Lost for Swords review

I play a lot of mobile games, but if you are a keep observer of my iOS gaming habits, you'll notice I spend a lot of that gaming time on my iPad. There's a lot of reasons for this, but none of them are particularly germaine to this review. I brought it up to underscore that when I say games like Lost for Swords are the reason I started looking for games to play on mobile devices to begin with, it carries an appropriate amount of added weight. This card game is quick, smart, replayable, and feels fresh despite being part of a genre that is arguably oversaturated at this point.

Decked out dungeons

Lost for Swords is a deck-building dungeon-crawler roguelike and wastes no time making itself stand out. Every dungeon consists of essentially three different decks: one for your hero, one for the enemy creatures, and one for the dungeon itself. After picking a hero and entering a certain tower, cards from each of these decks are played onto a 5x5 grid which creates each individual floor of the dungeon.

Whichever hero character you choose is also played down on the grid and you can tap to move them between empty spaces or into cards to interact with them. For your own cards, typically interaction means equipping gear or activating spells/abilities, whereas tapping on enemies initiates a fight. The entire game is turn-based but each card interaction counts as a turn, making Lost for Swords just as much about deckbuilding as it is about managing space and combat tactics.

Wild cards

On top of the novel mechanics for card-based navigation, Lost for Swords also has no qualms with creating cards, items, and dungeon setups that are off-the-wall. The game's excellent tutorial stages for each hero type do a great job of showing examples of these interactions and how they can be leveraged to their fullest. This in turn makes every run feel like it's brimming with potential to take one or more unconventional paths to victory.

As a quick example, one of my runs as a wizard put me in a situation where I could essentially deal an unending loop of fire damage to enemies, but to get to that point I had to ditch any and all armor cards entirely and be careful not to catch myself in the radius of my firestorms. I also only finalized this deck setup right around the same time I reached the end of the tower I was fighting, which is another thing worth celebrating Lost for Swords: Its sense of pacing is such that you almost always reach pinnacle deck strength right around the time you're facing off against the boss.

Feeling the dealing

This pitch-perfect pacing feels especially satisfying given how easy to play and track any given run of Lost for Swords is. In addition to having extremely mobile-friendly layouts for both portrait and landscape play, the game also has useful tools for inspecting cards and undoing accidental moves. The entire design of the game also has a pronounced, tactile quality to the point that it feels like a game you could play with physical cards. There's very little in the way of abstract or hidden mechanics, and things like equipment collections, card replacements, discards, etc. are constantly shown on screen so you can always keep tabs on the game's upkeep (and bend it to your advantage).

Lost for Swords is a free-to-download game so you can try it out before deciding to pay $ 4.99 once to unlock the whole experience. In playing for this review, I tried it on both my iPad and my phone and ended up sinking much more time into it on my smaller device. Something that would be a nice addition to the game would be some kind of iCloud syncing so your progress can continue between devices, but given the one-off nature of runs in Lost for Swords, this isn't a huge deal.

The bottom line

Just when I think there is no more to explore or uncover in the realm of card-based roguelikes, something like Lost for Swords comes along to prove me wrong. Its fresh approach to deck-building and dungeon-crawling is as friendly and manageable as it is elegantly designed and carefully balanced.