Warstorm: A Game Or Expensive Animated Voyeurism?

If you’re like me and have even the slightest experience with trading card games, you know that they require a few things for the player to be successful: Money to buy the cards obviously, other people to play against and solid strategy in both the aspect of building the deck and then playing the deck properly against the one your opponent brings to the table. If you’re not like me and are unfamiliar with trading card games, well, now you know what they typically consist of. You’re welcome for the quick synopsis.

You can also argue that not only does the player need these things to be successful, but so does the game’s longevity. If a game doesn’t offer up a challenge, will it hold anyone’s long term interest? Or to go even deeper, exactly how little challenge and strategy can a game be devoid of, and how far removed from the outcome of the game’s conflict can the player be until it can’t even be considered a game anymore, but instead just a colorful animated, and expensive waste of time?

This is the question I’m faced with after indulging in Warstorm.

I was first introduced to Warstorm in an online ad. I was a Magic: The Gathering freak when I was younger so I still have a soft spot for card games, especially fantasy themed apparently, because when I saw the ad, that old MTG nostalgia kicked me in the face and I clicked that ad pretty fast. I signed up and was thrust into the meat of Warstorm– choosing my “hero” in the form of a digital card to lead my assembled “squad”. After putting my squad together, I was told to click the “battle” button and I was brought to the main battle screen.

At this point I prepared myself for what I was sure to be some semi-complicated course on the rules of Warstorm, but instead I was extremely surprised to learn that it was un necessary because — now get this — Warstorm plays itself. Once you assemble your deck and click the button to proceed, the “game” is out of your hands. All you do is sit and watch to see if the computer gave you a better draw than your opponent (some cards give you a great advantage if you’re lucky enough to have them get into play early).

After I got the screen stating I was the winner and clicked to continue, I was presented with a screen containing a bunch of quick links to the battlegrounds where I could single out players to challenge, engage in quick challenges versus other players, go to the marketplace to buy more digital card packs for real life money, auction off cards in Warstorm’s auction house, or just chat with the player base in a chat room. I could also view my total card collection, propose trades to other players and organize my squads. What I chose to focus on however was the single player challenges where I could earn packs of cards after defeating each level, and I could just see more of what Warstorm is about. I’m the type that likes to get my bearings before engaging in multiplayer.

Moving ahead in time, I eventually defeated all 20 levels of both single player challenges. Along the way I gained new cards and had a bit of fun trying to assemble squads in order to defeat new single player challenge levels. At the end of it all however, I realized a couple things about this “game” that made me feel very let down, and decide that it’s really not much of a game at all and not worth my continued time or money investing in Warstorm’s digital cards.

As I touched on earlier and I will get more in depth towards in the words to follow… This game is devoid of strategy. The game, as I said, plays itself once you assemble your deck. There’s no segments of each player’s turn where you can do various things limited only by the abilities of the cards in your deck like MTG. There’s no danger of your opponent interrupting something you’re trying to do on your turn for example. In essence, Warstorm is to trading card games as Candy Land is to board games, where in the latter you draw a card and do what it tells you, and you have no say at all in the outcome.

The difference between MTG and Warstorm is that the person spending the most amount of money on the top tier cards is nine times out of ten going to be the winner of the match. This is the only aspect that can be argued as being strategical in Warstorm, and sadly it relies nothing to do with your intellect, but on how much money you’re willing to spend on the top tier cards. There’s no strategy to playing your cards correctly against the squad your opponent put together. You can leave your brain at home and this is one of the few activities on Earth at this point in time that I’d say someone high on meth can manage to engage in and maybe happen to be successful at. Warstorm is honestly that vapid and I can’t believe it’s classified as an actual trading card “game”.

Let’s go more in depth on the power of card ranks which are everything in Warstorm. There are seven tiers or ranks of cards. The t7 cards are of course the absolute best as they reduce the time it takes for the cards to be put from the staging area of the main combat screen into actual play. A t7 card of one type may have a “cast” time of 4 turns while a t5 has 6 turns before it’s put in play. This means if you had a t7 of a certain unit type and your opponent had a t5 of the same unit type, and they came into the staging area on the same turn, your t7 would be in play a full round before his would be, offering you a big advantage. Common sense tells you that the faster something comes into play, the faster you will damage your opponent. If you can have 3 units in play before your opponent has one, then good luck coming back from that.

