I've just spent 30 hours with Arcanium, and now you have to suffer the consequences in the form of this essay.
"Slay the Spire is beyond reproach, and Monster Train is among the best games of all time. What does Arcanium offer?"
Great question. I think that if Arcanium came out ten years ago, it would be enshrined as Slay the Spire is. But we've definitely hit deckbuilder fatigue, and so any newcomer has to be stacked against the titans of the genre.
Here's the short version: Arcanium is not as good as Monster Train, but it is better than Roguebook while doing a lot of the same things as Roguebook.
The long version is that you have a party of three characters to manage (out of a pool of something ridiculous like 20). Characters have their own hands and their own energy ("AP" in this game). At the start of the game, they gain 3 AP and draw 3 cards each round. AP carries over from turn to turn, but it caps at 5, and the hand limit is also 5. When you get enough experience ("Essence"), you can increase a single character's AP or card draw. Cards generally cost from 1 to 3 AP. Unlike many similar games, it is very common for cards to cost 2 or 3 here (compare STS, where it's not terribly uncommon for a card to cost 2, but most cost 1 and very few cost 3), so upgrading AP is generally the priority. The interesting thing about all of this is that you start quite close to the cap. You'll get stronger, but you won't ever go endless.
Each AP you spend on cards also generates that much Fury. When you have enough Fury, you can use your character's Ultimate. There's a pretty wide variety in ultimates, but they tend to be very impactful. Each character starts with one ultimate, but you can unlock two variant ultimates via meta progression. My experience is that the default ultimate is just fine for all but one or two of the heroes. There's a ton of unlockables in this game, but surprisingly, you don't feel hampered at the start except in terms of character selection (you will unlock one or two new characters in most successful runs).
Combat takes place in three lanes: your three heroes against three enemies. For 1 AP, a character can swap positions with an adjacent character. This is important both for tanking dangerous attacks and for executing attacks that can't target other lanes. You won't reposition every turn, but you'll do it a lot more often than you might expect.
There are four varieties of combat:
Standard battles are always assault, but elites can be defense or breach. Standard battles are barely worth your time, both in terms of reward and threat posed, but they occupy an outsized portion of the map.
And the map is one of the best parts of Arcanium, at least in terms of distinguishing it from its peers. The map is divided into hexes, and each hex has something of interest. There are plenty of non-combat nodes, but accessing one requires you to clear out all adjacent combats. The first time you enter a node, you gain a point of Threat. Every 10 points, the game gets harder; at 30 points, the game wants you to proceed to the endgame, so each Threat you would generate instead litters the map with boss nodes.
Scattered across the map, visible from the start, are the shard battles -- the Super Elites. These are the most difficult but also the most rewarding, since they guarantee an heirloom artifact. Heroes have three regular artifact slots and one heirloom slot; heirlooms are hero-specific relics that provide a huge boost to a hero's toolkit. Each hero has a pool of three heirlooms. Some heroes feel borderline unplayable until you've got an heirloom; some heroes feel borderline broken with the right heirloom.
What do I like about Arcanium?
There's a strong emphasis on status effects. You can absolutely build around big numbers, but you really want at least some status thrown in. As an example, I just cleared the highest difficulty, defeating the 700 HP last boss in two rounds. My primary damage dealer didn't have a single card with a printed number above 6. What she did have was a bunch of weak multihit cards and an artifact that inflicts Shock on each hit. Shock deals 1 damage in an area per stack. I killed off both of the 250 HP adds without ever targeting them. (This was Goat/Tiger/Elk -- I don't remember the character names, but this is my favorite team comp.)
Most of the characters feel pretty distinct, which is impressive given how many there are. All of them have a passive that often ends up defining their playstyle. Many of them have a signature mechanism that gets augmented by their heirlooms. There's a good amount of overlap, because there are only so many roles a character can fill, but the game does a good job of making Tank A feel a little different from Tank B.
The combat presents a variety of challenges that favor different approaches. There are lots of ways to get the enemies' HP to zero, but some of them will be far more effective against certain enemies than others. At the same time, the game never hard-counters any specific build. Some bosses have abilities that will shut down certain strategies (for example, "return 50% of all direct damage" basically means your team will not be doing anything to the boss), but they cycle through their pool of abilities, so you're only shut down for that turn instead of taking a hard L. I'm impressed by how well the game does in challenging a wide variety of builds while keeping so many viable.
The exploration is a nice change of pace.
What do I dislike about Arcanium?
With so many characters, they can't all be winners. Rhino seems to want to be some sort of bruiser, but he doesn't really have the toolkit for it. Ram is clearly trying to be a weird support/minion tank, but he's only OK at support, he's bad at minions, and he's terrible at tanking. Carrion (actual character name!) has a fun thing going on with the ramping undead minions, but he feels like a strictly worse Crocodile. (Crocodile is a lot of fun, though)
Runs are long, easily two or three hours. This doesn't bother me much but could easily be a dealbreaker for some. (You have some control over the length of your run -- it goes quicker if you prioritize non-combat nodes and slower if you keep exploring after the boss becomes available.) I saw a thumbnail for a 55-minute speedrun on YouTube. For comparison, I think the Slay the Spire speedrun is something like 3 minutes (although it's fairly degenerate).
That's really it for grievances. I guess the other dislike is that Monster Train is still a better game. That's not that much of a complaint, since, as I said, Monster Train is among the best games of all time. There's no future in which Arcanium ends up taking more of my hours than Monster Train, though, and I can only recommend Arcanium for people who have gotten their fill of Monster Train or who bounced off it but liked STS/Roguebook.
"Slay the Spire is beyond reproach, and Monster Train is among the best games of all time. What does Arcanium offer?"
