Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming.Today we are going to take a look at Second Second. This roguelike card game promises fun battles with cards without actually drawing cards. Whether it can deliver on this promise is the question we will try to answer today. Second Second is available on Steam for 13 Euros and 29 cents or your regional equivalent.

With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Disclaimer: I have received this product for free!

Video Review

Text Review

A roguelike? And a card game? At once? Sign me up! I love both card games and roguelikes so when I saw this in the Steam store I immediately wrote to the developer whether he could provide me with a review copy. And when he did I went and started playing right away.

Gameplay

So, what exactly is the deal with Second Second? It’s single-player roguelike card game, somewhat inspired by Slay the Spire I’d say. And what does Second Second have to offer? Two game modes, the first being the story mode. Without me doing any spoilers, I can honestly say – the story … is just not great. Not that I don’t like it being there as it provides you with a good starting point where to start with Second Second, but honestly, the game could exist and not have a story mode at all and most players wouldn’t care at all.

The second game mode – Standard – is where you will be spending the majority of your time. And truly, there’s truly only one difference. But the thing is, it’s kind of a big deal. The very core of the combat works differently in standard mode. And honestly, I find that to be a very weird choice. But let me first explain how the combat works in general before I go into the differences between the two modes.

So the combat. Obviously, it works by playing cards. But that’s what you would’ve guessed in a card game. But the unique way Second Second approaches it is by not having draw as a feature in-game. Then, how do you win if you don’t draw card? Well, the cards you have are instead put into slots. And each of these slots can have up to three cards in it. And the cards themselves have a limited number of charges so you need to plan your battle pretty well.

And the number of cards available is actually quite impressive. There’s over a thousand cards for you to find in the game and I can guarantee you that you will need a lot of time to discover them all. Plus each of the cards is available in one of four different qualities. Now wait a second, I hear some of you saying, “ugh, that means I have to grind out legionaries to beat the hardest bosses, blegh” and well, you’re not wrong. But, it’s not a lot of grinding. And that is thanks to a very elegant solution in my mind. You can upgrade the cards you are actually using instead of relying on random drops. And yes, there will still be some grinding as to upgrade a card to a legendary you still need another legendary to be destroyed in the process. But, honestly, that doesn’t take as long as you might expect.

Now to the real combat itself, you cast cards, some of them deal damage, some of them apply status effects, some of them combo of each other, other cards heal you or provide shields. You know, the typical. If I were to go over all the types of cards and all the mechanics that are here I would be here for hours. But there is one thing I do need to explain. Instead of mana cost, the cards have cast times. And each turn you have a limited amount of time to cast in. But honestly, it works pretty much just as mana. With one exception. You can use a card that has a longer casting time compared to what you have available. And when you do that, it will actually cast on on the opponents turn. This is a very cool mechanic, one that I don’t think I’ve seen really used previously and provides an additional layer of strategy in a subtle yet powerful way.

Okay, it’s time to finally explain the one difference between story mode and standard mode. In story mode, you always have 10 blocks of time available for you to cast in. But in standard, for a reason I honestly don’t understand. You start with a single block of time, on your next round you have 2 blocks and you see where this is going, aren’t you. This creates unnecessary confusion between the modes. I, for example, played first through the whole story mode. And enjoyed my time. And when I finished I was looking to play some more and ventured into the Standard mode. And I was utterly confused as over the course of the Story mode I’ve gotten used to using a certain combination of abilities when I started a new campaign. And suddenly, this just wasn’t an option. Plus, it makes the Standard mode actually much harder compared to the Story mode, especially in the early levels before you can access to power abilities.

Seriously, in Standard mode, I have died a few times to the first enemy. And not because my tactic was wrong. Just because the random enemy that was generated to face me had a set of cards that weren’t beatable by the cards I had access to. This really shouldn’t be the case. And I know it was probably by design, to make the game appeal to “hardcore gamers” but, hardcore gamers don’t want bullshit RNG killing them. They want skill to matter. And in a game where you randomly get abilities and sometimes you just get abilities that do shit. Well, that’s not hardcore. That’s bullshit.

And it is also bullshit placed in a very unfortunate spot. It’s in the place where you should come for replayability. But honestly, I would much rather play story mode over and over because the story doesn’t matter and there is so little of it.

There is also one more problem the game suffers from. A weird combination of too much and not enough information at the same time. I know, I know, that sounds like a statement that makes no sense, but listen. The amount of mechanics in game is absurdly high. Seriously, if I go only through the mechanics that are available to you at the start when you pick your character, there are 27 different mechanics. Each of them with their own keyword, graphics or whatever the developers decided to use. Plus there are other on cards that you can get in pack during your playthrough. Yes, some of them are very basic. But some are pretty ridiculously complex and if when you read their tooltips they aren’t always super clear.

But, how does this all feel when you put it all together. Well, it is fun. Once you get into it. And if you stick to Story mode. Standard mode could be easily fixed if the part of ramping up mana (or time if you want to stick with the game's terminology) was removed because the way Story modes handles it is much more consistent and doesn’t cause you to randomly lose battles because you got unlucky with your packs. Hopefully, the devs change this. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of familiarizing yourself with all the mechanics and once you do that, you’ll have plenty of fun.

Graphics

Okay, time to look at the graphics. Which are gorgeous. Seriously. It’s a wonderful looking. I have no idea what the style is called, but every single screen and animation is filled with the artist’s love and I can’t get over how amazing this looks. For me personally, this is one of the contenders for the most beautiful game of this year. Great job on the visuals guys.

Music

In terms of music, meh. It’s there, it’s okay. I won’t listen to it in my spare time.

Performance

Performance wise, yeah, the game runs well, but what would you really expect. It’s a 2D turn-based game. There is one weird issue where whenever you start the game it always shows you the tutorials. Luckily you can just click next many times over and it goes away. Still, get this fixed devs, it’s annoying.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: Second Second is an interesting addition to the card game market. It has several unique mechanics and is fun to play. Thus, you may think I will recommend it without a doubt. But, it has its issues. I feel the Standard mode need to be fixed in one way or another to feel less random and something like a little encyclopedia that would explain all of the mechanics to you in more detail would go a long way as well. But the real reason I can’t give this game an easy pass is the price. While the value you get is pretty much infinite as you can just play it forever, it will eventually run its course. But it truly needs only a small discount, just make it go under 10 Euros and then go for it.

One more thing though, the game should eventually see release on Android as well, at least that’s what I see on the developers webpage and I feel that if it is under 10 bucks there, I will go for it, because there currently isn’t a better singleplayer offline card game for Android that I know of.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page