone who might buy the game understands that this is a possibility, but at the same time it was still frustrating to have my strategy stopped by the whim of luck. On top of that, I was never all that entertained by the new spells I unlocked as I progressed through the game. Nearly every spell I encountered did some amount of damage with an additional effect if I had matched at least 10 cards that turn. There were different elemental alignments of this damage, but this only served to do some minor rearranging of equipped abilities before a battle if an enemy was resistant to the element of the spells equipped. I would’ve liked to see more spells like Chaotic Blast, which was a spell that did a random amount of damage. Chaotic Blast represented an interesting tactical decision, because it could do far more damage than any other spell for the same cost, but could also end up being a dud. If the elements had made more of a difference, or if the spells had functions that didn’t require a high combo meter, I would’ve liked my time with Ancient Enemy more. I also would have really appreciated having any new physical attacks beyond the basic dagger.

Ancient Enemy also suffers from a problem I find in a lot of modern games, and that’s poor tutorials. Though the early levels do explain the basics of play, there are quite a few things that are left for the player to discover on their own, and not in a fun Dark Souls way. One of the first of Ancient Enemy’s unique mechanics players will encounter are Wyrm cards, which serve as wild cards, allowing the player to continue their match streak by jumping to a new progression of numbers. No where in the mechanical explanation is it ever explained that Wyrm cards are a one-use item, consumed after a player ends the encounter. Had I known this earlier in the game, I would have used them much more carefully. Another thing unexplained is retrying encounters. At the end of each encounter, players are given the opportunity to retry in case they didn’t get a satisfactory score or used too many special resources. The first time I had an encounter go south, I decided to move on to the next in order to keep progressing the story and come back later, only to discover that players aren’t allowed to do that. Once an encounter is over and the player passes on the opportunity for a retry, that result is locked until the player decides to restart that entire chapter.

Honestly, there’s fun to be had in Ancient Enemy but it doesn’t feel like there’s enough. I think this is partly because Ancient Enemy appears to be built on the same card engine developers Grey Alien Games have used for all of three of their releases since 2015, bending it to fit the new theme as much as possible. However it also suffers from some uninspired writing and game design. I think Ancient Enemy would be an excellent $5 mobile game, but as a $15 PC game there’s not quite enough there, so wait until it’s on sale before you pick it up.