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Night of the Full Moon Review

Night of the Full Moon is a Free to Play deck building, roguelike game available for both mobile and PC, although the mobile version is much superior and the form I am reviewing today. With over 600 cards to choose from, 8 vastly different classes and over 100 monsters and bosses to fight, the replayability is incredible!

Story

Personally I do not take any interest in the story aspect of this game I just really enjoy the actual deck building, adventuring style. But having said that it definitely does have a somewhat coherent story; You play as Little Red Riding Hood who heads out into the night to find her Grandma and meet and whatever lies in your path head first.

Gameplay

The game has 2 different modes, the base game (Full Moon) and the DLC (Red Hood Diaries). Full Moon features all 8 different classes to choose from (Knight, Ranger, Nun, Witch, Magician, Apothecary, Werewolf, Soul Hunter) all with unique on use skills, vastly different play styles, builds to go for, a normal difficulty and an 8 level hard mode progression system. When playing you will move through 3 different chapters, with a boss at the end of each. You will be presented with 3 options to choose from at any point up until you reach the boss, i.e Fairy Blessing - Village Guard Lv 1 - Mad Scientist Lv1 so you have a level of choice of which order you want to attack things or, whether you want hunt for an upgrade before heading for that incredibly annoying Headless Horseman!

When starting a new game each class has a predetermined 10 card deck that is customisable by gaining new cards via leveling up, purchasing them with gold obtained from defeating monsters/bosses and also found in a multitude of chests. Further customization can be done through leveling up some of your cards such as  ‘Basic Attack’ and removing unwanted/clunky cards. Further depth on top of this is the blessing system, these are passive buffs you will be able to pick up while travelling through the chapters. A Build for Knight I would highly recommend is grabbing as many equipment cards as possible and the blessing ‘Shipborne Artillery’. This makes it so that when playing an equipment card it instantly fires off 6 damage. You will need more to make this build completely bonkers but I will leave the rest for you to figure out.

The Red Hood Diaries DLC is more of the same, slight gameplay tweaks but nothing exciting. In this game mode you have the choice of 4 different classes (Knight, Witch, Apothecary, Ranger) all with 3 distinct builds to go for. When starting your adventure you will be able to choose an out of combat skill, unique starting card only available here, a blessing from the get go and further down the line picking up 2 skills usable in combat. There is a clear progression path here, where instead of having 3 options to choose from as with the base game there is a singular monster in front of you without any of the flavor of discovering Healing Bandages, chests or shops. This does however have new encounters and added more cards to choose from. The DLC feels like an addition to get if you just can’t get enough of the base game and want to support the developers as it doesn’t add much in terms of gameplay aside from the new cards, which on a side note are available to use in the base game if you wish.

Problems

The game isn’t without fault of course, there are some minor translation issues where some things don’t quite read the best English but are more or less fully understandable, just not worded perfectly. The biggest issue however (and trust me this one is a biggy) there is no tutorial and a lot of game systems go completely unexplained at all, for example after you finish a battle any cards that are left in your hand are returned to the top of your deck in the same order for the next battle. This provides you with an extra layer of thought and is a genuinely interesting mechanic but could go completely unnoticed. Most of the mechanics can easily be figured out with a little trial and error and you will soon pick up everything the game has to offer. 

Conclusion

I play a lot of mobile games at work during my lunch break to pass the 30 minutes. I downloaded this title back in the summer of 2019 and have played it almost every working day since then, completely falling in love with its gameplay. This game is a great little time sink with almost endless replayability, if you find yourself looking for a mobile game to play any time soon I couldn’t recommend this higher. 

7.5/10

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A Potential Scalebound Revival?

Platinum Games’s Scalebound was an action role-playing game in development from 2013 up until its cancellation in 2017. In the game players would take control of a main character Drew who would be accompanied by a dragon named Thuban, you would use a variety of weapons and items to combat enemies while also dishing out commands to your dragon for assistance in battle. This interesting style of game play really got myself and a lot of others attention and we were eagerly awaiting it.

Platinum Games have since gone on to release Astral Chain in August of last year which featured a somewhat similar/potentially inspired by combat system. In Astral chain you took control of a Detective from the Neuron special police force, all of these characters have access to a familiar (Legion) that is bound to you by a chain. The combat works by weaving in melee and ranged skills whilst simultaneously commanding your legion to deal out damage. This did however feel a little bit awkward at first but once you got your head around it, it honestly felt pretty incredible. So having seen this it really makes me daydream about how Scalebound could have felt to play.

This has been brought back into public attention again because whilst at PAX East, Hideki Kamiya, Director at Platinum Games took part in the panel ‘101 Things you didn’t know about Platinum Games’. At the end of this, fans were treated to a Q&A where of course the question of revisiting some old and failed IPs was brought up. To which he responded ‘ Okami 2.. Scalebound.. Viewtiful Joe 3.. Dante VS Bayonetta.. Devil May Cry o.. I want to make everything!.. Please email Capcom’. Even though Platinum would love for these titles to live on their ownership resides with other companies such as Microsoft for Scalebound, so the decision would ultimately come down to them.

What do you think, would you like to see the revival of any of these IPs? 

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Plague Inc Removed from App Stores

Small UK Based development studio Ndemic Creations have taken to twitter this week to announce that Plague Inc; a game which involves creating your own virus and trying to spread it round the world causing as much harm as possible, has been removed from the Chinese app stores. In a statement provided on their website it is said that Plague Inc “includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China”.

Plague Inc launched back in 2012 and was well received scoring 80/100 on metacritic and a 7/10 on IGN, for two weeks after launch it retained the top spot on the paid app charts for both iPhone and iPad. It has had a huge resurgence recently with the outbreak of the CoronaVirus shifting people's minds heavily towards the spread of disease and illness. It has soared to back up the charts becoming the number one best selling app on the Chinese market in January.

Ndemic Creations are working hard on getting the game back into the hands of Chinese players but it is currently uncertain whether or not the ruling will be overturned. 

Please follow the link below to read up on the statement: https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/news/173-statement-on-the-removal-of-plague-inc-from-the-china-app-store