Thank you Iceberg Interactive for sending us a review code!

Mahokenshi is a weird type of game that I never knew I wanted, but I deep down did. I have also never seen a game draw me in with such fun gameplay to then suddenly put me off as much as it did in the span of one level. Mahokenshi is a recently released RPG (role-playing game) strategy game that combines deck building and roguelite elements with a map similar to games like Civilization. You walk around on the map, made up of floating islands, and collect resources to build up your deck in order to fight evil cultists and their summons.

While this gameplay might not be anything revolutionary I found it very pleasing to use. The way you move across and interact with the maps feels very similar to some TBS (turn-based strategy) RPGs and makes it feel different than your standard deck builder. That, to me, is a major plus since I don’t have the most fun with deck builders, but I love the other elements this game brings in and mixes with it.

Mahokenshi, while being a deck builder, is very much a roguelite. While you do have to start over if your character dies, it is set up with a campaign, with side missions, that count as their own run with leveling done in between these missions. Losing can still be a setback, with some missions being rather long while not allowing you to save mid mission, but this game is a lot more forgiving than other deck building roguelites out there.

While there is a campaign there isn’t much in the way of a story. When you first boot up the game there is a detailed opening going over the lore of the world and it talks about the 4 houses your heroes come from. Each hero also has their own backstory, but once you start playing the actual story becomes mostly to do the objective. It so much becomes that to the point where the bits of story you get in mission, usually events you have to go to and start and are typically side objectives, has parts of the text blurbs in bold text so you can skim over it quickly to get all you need to know and skip the rest. I started off trying to read the text blurbs at first, but they were all quite generic and just added a bit of fluff. It sadly feels written with the intention to just give you the quest details and any other details are secondary. To make it a bit worse, as you progress the story you get before entering the missions, with cutscene and narration, becomes quickly about two sentences long and either bad guys doing bad things; kill them, or protect the villagers. I mean, hey, it is good versus evil and you don’t need much more reasons to kill the cultists summoning evil, but it could have been nice giving the game’s opening spell.

That leads me to the setting. The game is set in some special realm with floating islands and nice fantasy Asian floating islands. You have your four houses of Mahokenshi who help protect the realm from evil. To do so they use different real world sort of tactics, armored samurai, stealthy assassins, etc. mixed with more artistic liberties such as flight and ninja clones, some done by aid of talisman. Your enemies in this land are cultists who are summoning evils such as onis and goblins. Yes, goblins. I don’t exactly remember many goblins from my forays into Asian folklore, but that is one of the first things our cultists start summoning. Now, maybe these cultists get more story later, but at the point I’m stuck at they are just summoning evil for the sake of evil such as burning down villages and infusing themselves with demonic powers.

Now while this may sound lacking with the story and setting, the gameplay more than makes up for this. As I mentioned earlier this game combines roguelite deck-building with movement around a map similar to games like Civilization, just with more artistic Asian scenery on floating islands. Combat also happens on these maps without you being drawn into any sort of encounter. Everything is on these maps and you have the same deck to use for movement as well as navigating. While there is an ability to move without using your cards there is no such mechanic for attacking. All attacks are done through cards. When starting a mission, you start off with the same basic set up with any difference being the between mission upgrades. You must move across the map and move onto different spots that will either give you cards at random or collect gold to then head to other spots to spend gold on various other cards or upgrades. You can also find other points of interest that, if interacted with, give the player certain boosts like more card draw, more energy a turn, more base strength, etc. There’s a wide variety of things that can appear on each map and not all seem to have every possible one, though I suspect some of the later bigger ones to have more.

I mentioned earlier that there are four different heroes you can control. Each of them has their own card pool, though there does appear to be a general card pool to get cards from, as well as levels that can be raised from doing missions with them. There’s not that many levels, and it seems to be easy enough to get through them all, with minor grinding, but each gets you a few extras to use on future runs. So far I’ve ran across level up rewards containing more cards to add into the pool, new talismans (talismen?) to get to maybe appear in levels with castles, and items that can be equipped to bring on a run. New cards seem to only appear when using the hero you unlocked them with, but items are free to equip by all and talisman seem to be available to all, though it is hard to tell since which talisman you get offered seems random. There’s one other RPG element which is a skill tree. You get points for this from doing missions and completing side objectives. You can use these to upgrade some of your starting hand, add more possible options into shops, and even make some interactions free the first time you use those services. All of these things really make me stress the lite part of roguelite since there’s a lot of progress to make between runs that won’t go away.

All of this leads me to my biggest issue with this title which is difficulty and a sort of disconnect between certain areas of gameplay. I mentioned early about the story that I had seen up to. That is because I’ve progressed in the campaign a little bit less than halfway and I’ve hit a wall. There is just one really hard and not fun mission I am stuck on. I’ve been here for about 3 hours of gameplay. I really wanted to play all, or most, of the game before dropping the review, but I’ve reached the point where it just isn’t fun and I’m well past the point of continuing to play it if I wasn’t going to write a proper review of it. I could stick it out, though something about the definition of insanity, and I didn’t want to taint this review with the countless hours I’d have to put in to get past this roadblock.

