Ash of Gods: The Way Review: A Breath of Fresh Air for Card Battlers

I was lucky enough to be given a key for Ash of the Gods: The Way from developer AurumDust. I'm happy to say I'm very impressed. It just ticks all the boxes. It's snappy and fun. There’s a lot of customization and variety in deck builds. Even better, the game design forced me to make use of all the different options available to me and experiment a bit. I never quite realized until I played this game how complacent most deck builders leave me, and how badly I wanted something like this that pushes me out of my comfort zone. While I’ll get into it, let it be known – if you like deck builders and are looking for something that’s a little outside the norm, I cannot recommend Ash of Gods: The Way enough.

One thing that surprised me out of the gate it this one has a pretty thorough story full of political shenanigans told in the style of a visual novel. I can't really think of any other deck builders with this much story off the top of my head. Even cooler, the choices the main character makes impact how the game unfolds and what ending players get. Though mileage may vary with how enjoyable the story is. Initially, I found the story a little over top with how grim and dark it was. Give or take a couple of hours, the care and passion put into the story shone through and the characters really grew on me. 

Including a competent story is great, but the meat of the game is the card battles. They are a lot of fun and super addictive. It's on paper a tactical card builder, but it's one that's well-designed with a lot of depth. I found the game’s description of being easy to learn and hard to master pretty on the nose.

Battles start off as the familiar play cards, the strongest card wins, things escalate pretty quickly, first with various abilities and spell cards. Then it moves on to a variety of factions and then escalates further by giving each card an upgrade path with a number of options. When it’s all said and done, there are numerous ways to achieve each victory condition.

The game features plenty of victory conditions and scenarios, which gives each battle a different feel. At times it feels almost like a puzzle box, where it often was a question of what build to use to achieve the results I wanted. Given the game has a pretty decent difficulty curve and I’m a casual, I lost a lot. In a wise design choice, the battles were not very long, so each time I lost, I found myself quickly back in the ring to try something new. Through my wins and losses, and more of the game opening up as I progressed, I had the really satisfying feeling that I was growing as a player and getting better.

 I will note as well – besides having solid gameplay, a lot of care was put into all the little details surrounding the game. This game looks really good. It has a gorgeous art style that captures the mood of the game and makes it really fun to look at. The soundtrack is a banger. What I also found impressive is that this game has voiced dialogue – which is amazing considering that there is a lot of words in this.

I got the Switch copy of the game, and in my opinion, handheld is the optimal way to play this game. It really lends itself to being something I picked up for 10-30 minutes, played, and then put back down. The Switch copy also played almost flawlessly – there were a couple of times when it crashed when it sleep mode. That said, a lot of problems with Switch ports, such as dropped frames, simply were not present in this one.

There's no shortage of deck builders or tactical RPGs this year but this one has stuck with me. Even against Nintendo First Party titles such as Fire Emblem Engage and Advance Wars, this really stands out as the far superior game and is the one I keep going back to. All in all, this game gets the possum gold star of approval!

Big thank you to AurumDust devs for gifting me a key and then being so patient with me getting my review out while I recovered from covid!

Check out Ash of Gods: The Way on Nintendo Switch for $24.99 here!

On a side note, Raylo is a surly jerk, and my favorite character.