Star Realms is a deck building card game which was originally a table top game that was published in 2014 by White Wizard Games. The PC version of the game was released onto PC on March 8th 2016.
I am a huge trading card game fan, on a daily basis I play at least three hours of Hearthstone, and have played Pokémon and MTG in the past too. Star Realms is a game which instantly took my fancy from the screenshots. Once you get your head around how to play the game, which sadly the tutorial doesn’t do a fantastic job of explaining things, it is a really simple yet addictive card game. I love the deck building side of the game since you can pick and choose exactly how you want to build your deck depending on the type of opponent you are facing.
You start each turn with at least 4 or 5 cards in your hand; you can play all of your cards if you choose, this in turn gives you damage points, and resources to choose another card to add to your deck. Games start off quite slowly but soon ramp up to some pretty high numbers being thrown around. It sounds really simple when it is explained properly, but somehow the tutorial manages to over complicate it to the point where it is almost as easy enough to teaching yourself how to play by just jumping into the game.
The game’s art style is in a pretty generic sci-fi theme. You can quite clearly see the game was designed for a tablet, as the UI is pretty poor for a PC game. The clunky designs of menus are a little off putting. The UI in the game itself is OK, you can see all of the required information fairly easily, but again it is very “tablet-fied”. The audio is pretty sub-standard too, sounds like some stock sci-fi music playing in the background with some fairly generic sound effects too. Although these aren’t all massive pointers for a card game, I would still like to have seen an average attempt at these elements.
Star Realms is being advertised on Steam as a free to play title, but really, it’s simply a demo for the full game. The single player campaign mode is gated after the first chapter, which is only five levels itself and you cannot play multiplayer without buying into the full game. Alas I did actually make the purchase of £3, 99 to get access to the full game, because I was having a really good time playing and wanted to play more. Sadly after purchasing I was greeted with an error message of “401 Unauthorized” and no way to exit out of that screen other than ALT F4ing. A few people on the forums seem to be having the same problem too which isn’t too promising, so I have requested a refund until the developers can come back to me/solve the issue.
IF the game can be fixed to let me continue playing, Star Realms is a game I can definitely see myself putting another 5-6 hours into, or at least completing the campaign mode. There is a small online community with roughly 100 people being active at any one time, but I would personally only see this as a single player experience at the moment.
Other than the technical issue I have had with the full version of the game, everything else seems to be running fine, and even has support for 4k resolutions too! For me the issue is with the game claiming to be free to play when in fact it is just a demo, which doesn’t sit right for me. There is gated content behind the paywall, which doesn’t seem to be working correctly sadly. I hope this can be fixed in order for me to play the rest of the game. Without the technical faults, Star Realms is a neat little card game, which any trading card game fan will enjoy. A game can last between 5-10 minutes, so has a very casual feel to it. At the moment I am purely going to just recommend this title and nothing more. I really want to be able to highly recommend this game, because I have had such a blast with it so far…. I will definitely be re-purchasing the full game if the developers can fix the issues and I will for sure re-visit my review in due course.
Tom’s Score Card
1) Stay away
2) Not Recommended
3) Only recommended when on sale
4) Recommended
5) Highly recommended
6) This is a must play