So it really comes down to the fact that if you want to be the best at this game, you have to spend the most money. Once that has been taken care of then you have to cross your fingers that the person you’re paying against — taking into account he has an equally expensive squad as you do in this example — has a more un lucky initial card draw than yourself, and the cards that you get out on the table happen to counter the types of units that the opponent is unlucky enough to have the computer put in play for him

So can you argue that the strategy is in deck building? Sure you can feel free to, but I’d say it’s a very weak argument. When it boils down to it, as I said above, a squad full of top tier cards will nine times out of ten wreck a squad full of cards just one tier below. You can take practically any mix and matched cards of the top tier and make a squad and they will simply out perform one made from a lesser tier. A two year old child can color match.

This is to be expected when Warstorm bases its income off of selling digital property. The developers want you to spend more and more money to find these rare top tier cards because they know they are the most powerful and that’s what players are seeking. If more readily accessible mid tier cards were as powerful as the more rare top tier, where would the incentive be for players to spend more money in hopes of owning a deck of ultimate top tier unbeatable destruction?

Another thing that leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth is that the developers of Warstorm want to get you into the habit of buying cards a bit too quickly. The initial single player campaign will give you very very few good cards to work with and is over within an hour. The only thing left to do is start buying overpriced packs of cards and spend oodles of time trading off what you don’t want for something you do. Now some people would say to simply make alt characters on a new account to redo the single player campaign and trade off the cards back to the original character until you have amassed a decent portion of mid tier cards to work with. This type of thing however is actually not allowed by the developers of Warstorm, and they will ban all accounts per IP address if they feel that someone has been making alts. This is my opinion crosses the line between trying to make a profit and being a total bunch of dicks. The time needed to actually get any decent cards via that method of creating alt accounts is out of the question for most people, and it’s simpler and more time effective to just buy some packs. But for those people that are broke and unsure about spending money on the game and would rather sacrifice time instead of money for now, then I don’t see the long term harm. The amount of people willing to do this would have to be very small I imagine.

Hopefully however, if a person is smart they will see that Warstorm isn’t very much of a game at all before they go ahead and decide to spend money on purchasing digital card packs anyway.

Look at it this way, let’s say you did end up spending hundreds of dollars, or maybe even hundreds of hours worth of time to acquire some top tier cards and you have yourself a practically unbeatable squad. Ok well, now what? What do you get from it? Yay, you’re awesome on the internet! You might get interviewed on http://www.cgtactics.com!

See it’s not like you got to the top by being smart and strategic or utilizing anything to do with your intellect or wisdom, you got there from spending more money than other people around you, or maybe alternately spending a load of time trading and wheelin’ and dealin’. For the most part though, Warstorm is simply a battle of bank accounts. So you got your big awesome squad put together, and you can now sit at the top of the ladder all smug knowing that you are one of the more wealthy people that play Warstorm. At least I hope you’d be sitting there on that pretense and not thinking you got there because you’re an actual “good” player, because Warstorm’s mechanics don’t even have room for people to really “play” anything. You can now challenge other wealthy people and hope that your lack of being able to use any kind of brainpower during the matches to try and win will be made up for in terms of being lucky enough to have your top tier cards that come out into play be the antithesis to the ones that the computer decides to lay out from your opponent’s squad. Ugh.

I really do feel sorry for people who feel Warstorm is a game, or fun enough to sink money into. If it was free and ad driven (which I’m sure they could probably manage given the amount of traffic pouring into the site from so many poor souls sucked into this nonsense) I wouldn’t be so critical of it, but knowing that the developers really feel they should charge for this just makes me sad and I chalk it up as yet another reason to lose hope in humanity. Yes yes I know, if people are willing to pay, then so be it. It still doesn’t make it right in my book. But as it stands in my opinion, anyone who can’t see Warstorm for what it is — an expensive exercise in animated voyeurism — and very much not at all a game in any real sense of the modern definition of the word, are foolish suckers.