Cross Blitz

Editing this review with more details now that I've played more.
This is a really good deckbuilder. I was initially interested in its campaign mode but both that and the roguelike mode are really well done. My only complaint is this would be a perfect mobile game but its not on phone nor does it have controller support to make a good steamdeck game. I could see myself playing 100+ hours of this mobile.
Pros:
+Has a non-roguelike campaign to collect cards and really experiment with deck types.
+The roguelike mode has a lot more going on than I expected. There's a large metagame upgrade component and many different 'maps' to try running.
+Well designed card game mechanics, borrows a lot from hearthstone style games but has some lane mechanics. Pretty intuitive and they make good use of it with the card effects.
+Tons of cards and archetypes, I haven't played them all but seems like there's about 20 intended archetypes to build your deck around and obviously ways to mix and match those for countless viable decks to play.
+Difficulty is fairly well balanced. A few bosses in the campaign felt like they could high roll an unbeatable hand but overall its been a good mix of relaxing easy wins and games I had to strategize and deckbuild for.
+Pixel art is great. The whole game is well polished.
Cons:
-No controller or mobile support.
Nitpicks:
-The campaign maps are a little tedious to traverse, especially with how often you backtrack in them.
-The campaign is segmented into different factions. I wish I could play one campaign with all the cards in it to mix and match cards from different factions into one deck.
-I've had a couple soft lock bugs when too many interactions happened at once. Thankfully the game autosaves pretty regularly so I could close and reload into the same turn I was playing.
-The writing is cute but I love the game part a lot more, there's a lot of writing in the campaign and I've ended up just instantly skipping every cutscene.

This is a tough one. At its core, Cross Blitz has a fun card game that I enjoyed learning. You can do a lot with this system and the developers created a lot of cards and relics that stretch the system in fun ways. I'm 21 hours in, and I will probably play more. I can happily recommend the core card game at the heart of Cross Blitz. Sadly, the rest of the game outside of the core card game is quite rough.
The UI is slow, unresponsive, and cumbersome.
- There are frequently times where you're waiting for the UI to catch up and for UI components to become active.
- In some battles, the characters do a few lines of dialogue at each other on the battle screen, and while that's going on you can't do anything if you're the second player and there's no way to speed it up.
- Many things take way more clicks than it feels like they should. Here's how you create a new deck starting from the main/exploration screen:
-- Click your current deck
-- Click the "Edit" button to open the deck editing screen
-- Click "Create New Deck"
-- Click "Custom Deck" (or a template)
-- Click the "Create Deck" Button
-- Click the placeholder "Custom Deck" Title to open a sub-menu
-- Click "Rename Deck"
-- Click into the text box pop-up
-- Type your new deck name
-- Click the "Accept" button.
- That was 9 clicks. I can picture a UI where this is instead how you create a new deck from the main screen:
-- Click "Deck Editor"
-- Click "New Deck"
-- Click on the deck title and immediately be able to type your new deck name and press enter.
- When there are text boxes like for renaming a deck or for searching your collection of cards, they don't put the cursor in the text box automatically, so you have to click into the text box and then type.
- Every time you get a new card there's a flashing "You have new cards!" banner around your active deck, and the only way to make it go away is to do 3 or 4 clicks to get into your deck editor, scroll through your cards, and mouse over the new cards; there's no reason not to clear that notification by mousing over the deck itself on the main screen.
- You have to click your mouse to progress dialogue where most games let you use the space bar or the enter key. There was no reason for that key binding to not exist.
- There are many, many more of these little paper cuts and they add up.
The story mode is an exercise in patience. None of the systems feel necessary.
- The world exploration where you're moving around tiles doesn't add anything to the game because you still mostly follow a linear path. The game frequently makes you back track for side quests, and there's no fast travel on this exploration map. These side quests become cookie cutter by the 2nd character; they follow a formula of "You can't travel in this direction until you get the MacGuffin -> You lineraly progress and get the MacGuffin -> You backtrack to the place you couldn't travel to." This formula happens once in each character chapter. And every time you painstakingly back track, each scene plays the animation where tiles are dropping down that you have to wait for.
- The entire store/meld system with cash and 5 other kinds of currency feels completely unnecessary. Battles and chests could just unlock cards/relics and there would be no need for any of the store systems. Instead, you have to back track to the stores occasionally to buy new cards.
- The dialogue events were all WAY too long. If brevity is the soul of wit then whoever wrote this dialogue is witless. I ended up skipping them completely halfway into the second character's campaign, and I'm NEVER the kind of person that skips dialogue in a game.
The opponents are extremely poorly made.
- The AI is abyssmal? Or non-existant? As far as I could tell, the AI played each card completely randomly. If I had a lethal threat on the board it would place minions in places that didn't block my kill. It would place guys with poor power/hp matchups when there were good ones for it available. AI spell targeting seemed completely random as well.
- Difficulty is either absent or overwhelming. This is probably partly because of the non-existant AI, but it's also partly because of balance. The game system does not work when you give enemies less than 20hp, but the developers use low hp as a balancing switch. This means that 75% of every roguelike-mode run can be cheesed with 0 challenge. To make an enemy strong, the developers give them obscenely strong relics since an enemy can't just have a strong deck that it plays well.
This game is quite flawed, but despite that I had a fun time learning the system and exploring the cards that the developers made. I'm thirsty for games exactly like this; single player CCGs where you build a collection of cards and then craft decks from your whole collection. There haven't been many; STS's success made it so very few of this kind of game have been made in favor of deck-builders. Hopefully we see more like this in the future.

