Blood Card 2

If I had to guess why I decided to give Blood Card 2 a try, then it's because I still like the idea of roguelike deckbuilders, and back in early 2021 when this was released, there weren't yet that many good ones. I don't think I'd pick something like this up these days, but I decided to honor my past decision by playing this regardless.

So, you pick a class, you pick a difficulty, and your goal is to work through a number of floors, each with a few columns of enemies. Defeating an enemy causes the column to shift down. At the end of one of the columns is a boss. Beat all enemies to win. Each turn you have energy, you have cards with energy cost, damage, and various effects, and you play them until you're out of energy or cards. Then the enemies attack you, and you lose health. Pretty standard stuff, with the exception that you don't explicitly have health. Instead, enemies steal cards from you and you lose when you run out of cards.
I played two full runs at the first difficulty (which was far too easy, but I couldn't play the harder one until I beat it, and even then I could only do so with the character I beat it with, which was a shame) and both classes had a strong synergy with this card stealing mechanic. One generated cheap cards that allowed him to pad his health pool but not clutter his hand while the other got strong buffs from enemies holding onto specific cards of hers. I would assume the rest of the classes were similarly designed around this mechanic, which I quite enjoyed.

Overall, the game design and balance were surpisingly good, given that this game has a very basic UI, and just about zero animations. I'm not very up-to-date with what this genre in general has to offer, but still, this felt a bit weak to me. If you care about graphics at all, then this definitely isn't a game for you. The gameplay wasn't bad enough to really point out something terrible, but I just didn't get a feeling of excitement while playing it. I think everything was just kind of made to be passable and good enough, and it kind of is. If you're just looking for another roguelike deckbuilder to play, this should have a good amount of content time-wise, but nothing about it really sticks out to me, and I wouldn't generally recommend it.