So, I was in the second Sword Girls closed beta! I meant to post this much earlier but Steam sales sidetracked me.
Swords Girls is yet another flash-based, online CCG. It's most distinctive feature is that unlike many other card games in the West, which depict things that generally want to kill/maim/destroy other things (or farmers. I'm looking at you, Dominion), you have a bunch cute anime girls... who happen to kill, maim, and destroy other girls and a few monsters. There actually seems to be some kind of overarching plot, but it doesn't really make any sort of appearance outside their website as far as I can tell.
The game includes three card types: Character, Follower, and Spell. All cards have an Emblem, telling you what faction they belong to: certain cards only have effects on others of a certain faction Character cards represent you: they set your total life and each have an ability of some sort of to set them apart. Followers are your main workhorse: They stay in play, attack your opponents and their followers to defeat them. They have 4 characteristics, Size, Attack, Defense, and Stamina. Size is part of the game's resource management system, which will be reviewed later; think of it as analogous to mana cost in Magic. Attack is how much damage the card deals when it strikes other followers, defense reduces damage taken, and stamina is the total amount of damage it can absorb before it dies. Spells also have a Size, but are one shot effects that immediately go to your discard pile after use.
The deck building limits aren't very different from what you would expect: You must have 30 cards, exactly in your deck, and it can only contain a variable (mostly 3, but some are limited to 1 or 2) number of copies of a single card. The interface is simple and workable, with a list of the cards currently in your deck on the left, and a sortable display of your cards in the middle. It is possible to train and upgrade your cards, and give your Character cards gifts (of other cards... it's a bit of strange). During my play I didn't encounter any upgraded cards, but it is a point of a concern for me: the game seems to imply these upgraded cards will have better stats, and the upgrading process has a chance of failure, like many Korean MMOs. If these upgraded cards are significantly better than their ungraded counterparts, I worry for the new users.
The gameplay isn't too different from what I've come to expect from these flash CCGs; the gameplay is highly automated and you do everything during your turn, which little to no ability to react to your opponents moves. Cards are arranged in a semicircle in front of your character, with slots numbered from 1-5. You can only play cards up to your maximum field size (which is 10. I have yet to see anything that can change this limit) and you always play cards to fill the slots sequentially. This the key resource in Sword Girls, Size. You can play any number of cards as long as the field never never goes over the size or slot limit. Cards with higher Size ratings generally have better stats than those without, and direct attacks to the enemy character is based on Size, not attack. This is a double edged sword however: If a follower is killed, your character loses life equal to its size rating. You can play as many or as few cards as like onto the field, and if you don't like your hand you have the option to shuffle it into the deck and draw a new one twice during the game. A coin flip determines whose cards and skills will activate first. Spells will always activate before followers, but the order they and your followers activate is random. Spell activations just trigger their effect and are gone, but followers will attack another follower on the enemy field randomly. If there are no enemy followers They seem to have a slight preference for targets their attacks will kill, but they won't always go after them. If an enemy follower lives after it is attacked, it will counterattack. There is no limit to the amount of counterattacks a card can perform in a turn, and abilities that trigger on attacking will trigger on counterattacks. Thing pass back and forth between you and your opponent until all cards on the field are activated, which ends the turn, and you start all over again until things are done.
The game's greatest strength is obviously its artwork: it's all very good, the quality is consistent across cards, nothing looks like a quick Photoshop edit. That having been said, I know some people hate anime-styled artwork, and this game is not for them. It feels at times like someone tore out the pages of an artbook and tacked on some numbers to make a game.
The main gameplay really stems from deck building rather actual play decisions as there are so few of them: what cards to play and whether to shuffle for new ones. The automated process covers the rest, with no real input from you. This can be a real source of frustration as some of you followers will make suicidal attacks when there are targets they can actually remove. The randomness also sometimes results in an enemy follower becoming basically invulnerable through spells or abilities which increase their stats and very dumb attacks by your followers. The whole thing can make you feel somewhat helpless as you watch a pumped enemey follower rip through your ranks with counter attacks after yours blindly attacked it for 1 damage and were killed by its counters. You can't skip the animations, so the resulting battle sequences can take quite a while. You can't actually affect the resulting outcome in any way, so it's a little surprising there isn't a "skip" button.
Swords Girls suffers from the same general flaws that card based games have in general. The tutorial serves passably as a introduction to game, but it's really not very good: I don't know if i would've been able to really make the effective changes I did to my deck without my prior experience in Magic. They also make you choose a starter deck in the very beginning, without any listing of what they contain and just a brief, very limited to description. This happens in a lot of these card games, and I find it to be a terrible thing because it's difficult to know how the decks will really play and if you'll actually like that particular playstyle. Luckily in the beta, they gave you enough free cash to purchase all of the starter to try them out, but I doubt it will be so easy at launch. For the moment, most of the factions seem to have very similar cards. For example, each faction has a card that boosts 2 cards of the same faction's attack and stamina. They each seem to have vanilla followers with the exact same stats. The abilities on cards do differ, but even then they tend to just be stat boosts on attack or on being attacking. The rather limited amount of spell cards seem to do most of the differentiation among the factions. I am unsure if this is the intended feel. They may have wanted people to be able to play with basically nay art setup they liked.The same concern with "buying your way to victory" is present here as well, as there seems to be a definite advantage if one decides to pony up the the money: rare cards do seem to be better than the commons and uncommons.
Overall, the game is free, and it is honestly worth a shot to see if you enjoy the way it does things. It's quite easy to just play a few quick games and be done with it. I personally wouldn't call it a deep or very innovative game, but it is certainly presented well and as enjoyable as any of the others I've played.
Too Long, didn't read?
Good: Art, theoretically free, fairly easy to pick up
Personal Preference: Most of the strategy seems to come from deck building and not play decisions
Bad: Battle animations unskippable, memorization of cards may be necessary, factions are not really distinct.