Cross Blitz is exactly what I'm looking to play in a deckbuilder. It plays out like a single player MtG, Hearthstone, or Marvel Snap except that you only pay once to get access to everything and don't have to deal with predatory microtransactions or FOMO generating content.
The campaign mode is nearly perfect and should be played first, basically sending you to battle, then giving you an extra card to use if you win or letting you try again if you lose. There are optional goals for most fights that will give you additional bonuses, and you can (and should) manage multiple decks once you get enough cards. There are enough synergistic play styles to fill four to six unique types of decks in each of the five campaigns, so there is a lot of variety to dig into. The dialogue does run a little slow and you have to spend a little time walking back and forth occasionally, but those are really my only minor complaints.
The roguelike mode is best played after you've been introduced to most of the card concepts during the campaign. You have to adjust to picking up what cards are given to you rather than building a perfectly refined deck, so it's a big change of pace from the campaign. This mode introduces trinkets, which can power up your cards significantly, and plays out not too dissimilarly from Monster Train in terms of sending you racing through some wild and unexpected runs.
Certain types of decks are going to naturally perform better against certain others with so much complexity available, but I never thought that anything was unfair or unbalanced after the full release of the game. The AI isn't quite as cutthroat as it could be either, but none of this is a particularly good reason not to sink your teeth into this game. There's a lot here, but I'd be eager to buy DLC or a sequel.

gameplay's really fun and interesting, takes good advantage of the potential the format has. The stories are cute, they have the vibe of those shows that're made for kids but can be enjoyed by anyone, lighthearted with some serious stuff in them.

I'll be honest, reviews tend to scare me away from a game, specially if I haven't tried its demo and there ain't much information of it out there. it almost made me not buy it because I was extremely discouraged from the reviews. but damn, I'll say, it was my best buy last december.
Cross Blitz has charm, substance, depth, it's so much polished, so well produced, you gotta play to see it.
the game has two modes, a roguelite mode named Tusk Tales, which I feel is more arcadey than roguelite, and then there's Fables, which is a story mode.
Tusk Tales gives you 12 characters to play as, and each of them has a major archetype. there's a character which focus on summoning a big tough board, another that focuses on summoning your baddies to shoot cannons at the enemy's board, there are spellcasters focused on their minions dying and board and... there's so much. Tusk Tales is, honestly, one of the most well fleshed experiences I've seen on deckbuilders out there, and it's accessible too. it starts though, but you get the hang of it and it just. gets. better!
Fables is where the game shines the most though. the stories are fun, it's quite Octopath, you know? where some of them appear on someone else's story and you just start to make connections here and there.
there are 4 characters (so far. there's a fifth to come), and each character has 3 chapters each. it's where you're given the most freedom to try out a major archetype and their combos.
I won't say much about these modes because it really comes down to experience. it's just to give you an idea.
Cross Blitz is a hidden gem and I am so glad I got it instead of anything else. and that ALL in Early Access.
10/10, no doubts here.

Leaving this review to raise the overall score a bit. I feel this game got too much negative reviews early on which still haunts them a bit. Personally, I think this game offers a lot, has a great pixel art style and is enjoyable to play. More people need to check it out if they're into this type of genre. :)

This game is cracked. The best comparison I can make to this game to others would be slay the spire and legends of runeterra had a cross over. You've got a campaign mode that allows you to get to know all of the classes and all of the unique play styles those classes have. Then you've got a roguelite mode where you can choose a character to upgrade to do runs with which is super fun. Plus the music and art style slaps. I do have a couple complaints however my main one being that I feel like half of the characters are either ok or just bad. Like the devour and blood token kit just suck because their too slow. And the shimmer, discard, and death effect kits are ok sometimes they work sometimes their too clunky to work with. Also the game does get a little buggy at times (especially with the archers for some reason) but it's in early access so it's understandable why there are bugs in here. Other than that great game and highly recommend u buy it.