A Demo That Should Have Been A Playtest | Rainbow Legends Demo Review

Playtests are an excellent way to look at games early in development and help the devs improve and fix issues before release. Demos are a bit different. Demos are supposed to be semi-complete experiences that take an early vertical slice of a game and allow a player to test out the game before deciding if they want to buy it or not. At the end of the day, playtests are for helping the developers, demos are for helping the consumer.

I start like this because I am reviewing a decent demo that would have been a great playtest. Rainbow Legends is a fascinating game. You get cards for Tetris-like blocks to claim land in a grid-based battle zone. Both sides use their blocks to cover ground, and damage is dealt to the one with less coverage. The concept is simple, yet a twist on turn-based card games. 

The Battles

Let’s start with what to expect from a run in this roguelike card game. You and an enemy will overlook a grid-based zone and fight to claim the most land. Armed with cards representing Tetris-like blocks, expand your territory to fill a bar. At the end of the round, the loser’s score is subtracted from the winner’s, and that is the amount of damage dealt. 

I do love the fact that it’s not a standard card game where you attack enemies directly. Having to claim parts of the zone is fun, and as you progress, you earn more cards with unique coverage and more tiles. 

To get into these battles, you move around an overworld grid that shows the enemies and goodies you can interact with. 

The enemies come in three levels and can be identified by their size in the overworld. The harder enemies scale with health and attack more aggressively. The first difficulty is super simple to defeat. I barely took any damage, and the baby enemies hardly attack. The mid-level ones attack a bit, but I still felt overpowered. It’s not until the boss enemies that I would run into a wall instead of being the wall. The cards the bosses held were more powerful; they had better range and health bars that made me feel small. 

I still haven’t beaten a boss. The massive health bar compared to the minimal damage took forever, and things took a turn for the worse when they started to heal. Even though I was taking minimal damage myself, it would chip away over time, and I couldn’t hold up compared to my enemy. 

I assume there are ways to buff your character before getting to the boss. The overworld has chests, but I’m not sure what you are supposed to use these for. Localization-issue-caused-confusions are in their own section, but I was left confused about what I could do with the chests. 

I had an easier time with the merchant cart. They are scattered around the world just like enemies and chests. They sell cards and materials that, once again, I can’t tell what they do. This has to be useful; maybe they can improve my health or mana. I earned a good amount of gold, so I grabbed a few cards with better range, and they did come in handy a few times. 

Overall, the concept is there. I just don’t understand how to get more health to take on the bosses in a reasonable fashion. If this gets polished up, it can be a great time sink for an evening.

The Puzzle Mode

There is one more mode, and I think it’s perfect. Puzzle Mode gives you a grid to take total control of. Use limited amounts of cards to cover the whole map. This allows you to think. To break down the geometry of the map and think about how to get the shapes to line up perfectly. You can’t make a single mistake, or you’ll find yourself starting over. This is probably my favorite part of the game because it’s a logic puzzle. You might have an idea, but it won’t line up how you thought, so you need to find a new strategy. 

I would play a whole game dedicated to this puzzle concept, and I love that they decided to include this in the game. And the simplicity of the mode seems beneficial because it played the smoothest. There were no real issues that I found when playing the demo. 

Issues

Luckily, I only ran into one bug in the game. The problem was that it was in the tutorial. After finishing the first battle, I repeatedly got the ping to finish the first room before moving on, but no matter where I clicked, I couldn’t progress. This was super frustrating, and I ended up just jumping into the normal game mode. 

Now, here is where we turn to the issues and why I believe this should have been a playtest instead of a demo. This game is not originally in English, and the localization is still a bit rough. The translated parts have grammar issues, and some lines don’t make sense. I would forgive this more if this were a playtest. I would expect a demo to have only minor issues, but there are sections I can’t understand when they are explaining the game to me. 

There are also sections that have not been localized at all, still left in the original language. I am assuming these are not super important, and I was able to stumble my way through the demo even with these untranslated sections. 

The most jarring issues that I see are that the dialogue during a match seems to be translated, but blocked out. These seem to be helpful notes for the player, like about their mana count or effects from cards. Many cards confuse me after reading the effect, and I assume the dialogue is more explanation, but I have no idea. This is the most annoying because I can see the English poking through the blocks. I would like to see what tips I am supposed to get. 

The Verdict

This should have been a playtest. This is not ready to come out as a demo. The developers need more time to polish the game. The gameplay itself seems pretty solid, and the concept is great. The main downfall is the localization that leads to confusion on how to play the game. 

I can’t really recommend this game in its current state if you require the localization to understand the rules. The highest I can give it is a two out of five; the gameplay is carrying the demo, but if you can’t understand how to play it, then you won’t be able to enjoy it.