An Idle Game That Does What It Says On The Tin
I wouldn’t call it a genre, but I have a soft-spot for the free clicker games on Xbox. We’re talking about Idle Wizard, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and of course Clicker Heroes. They’re often the home of blurry interfaces, mistranslated text and carpal tunnel, as I jab the A button on my pad to get a fraction more DPS. I don’t pretend to defend their quality, but there’s something nourishing about the way numbers just keep going up.
Into the fray comes Card Storm Idle, and it conforms to all of the criteria I’ve mentioned. It is a heinously ugly little game, with text that’s barely readable and interfaces that haven’t seen a whiff of optimisation in the port from mobile. Most bizarre of all, there’s only a sliver of a window into the game world, as you get to peek at the various enemy sprites through what looks like a letterbox. The ghosts and goblins have all been relegated to the top of the screen to get more precious numbers in.
I was immediately struck by how similar Card Storm Idle was to DPS Idle. A quick check showed that they were both published by Desert Water games, so it tracks. Cards run in three rows across the bottom of the screen – an increase on DPS Idles’ two – and the majority of interactions in the game are to buy these cards, and then upgrade them.
Card Counting
The cards confer benefits. In most cases, they provide a sizable boost to one of three ‘weapons’. They are the very thematic Click Damage, Damage Per Second and Magic Damage. Would it have taken much to find-replace them for melee, ranged and magic, perhaps? It would have felt less like playing a spreadsheet. Anyway, they translate, roughly, into damage from pressing the A button (Click Damage), passive damage to the first enemy in the row (Damage Per Second) and passive damage to all enemies at once (Magic Damage). If you want to play a more lean-in, active role then Click Damage is your boy. If you’re planning to lead Card Storm Idle running while you Netflix and chill, then Magic Damage might be more tempting.
Having played for longer than any human should play a clicker game, we can’t actually tell you why Damage Per Second exists. We’ve yet to find a use-case. Killing one enemy at a time not only feels less satisfying, but is the least potent too, particularly in terms of its cards. Still, it allowed us to concentrate on the other two.
So, you’re choosing a card to invest in (flipping it over requires gems – more on the game’s currencies in a mo), and then pumping gold coins into them to level them up. There’s an axis or two at play here: the top row is cheaper to unlock, having a 1 gem requirement, while the bottom row requires 5. It forces you to concentrate on the somewhat less powerful cards to build a foundation. And, left-to-right, the cards get increasingly expensive to upgrade. So, there are still some humdingers on the top row.
We made a few friends among the cards. Goldmine and Military Museum multiply the currencies you gain from defeating enemies, so they’re an instapick. And then we tended to move onto Combo Punch, which scaled up the damage the longer we were clicking on something. Basically, the more troublesome the enemy, the more effective Combo Punch became, which is ambrosia of the gods to a clicker. Straight into the shopping trolley. Finally, there’s the Auto Click, a purchase for the lazy, turning the Click Damage into – effectively – Magic Damage. Score.
It is, as you can probably tell, a min-maxers dream. Which is to also say that it’s not for everyone. Reading the fine print of cards to create synergies? Yeah, that’s one for Statto’s, rather than the general gamer.
Doing It For The Prestige
To buy cards you need gems and gold, and they’re left behind by dead creatures. But the real currencies come from prestiging. This is bread-and-butter to a clicker, as you sacrifice almost all of the cards and improvements you’ve made to reset your character to zero. We say ‘almost all’ because of course there are some persistent buffs. Prestige Points can snag you increases to the damage types, increased gold and gems, and – vitally – label all of the cards so that you know what they do post-prestige (a sneaky benefit that should probably be there from the start).
But the real, real good stuff comes from SUPER Prestige Points. Reset all of your progress in common prestige, and you can fill your boots with permanent multiplications to damage, stars (which contribute to Prestige Points) and currency generation. This is where you start moving into the elite, as unlocking these can mean that Card Storm Idle becomes an ugly version of Fantavision. Levels whip past, fireworks go off at ridiculous speeds, and it becomes almost impossible to buy cards quick enough.
If you’re a clicker fan, I’d basically gesture to all of the above and say “yep, it does everything you want”. Everything is in its right place, and there’s not a risk taken. There’s a few days’ worth of play before the grind really hits, and it’s perfectly fine to decouple from it at that point. You will wave goodbye with several dopamine moments to remember, a full 2000 Gamerscore, and there will be barely a negative thought in your head. But if you go past that point and into the grind, there’s still some juicy stuff waiting for you: a Hero and Shadow Deck, plus a Mine can be unlocked for additional customisation.
A Number-Crunching Grind
If you’re not a clicker fan then, congratulations, you’re probably more discerning and have time on your hands. Card Storm Idle is prone to the same issues that the genre tends to have: it’s incredibly grindy, and unless you like numbers going up then there’s not much payoff. This is probably the ugliest example of a clicker on the Xbox, too, which is not something you’d stick on your poster. There’s monetisation in the form of a shop, which some might get sniffy about, but we never felt the slightest temptation to use it.
Card Storm Idle is incredibly unlikely to convert anyone to idle games. Clicker Heroes or Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms are handier at that task. But for those number-crunching, button-tapping weirdos who like the genre, well, this will be a week’s worth of clicking. It’s not pretty, it’s anything but ambitious, and – whoop whoop – it’s free.
Important Links
Download from the Xbox Store, for free – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/card-storm-idle/9P0LNTGQH4XH/0010
