[Want to know if it’s worth investing your time in Earthcore? Check out our review]
At first glance, Earthcore: Shattered Elements seems like a rather simple card-battling game. Once you’re introduced to skills that will change quite a bit. Even more so once you start to acquire hero cards. But it’s not so complicated that we couldn’t put together a beginner’s guide for all you Earthcore neophytes.
Due for release sometime in May, Earthcore: Shattered Elements has been in soft launch on the Canadian and Danish App Stores for a while now. A fair bit of effort is clearly being put into ensuring that everything about Earthcore: Shattered Elements is polished. It’s showing too, with this game steadily shaping up to be something quit special for CCG fans.
You’ll immediately notice that Earthcore: Shattered Elements looks quite gorgeous. Each card is attractively designed, easily rivalling the likes of Hearthstone in terms of looks. It’s an ideal way to encourage you to want to collect them all, not just for the sake of progression, but because of how they look.
Each match involves taking it in turns placing cards down, with you not able to initially place a card directly opposite your opponent’s, until the second turn. Besides elemental values at play here, with the usual fire beating water, and fire beating earth, there are also skills to use. These can make all the difference, so it’s important to note that you can only use one skill per turn. Some skills are simply a matter of inflicting extra damage to your opponent, but they can also be used to change elements and more.
There’s an extensive card crafting side of things too, which soon opens up. Earthcore: Shattered Elements promises that you can create over 500,000+ unique card combinations and I can see that being likely. There’s a plentiful supply of depth here.
That’s perhaps where the longevity for it will lie - enticing you into creating the ultimate deck to defeat others through PvP. In which case, it makes sense that Earthcore: Shattered Elements has been in soft launch for so long with balancing issues being ironed out.
As it stands, Earthcore: Shattered Elements already seems pretty appealing and potentially quite challenging, even for experienced CCG players. With further refinements planned for its already seemingly extensive campaign mode, as well as some tweaks to balancing, it can surely only get better. Earthcore: Shattered Elements is due for release sometime in May. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop.
In the game you not only collect cards, but can use them to craft new, more powerful cards. This allows you to customize your deck with over 500,000 possible cards to fit your play-style. The cards use a 3-element battle mechanic in a "rock, paper, scissors" fashion - Fire, Nature, and Water battle it out against each other. Earthcore includes a single player campaign as well as ranked multiplayer leagues and online PvP modes to satisfy competitive players.
There's no official launch date set yet, but until then you can drool over AppSpy's preview video of Earthcore: Shattered Elements.
To help us all with the wait, the developer has released a new trailer. The trailer further explains the gameplay mechanics, as well as the new risk system the developer hopes will set this title apart from other collectible card games.
The trailer is below and the game is scheduled to drop early in 2015.
Polish developers Tequila Games have unveiled Earthcore: Shattered Elements - a collectible card game for iOS that is set to come out early next year.
The unique point to Earthcore is the 'Card Crafting' feature, which will allow players to utilize the cards in their collection and fuse cards together to form new, more powerful cards, with over half a million of these combinations available. The game also features a Rock, Paper, Scissors-esque element system, with cards belonging to fire, water, and nature elements. In addition to this, the game also has a 'Risk' system, with cards with more special powers creating a higher loss to the player if they're defeated, meaning players will have to be careful when using these more powerful cards.
Lukas Deszczulka, the CEO of Tequila Games, had this to say on their upcoming CCG:
Following on from our history of creating successful casual games, Earthcore: Shattered Elements represents a big step forward and a very significant investment for Tequila Games. We are targeting both mid and hardcore players with a AAA title in a genre our team knows and loves. We’re currently working with some very experienced tabletop game design experts to innovate the CCG genre and we've invested heavily in the single player story-driven campaign, which is often neglected in games of this type. We’re sure that both new and experienced players alike will find Earthcore:Shattered Elements very different to anything that they've played before.
Earthcore: Shattered Elements is set to launch on iPhone and iPad in the first quarter of 2015.
