Overview
Death Roads: Tournament essentially turns Mad Max into a deck-building game, and I feel like that idea deserves an award on its own. What’s particularly impressive is that Death Roads is not simply Slay the Spire with cars. It’s a very unique deck-building game that plays off of its vehicular combat theme in really novel ways.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube
For example, you don’t simply put individual cards in your deck. Instead, each part, car, and driver offers a specific set of cards that make up your deck. Positioning and maneuvering your vehicle plays a huge role in combat. You can ram enemies and push them around, even into each other or walls. The gear your vehicle is in matters, and vehicles can lose control and enter a dangerous skid.
The way Death Roads: Tournament mixes Mad Max and Twisted Metal with deck-building card play is incredibly clever and makes it one of the most unique and interesting deck-building games I’ve played.
| Gideon’s Bias | Death Roads: Tournament Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: The Knights of Unity, Sure Fire Games |
| Hours Played: 12+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PC | Platforms: PC |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Turn-Based Deck Builder |
| Mode Played: N/A | Price: 14.99 |
Skid Marks
Battles in Death Roads: Tournament are a highly tactical affair of careful positioning and resource management, but the actual gameplay feel is one of crunchy carnage.
Each vehicle has a certain amount of handling, and you spend handling to play cards. Cards allow you to move around, shift gears, use weapons, and a variety of other effects. The trick is, if you run out of handling, you enter a skid where your vehicle pulls cards from a skid deck that can throw you in random directions.
The thing is, there are many layers to the skid system alone. Many attacks also deplete handling, most notably, when you ram another vehicle. You often have to decide how to manage your handling. Do you play a bunch of cards and risk being sent into a skid? Or save enough to absorb the impact of your enemies? With the right build, you can even use skids to your advantage by getting extra chances to smash into the other vehicles.
You also have to think about the handling of your enemies because you can send them into skids as well, causing them to careen into walls and each other. However, after every skid, a vehicle recovers some handling. Sometimes it’s best to lower a vehicle’s handling and then stop, so they have none left to play cards on their turn. It all depends on your build and strategy.
Then there is the whole gear system. Some cards allow you to shift your gear up or down. Many cards have stronger effects when you’re in a higher gear. However, if you enter a skid, you pull as many cards from the skid deck as the gear you’re in. If you’re in 5th gear, you pull 5 skid cards.
There are some serious risks, rewards, and strategies involved with the gear system. Higher gear allows you to do more with less but you run the risk of skidding out of control. At the same time, each driver has a unique deck of 7 skid cards, and if you can predict the possible ways a skid might go, you can turn that to your advantage even further.
It’s a brilliant system with an incredible amount of depth and nuance. It also gives Death Roads: Tournament a satisfying crunchy feeling when cars smash into each other. That’s something that every vehicular combat game needs.
Cars & Cards
Unlike most deck builders, you don’t build a deck card by card. Instead, various parts, such as wheels, engines, and weapons all add card sets to your deck. Each car also has a unique set of three cards that are always in the deck, and every driver has a set of three unique driver cards. As you unlock various cars and drivers, you can mix and match these to your liking.
All vehicles have a slot for wheels and engines. However, different vehicles have varying slots for mounted weaponry and accessories. Furthermore, each vehicle also has a starting set of armor that regains after every battle, and they all do different amounts of condition and handling damage when ramming an enemy.
As you progress through the map, you will encounter random events, battles, and shops where you can gain new parts to replace your old ones. In addition to having different functions, new parts can also give stat bonuses you can use to tune your play style.
I was pretty impressed at just how varied you could go with your builds. You could make a melee-focused car with buzz saws and wrecking balls. Focus entirely on being a ramming machine, gun enemies down with firepower, or make yourself incredibly tanky. I also liked that builds were rarely fire and forget, thanks to the enemy variety.
The different compositions of enemies constantly forced me to adapt to the actual fight regardless of my build. If the enemy vehicles had a lot of firepower behind them, I couldn’t simply just slide to the back and gun them down, even If my build focused on frontal firepower. I might win the fight, but I’d lose the battle of attrition as they would make me pay for the victory with heavy damage.
Instead, I had to constantly adjust my tactics, and figure out how to best use my build against each enemy composition, and that went a long way toward keeping Death Roads: Tournament from ever becoming stale.
Potholes
The events you encounter largely feel generic and they repeat constantly as there isn’t a large variety of them. However, I think the biggest thing that Death Roads: Tournament is missing, is an ascending difficulty model akin to Slay the Spire’s ascension. In fact, there are no difficulty settings at all in Death Roads at all.
This means that at some point, you may “solve” the game and once you unlock all the cars and drivers, there isn’t truly a new goal to shoot for once you have had a successful run.
Modifiers and ascending difficulty are pretty tightly interwoven with the rogue-lite genre, so the lack of them feels like a sore spot. However, Death Roads: Tournament largely drifts away from plenty of established rogue-lite deck-building staples. For example, you don’t discard your hand after every turn.
For the most part, forging its own unique identity is what makes Death Roads, great, and I certainly prefer that to seeing yet another reskinned Slay the Spire. However, I’d loved to have seen some difficulty settings at the very least. The ability to increase the challenge would have made the game even more replayable.
Verdict
Death Roads: Tournament is a very deep game that I only just scratched the surface of in this review. Every combat is an exercise in careful tactics, and mistakes can be costly. In addition to all the layers of its card, gear, and skid system, there’s also a variety of status effects that can further impact the gameplay.
At the same time, Death Roads is easy to grasp. Its short tutorial gets you on the road quickly, and finding out information about anything is as easy as mousing over it. A nice tooltip will show up detailing what something does, including every status effect in the game. You can even look at the decks your opponents are packing.
More than that, however, is just how well some of the visuals relay an enemy’s information to you. After an hour or two, you can tell what every enemy is capable of, just by looking at the weaponry mounted on their vehicles. It’s incredibly intuitive, as the enemies largely follow the same rules you do.
Death Roads: Tournament is a very unique gem in a world of copycat deck-building games. It takes the deck-building concept and uses it in a totally novel and elegant way. The combat is deeply layered and strategic while providing a vehicular crunch that might help scratch the itch that the genre death of games like Twisted Metal left behind.
Managing a gear shift and out-of-control skids for both yourself and the enemy is incredibly clever. At the same time, the streamlined deck building through the use of drivers, cars, and parts works gracefully. Plus the variety of builds you can pull off will make you want to get behind the wheel again, and again.
The lack of modifiers or difficulty settings does impact the game’s replay value and is the only thing standing in the way of Death Roads: Tournament from receiving my Golden Shield award. It’s a fantastic game otherwise.
