Cross Blitz
Are you ready? It’s time to BLITZ!
Cross Blitz is a new, exciting card based role-playing game set in a fantastical world teeming with vibrant characters and fierce battles. Select one of five heroes and adventure through their story as you uncover the many wonders of Cross Dawn Isle! From bloodthirsty lion pirates, to showy pop-star bards, you never know what you’ll run into next in this quirky fantasy universe.
Taking inspiration from beloved JRPG franchises like Breath of Fire, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy – and mixing them together with elements from popular card games like Hearthstone, Slay the Spire, and Steamworld Quest – we aim to deliver a unique, thrilling adventure for all types of players.
Cross Blitz contains multiple content-heavy single player modes – ranging from narrative driven story modes like ‘Fables’, to the deadly rogue-like challenge of the ‘Hollow Hunt’. And for those who love a heated PvP experience, exciting challenges await in the ‘Coliseum’ – an online competitive mode with cross-play functionality between all available platforms (PC, Mac, iOS, and Android).
– Play through each hero’s story as they face a variety of trials and tribulations! Sail the dangerous waters of the Southron Sea alongside the pirate Redcroft or explore the underbelly of the bustling city of Dawndell with Quill the pipsqueak thief!
– Collect over 250 cards across 5 factions – War, Nature, Balance, Fortune, and Chaos. Gather ingredients from winning battles to craft even more powerful cards!
– Partake in fierce battles that require strategy and cunning – build the perfect deck to stomp your enemies into dust! Easy to pick-up, but difficult to master, you’ll have to harness the strength of your minions alongside a plethora of spells, trick cards, and Blitz Bursts if you’re to claim victory!
– An expansive world awaits, filled with colorful characters and curious locations. The hex map exploration system makes it easy to navigate from region to region – with plenty of secrets to be found along the way!
– The Hollow Hunt beckons! Play against increasingly difficult opponents as you make your way through this exciting rogue-like game mode, venturing deeper and deeper into the abandoned ruins at the border of the Hellwilds.
– Partake in the Coliseum and battle against opponents online with cross-play across all supported platforms.
– Beautifully rendered pixel art awaits you at every twist and turn.
Cross Blitz is the third project from Tako Boy Studios. Development began in 2019, shortly after the completion of their first game, Candies ‘n Curses. Tom, the studio’s lead programmer, has dreamt of developing his own full-fledged card game for years – and Cross Blitz was his opportunity to turn that dream into reality.
Tako Boy Studios is an independent game development studio, co-owned by Tom Ferrer and Phil Giarrusso. Their design philosophy prioritizes juicy, exciting gameplay populated with colorful, quirky characters – building on the foundations of their favorite games, and melding these inspirations with unique twists of creativity. Lovingly crafted pixel art is their specialty.
Community engagement is important to Tako Boy Studios, and they actively participate in discussion on Twitter and Discord with their audience. By listening to players and incorporating their feedback, they aim to develop the best games they can.
Steam User 92
Game should not have mixed reviews, the negative are bugs and balance issues which are fair but they wrote the reviews before the game had a single update. 2 weeks after release devs put out a very good sized update fixing exactly what i and i assume the community had a problem with, buffing this, making this more fair, removing softlocks etc.
ALSO THE MUSIC GOES FUCKING HARD
Steam User 56
I'm already in on this. There are so many combos. I'm doing the roguelite run to start, and even this has so many options between the companions, spells, and 4x4 grid. Honestly, this is giving me the same excitement level as Inscryption did before.
Update: Beat the roguelite map. You get the ability to buy more mercenaries or upgrade depending on your preference. I went straight to unlocking new mercenaries. Overall a very cool experience. Even at the base level there was a ton of combos and synergy.
Working on the story mode now. You choose a mercenary (2 at the beginning are unlocked out of 5.) Each seems to have their own story chapters that unlock as you progress.