Great question. I think that if Arcanium came out ten years ago, it would be enshrined as Slay the Spire is. But we've definitely hit deckbuilder fatigue, and so any newcomer has to be stacked against the titans of the genre.
Here's the short version: Arcanium is not as good as Monster Train, but it is better than Roguebook while doing a lot of the same things as Roguebook.
The long version is that you have a party of three characters to manage (out of a pool of something ridiculous like 20). Characters have their own hands and their own energy ("AP" in this game). At the start of the game, they gain 3 AP and draw 3 cards each round. AP carries over from turn to turn, but it caps at 5, and the hand limit is also 5. When you get enough experience ("Essence"), you can increase a single character's AP or card draw. Cards generally cost from 1 to 3 AP. Unlike many similar games, it is very common for cards to cost 2 or 3 here (compare STS, where it's not terribly uncommon for a card to cost 2, but most cost 1 and very few cost 3), so upgrading AP is generally the priority. The interesting thing about all of this is that you start quite close to the cap. You'll get stronger, but you won't ever go endless.
Each AP you spend on cards also generates that much Fury. When you have enough Fury, you can use your character's Ultimate. There's a pretty wide variety in ultimates, but they tend to be very impactful. Each character starts with one ultimate, but you can unlock two variant ultimates via meta progression. My experience is that the default ultimate is just fine for all but one or two of the heroes. There's a ton of unlockables in this game, but surprisingly, you don't feel hampered at the start except in terms of character selection (you will unlock one or two new characters in most successful runs).
Combat takes place in three lanes: your three heroes against three enemies. For 1 AP, a character can swap positions with an adjacent character. This is important both for tanking dangerous attacks and for executing attacks that can't target other lanes. You won't reposition every turn, but you'll do it a lot more often than you might expect.
There are four varieties of combat:
- Assault: kill everything
- Defense: survive 4 rounds; killed enemies respawn a round later
- Breach: when you kill an enemy, it is replaced by a barrel, and an enemy respawns in that lane a couple turns later; kill the barrel to win
- Super Elite/Boss: just kill the center enemy
Standard battles are always assault, but elites can be defense or breach. Standard battles are barely worth your time, both in terms of reward and threat posed, but they occupy an outsized portion of the map.
And the map is one of the best parts of Arcanium, at least in terms of distinguishing it from its peers. The map is divided into hexes, and each hex has something of interest. There are plenty of non-combat nodes, but accessing one requires you to clear out all adjacent combats. The first time you enter a node, you gain a point of Threat. Every 10 points, the game gets harder; at 30 points, the game wants you to proceed to the endgame, so each Threat you would generate instead litters the map with boss nodes.
Scattered across the map, visible from the start, are the shard battles -- the Super Elites. These are the most difficult but also the most rewarding, since they guarantee an heirloom artifact. Heroes have three regular artifact slots and one heirloom slot; heirlooms are hero-specific relics that provide a huge boost to a hero's toolkit. Each hero has a pool of three heirlooms. Some heroes feel borderline unplayable until you've got an heirloom; some heroes feel borderline broken with the right heirloom.
What do I like about Arcanium?
There's a strong emphasis on status effects. You can absolutely build around big numbers, but you really want at least some status thrown in. As an example, I just cleared the highest difficulty, defeating the 700 HP last boss in two rounds. My primary damage dealer didn't have a single card with a printed number above 6. What she did have was a bunch of weak multihit cards and an artifact that inflicts Shock on each hit. Shock deals 1 damage in an area per stack. I killed off both of the 250 HP adds without ever targeting them. (This was Goat/Tiger/Elk -- I don't remember the character names, but this is my favorite team comp.)
Most of the characters feel pretty distinct, which is impressive given how many there are. All of them have a passive that often ends up defining their playstyle. Many of them have a signature mechanism that gets augmented by their heirlooms. There's a good amount of overlap, because there are only so many roles a character can fill, but the game does a good job of making Tank A feel a little different from Tank B.
The combat presents a variety of challenges that favor different approaches. There are lots of ways to get the enemies' HP to zero, but some of them will be far more effective against certain enemies than others. At the same time, the game never hard-counters any specific build. Some bosses have abilities that will shut down certain strategies (for example, "return 50% of all direct damage" basically means your team will not be doing anything to the boss), but they cycle through their pool of abilities, so you're only shut down for that turn instead of taking a hard L. I'm impressed by how well the game does in challenging a wide variety of builds while keeping so many viable.
The exploration is a nice change of pace.
What do I dislike about Arcanium?
With so many characters, they can't all be winners. Rhino seems to want to be some sort of bruiser, but he doesn't really have the toolkit for it. Ram is clearly trying to be a weird support/minion tank, but he's only OK at support, he's bad at minions, and he's terrible at tanking. Carrion (actual character name!) has a fun thing going on with the ramping undead minions, but he feels like a strictly worse Crocodile. (Crocodile is a lot of fun, though)
Runs are long, easily two or three hours. This doesn't bother me much but could easily be a dealbreaker for some. (You have some control over the length of your run -- it goes quicker if you prioritize non-combat nodes and slower if you keep exploring after the boss becomes available.) I saw a thumbnail for a 55-minute speedrun on YouTube. For comparison, I think the Slay the Spire speedrun is something like 3 minutes (although it's fairly degenerate).
That's really it for grievances. I guess the other dislike is that Monster Train is still a better game. That's not that much of a complaint, since, as I said, Monster Train is among the best games of all time. There's no future in which Arcanium ends up taking more of my hours than Monster Train, though, and I can only recommend Arcanium for people who have gotten their fill of Monster Train or who bounced off it but liked STS/Roguebook.
