Nadir Review

thesixthaxis.com:

It’s somewhat unfortunate foreshadowing that Black Eye Games and Team Nadir chose to name their game Nadir. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a nadir “The lowest or most unsuccessful point in any situation”. Well, it’s not far off…

Nadir: A Grimdark Deckbuilder is a very stylised roguelike deckbuilder, based around the city of Nadir in the bowels of Hell. Your mission, as one of a group of interchangeable and unrelated characters, is to descend through the rings of Hell to reach and defeat a boss using the card-based powers you earn from beating its lower-ranked denizens.

So far, it’s all pretty par for the course — Dante meets tattoo parlour. What makes Nadir stand out, however, is that each of the cards in your arsenal is split in two halves: red and blue. As you play, you attack the enemies by targeting either the blue or red cards in their hand with the corresponding half of a card in yours.

Target a card enough times and you will trigger its attack, allowing for genuinely tactical gameplay strategies. You’ll want to plan around taking status damage, like Bleeding, which damages you every turn, or Counter, which allows the enemy to counterattack your next move.

If you don’t want to attack any of the cards for fear of the crackback, you can shuffle both your own and your enemy’s hands away for a set of new cards, and a minor penalty which changes based on the enemy.

Once you beat an enemy, you can craft a card (presumably) from their remains and add it to the deck, and descend to a deeper circle of Hell.

While this all makes for an interesting set of mechanics, it’s ultimately let down by a massively underwhelming experience.

There are three characters you can choose from, starting with Jeanne d’Arc. There’s no