Update: This is exactly what happens. Once a chapter is completed you can move on to the next one. The chapters are really interesting too. It reminds me of some of the hard Kamifuda fights where you really have to think about your deck. Some enemies mill your creatures, some do some nasty traps. Each mission also has added challenges to gain more money if you complete the criteria (e.g. kill x amount of minions, finish in x turns.) This may sound repetitive, but a lot of fights have unique mechanics that have special criteria.
Summary: Way more robust then I expected for 20 bucks. Good narrative, easy to understand. Story is jam packed. One chapter took me (with some breaks for work in between) 1-2ish hours. It looks like 5 different mercenaries with 3-ish stories each, so 15-30 hours alone just in the story mode. Not including roguelite unlocks.
Steam User 73
Please dont listen to the negative reviews, there seems to be some variety of review bombing the game going on here.
It's not perfect, but its also not finished. Buying an early access game means expecting an early access experience. What we have here is quite good, so far, though.
- Lots of content, to say its not all been implemented yet
- Fun card play with promising synergies, would be nice to see some more variety here and there in each faction
- Beautiful artwork
- Charming and delightful soundtrack
If you want a fun card game rpg, this is a really good deal. Maybe wait for the full release if you aren't sold on the early access blemishes though. Im having fun, and thats the best review I could give!
Steam User 46
My eyes boggled out of their sockets when I saw someone gave this game a negative review for being capped at 60 FPS as a 2D animated game. Heavy hearthstone inspiration and very well built. Only criticism is the time animations can take in battle and when crafting cards.
Steam User 15
I'd recommend this game to card game afficianados, but not casual players; the game asks you to counterplay against upcoming bosses in the roguelite mode and change your deck archetype frequently during the campaign mode. I love it, but a lotta people hate it.
This game's got a ways to go during Early Access; I got it on initial release, and it was content rich but ROUGH. I'd be happy to spend this much for 30+ hours of above average card battling, but you worry with these Early Access games, whether they'll routinely improve.
The first major update's here with hefty bug fixes, balance changes, and dev notes. And the devs have a history with successful mobile games supported by post-release development cycles. So I feel about as confident as you can with these things.
Steam User 13
General Impressions
At this stage of Early Access, Cross Blitz is not without a small number of flaws. However, the flaws are, mostly, superficial and easily amended or changed, rather than baked into the core concept or execution.
Beyond these small flaws, which I will elaborate on further down, Cross Blitz is a stunning and truly special addition to the card game genre on PC and - much like Wildfrost on its release - deserves far, far better than the initial Steam reviews suggest.
The game has two distinct modes at this stage: a fleshed-out story mode (with two multi-chapter campaigns at the time of this review), and a roguelite not dissimilar from many other deckbuilders, but with a form of level selection and meta-progression that most resembles the Path of Champions mode from Legends of Runeterra. Overlaying both modes is a charming, bright, well-executed and engaging aesthetic everything from the UI feedback to the art and illustrations themselves, along with excellent, thematic music. Its cards are relatively well-balanced and well-conceived, the relic system (and trinket system, in the roguelite mode) is integrated well into the deckbuilding strategy to allow for a broader range of potential strategies and perspectives to view each card for, and even in this early stage the game offers quite a lot of content and diverse experiences to the player.
Examining Story Mode
Cross Blitz's story mode - probably its selling point - is a rarer form of card game (at least nowadays for non-live-service games) where you accrue currency, relics, cards and levels as you play through a story, complete sidequests and build a collection of different decks to overcome a number of opponents and challenges. For those with nostalgia for the older Yugioh game titles (and some other examples, like the Pokemon TCG for the Gameboy), this is a well-crafted, modernised take on the genre that I find myself constantly aching to return to after each day of work. I particularly like the rewards for defeating enemies in specific ways that encourages the use of different decks and strategies.
If there were faults I could take with story mode so far (having only played half of the first campaign), its that the level-up system for your hero appears fairly bare-bones and the implementation seems to fall flat. You have something resembling a 'skill tree' which is actually just 5 linear columns of improvement. About 2/5 of the upgrades are just "increase max health slightly", another 2/5 is "unlock a new card for your decks" and 1/5 is "unlock a special ultimate skill for your deck" (called a Blitz).