So what is it? To put it simply I’m stuck on a really not fun boss mission. In this mission you have to kill the corrupt scholar before he burns down all five villages on the map. You have to go around the map collecting stuff (cards, buffs, and upgrades) before engaging with the really tough boss. You need to try and gear yourself to the point where you can really kill him quickly since he is geared to just spiral out of control the longer the fight lasts. He attacks mostly by filling your deck with cards that deal damage to you each time you draw them and must be played to get rid of them, but he gives so many it is tough to get rid of them and then attack to whittle away at his massive health pool. He is set up in such a way there is little variation to how you must engage him. That wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact the deck you get is randomized. Some runs you just won’t be able to get the cards to deal with him. The talisman you get, which seems very critical to defeating him, are also random and it takes a bit of time to even reach the point to even get the option to pick one. I’ve even reached out on the steam forums to get help and the general consensus appears to be to just get lucky. The devs even posted a helpful guide, but some components are just random whether or not you get them. I’ve gotten close a few times (boss down to 40% health) though each attempt of those took me some 20 to 30 minutes before I lost. The only other option I can see is to go back and do earlier missions again to get more levels for my heroes, though that adds more randomness since my card pool will grow, and try to fill out more of the skill tree. I could do that, but that’d be another two or three hours and I’m just at the level of frustration with this mission to just be so put off by that prospect I’m just going to call it here. To add insult to injury, and to further cement my issue with the balancing here, there’s a bonus objective to stop the boss before he burns the second village. That’s about 7 turns in. I’m usually losing to him on turn 20 to 30 with one or two villages left. I have no idea how you are supposed to complete that with such a tight margin for error in an RNG experience.

I’m sad it has came to this point, but I just value my sanity more than completing this mission. Also, I have other games I could play that I’m still having fun with. It is really sad too since my first session with Mahokenshi I played just to that point and it was one of the best gaming experiences of my life. Everything went together so well and I had fun redoing past missions to try out different builds and complete side objectives, but this one encounter soured all of that. I think it would be easier to handle if this was more of a strict RPG. If that was the case I could gear myself up properly for the fight, but since this is a deck-builder with some elements of random thrown in, it really isn’t up to me if I will do well. I’ve seen others talk about doing it first try, but for their one heads I’m getting 10 straight tails. The odds are similar just not in my favor. Luckily, I’m not a female lead in a YA novel (nor movie adaptation) and can just choose to play another game.

Graphics overall look fairly nice, though some of the maps are visually a bit busy. Biggest complaint here would be it was sometimes hard to tell if a certain hex was a normal piece of terrain or was something else that could be interacted with. This was extra harder when there was some new map tiles that were added with no introduction. Sometimes the areas just looked like a small variation to break up repetition. A tactical view similar to what the Civilization series has could be nice. My only other complaint is some of the more stylized text was a bit too stylized and was sometimes harder to read. I always thought the '3' used for the remaining energy looked like a '5' for instance. As for audio everything sounded nice. The music was nice and fit the setting well. The narrator who voiced some different scenes did a great job and sounded good. I just wish there was a bit more voiced. Mahokenshi also has some nice sound effects for the moves. I especially liked, even if it haunts me, the sound used for the poison and damage taken from certain card draws.

As for stability I had no crashes, though for the first week or so that I had it before it launched it would just go to a black screen after launching it. It got fixed just right before public release, but I feel like it is worth mentioning since that’s kind of a major problem and there could be some others later, assuming it gets future updates. As mentioned previously, the creators decided to not add in a way to save mid mission which can be a bit of a bother for longer missions since you need to do them in one sitting or just leave the game running. I also experienced some annoyances with trying to occasionally use cards or select things on the map. It seems like the hex and character on it are two separate things and sometimes you can select one and not the other. It might not be that bad, but I kept getting cards to not play by it targeting the hex and not the enemy on the hex. Also, reentering certain locations if you are already standing on them can be difficult. Finally, it could have handled cards that deal damage to you when drawn a bit better. Each card does 2 damage when drawn, but each 2 damage gets its own multi-second long animation of your player taking damage. This can really slow down your battle when your whole hand of seven cards are those. It would’ve been a bit nicer to not have to wait so long before I could start playing anything.

Morally this game didn’t have much happening to knock off points for, though it is heavily based in some Asian mythology and has stuff such as talisman being used, demonic creatures from Asian mythology being summoned, and you doing various forms of magic. Due to the sheer nature of the game there really isn’t anything sexual present, at least as far as I know. There is some violence, with you killing evil cultists and their demons, as well as a decent bit of occult going on, but it seems to be exclusively used by enemies. There’s also corruption pits, which most of the demons, and goblins, come from as well as some cultists being taken over by evil spirits. With that said, there seems to be a strong stance against messing with the occult or demonic forms since it is viewed as a bad thing what the cultists are doing and is sad that some have been taken over by said forces. As for the violence it mostly revolves around doing various attack animations on enemies who hardly take damage from the moves, but when you do defeat them the sort of fall over and disappear. That said, I think certain demonic creatures sort of melt away after beign killed. You also very early on fight against some bandits, but it is shown that they are left alive after battle since you interrogate them in order to learn about the cult making them do it or otherwise face death. As for any language there wasn’t any I noticed, but I haven’t, at the time of writing this, done every side quest in each mission which is where the chunk of the rather small amount of dialogue seems to happen.

To finish this off, this is a rather promising title that I want to like, but due to the issues I ran into I just can’t personally recommend. Maybe after a balancing patch it will be fine, but if you are a gamer similar to myself I just can’t recommend it. That said, you might read about my roadblock and think it doesn’t sound bad and in that case I’d recommend this title. If you don’t think you will get stuck like I did, and like this style of game, then it should be an awesome time. I really enjoyed my first session and I’d love more games to get made like this one and I look forward to what the developers make in the future.

-Paul Barnard (Betuor)