HANDS ON - Bloons Card Storm strips away the guff and focuses on pacing

21 Oct

Written By Jay Tee

Speedy and slick.
By Jonathan Garrett
21/10/24
Previewed on PC.
Access provided by Ninja Kiwi.

Bloons Card Storm is an iterative revisit of a well established formula that scales up from mobile to PC in a lean, no frills package. You won’t be bombarded with pop ups and unwelcome overlays at every turn (which is often synonymous with gaming on phones), thankfully leaving the focus of your time on the actual gameplay itself.

As card battlers go, this is far more feature complete that you might expect; PvP and cross play are both fully supported here, with cross save in place if you want to continue playing on the go. Turns are snappy with hardly any downtime, which encourages you to dive in head first and take a “learn as you go” approach to the mechanics. It doesn’t want to waste your time.

Loading times are lightning fast thanks to the well optimised graphical design; the technicolour palette that would make for an eye catching grab on the Play or Apple Stores has translated well to the “big screen”. You could be forgiven for thinking it’s a somewhat slight experience, given the simplicity of the UI. But you don’t have to progress far to realise there’s more on offer here.

There is however a systemic repetition to the gameplay loop that will either enthral or grate depending on your investment in games of this type. For some, the familiarity and rhythm of turn based combat will be enough to keep you locked in. However, as a novice with games of this type, it wasn’t something that immediately clicked for me.

That being said, it’s immediately apparent that Bloons Card Storm has taken an already recognisable format and iterated smartly. The full free to play release drops on October 28th.

TARPS?

At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.