These are weird upgrades, especially in the light that you can respec for free at any time. Some issues include...
1. Because you can only equip one ultimate skill at a time, AND respecs are completely free, there is NO reason to EVER spend a level up on another ultimate skill unless you've maxed out every other upgrade. Even if you want to switch ultimate skills, it's more efficient to just respec when necessary.
2. Similarly, if you're not using any given card unlocks, it's optimal to just respec to grab all of the max-health increases rather than waste the level ups on cards now being used by your current deck.
3. A combination of 1 and 2 above (and the relative infrequency that you would mix cards TOO much from different parts of the skill tree) means that by about level 8-10 (of a max of 20) you feel like you've gotten all of the power you possibly could want from the level-up system, and remaining level-ups are worthless to you.
4. The small max-health increases, though often the ONLY relevant level-up, are really boring.
5. The very nature of ultimate skills and strategy-centric level up cards somewhat stifles possible deckbuilding creativity by rewarding you overmuch for just following one of the four core strategies actually enabled by the ultimate skills on offer.
But the game would be fine without an explicit level-up system at all, and at the very least it's satisfying to unlock your first ultimate skill (which IS a really strong option). I'd love to see level-ups focus on different nuanced improvements, a lower level cap where you actually had to make choices rather than easily unlock all of the useful/relevant options for your deck from early on, and a broader selection of Blitzes/ultimates, whether earned in-game from challenges and quests or by level ups.
Examining Roguelite Mode
Its roguelite mode is also... interesting, featuring an uncommonly broad progression system possibly inspired by Legends of Runeterra or even Hearthstone's Mercenaries mode. It has a number of different missions, expects you to frequently switch characters between missions, and has multiple difficulty options and tweaks.
At first impressions, despite being relatively content-rich, Cross Blitz's roguelite mode does not feel as impressive from my first impressions, though, in part because it is competing in a fairly busy/saturated genre, and in part because it seems to offer you so many cards and stores and rewards, giving the player so much agency over their deck with few restrictions on stacking powerful upgrades, that it seems to lack much challenge. Further, the roguelite mode - like Legends of Runeterra - doesn't seem to reward "fair" gameplay where you try to create a broad strategy or synergistic gameplan, but instead wants you to just cut your deck down to a small number of greatly enhanced cards with a lot of duplicates, which leads to a lot of the battles becoming both easy and repetitive.
Other Issues
The game is a bit buggy, which is unusual for a card game as relatively mechanically simple as this, it seems like. Card images stuck on board after they die sometimes, or seemingly-unintended sequencing of actions or events sometimes occur.
The game is surprisingly slow to load and sometimes experiences framerate issues, which I don't expect for a card game at all.
Respeccing your character (a powerful option, as explained above) breaks your saved decks, even after you respec-back again to recover the same ultimate skills and card unlocks, because the decks reliant on those unlocks don't properly update to become playable again without manual tweaking.
The animation speed is so slow and, combined with the loading time and the delay between phases, leads to the game progressing so much slower than it needs to. The art and music are so good that I wouldn't mind overmuch, but I'm sure - especially in the roguelite mode - the amount of downtime between turns is going to turn frustrating long before I've finished the content on offer.
Some of your most powerful relics are earned early-on in the story mode (such as one that increases the attack power of all of your Pirate units), which constrains a LOT of your deckbuilding over the story because you're encouraged to stick with a specific subset of strategies that receive far more support and enhancements over alternatives. This also plays into my experience of the game being quite easy (so far), but the overall structure of the game offers a myriad of ways for the developers to add challenge in a number of ways yet.
Final Thoughts
Despite the list of grievances and suggestions, I reiterate that this game is excellent. It's content-rich, full of heart, full of strategies and options, and utterly, utterly brilliant and enjoyable. I hope it only gets better as EA continues, because Cross Blitz could very well - without exaggeration - become one of the greatest card games on Steam with just a relatively small number of enhancements.
Steam User 38
Game is fine. Negative Reviews are crazy for a game in early access. Its super fun. Highly recommend. I cant wait for multiplayer when it comes out