SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS

After arriving at the Card Tower to take part in a tournament, a computer called Max has somehow brainwashed the participants and is trying to take over the world by card battles. The story doesn't make much sense and the dialogue is extremely poor. It seems to be poorly translated but could have easily been perfected if they let an natural English speaker proof read it!

The Card Tower is split into two sides; the SNK side and the Capcom side. Depending on which side you battle through, you'll have access to different shops and will battle different themed decks. You can switch sides every couple of floors. However, because of the limited access to the shops, it proves extremely frustrating when you reach the floors where you aren't allowed past a character unless you find them certain cards. Being only allowed to access the Capcom shop and being told to bring SNK cards meant I had to battle the same person over and over again and gamble card packs. Given that there are only 5 cards in a pack, and 2 of them are normally non-character cards, this meant a lot of time was wasted.

The battles themselves are pretty straightforward. Decks are composed of 50 cards and can contain character cards, action cards, and counter cards. You can put character cards into play by spending 'force' which are generated from the characters you have in play. Each character card has HP and an attack rating and the stronger cards cost more force to put them in play. There is quite a bit of strategy when choosing to defend and attack. If you attack, your characters cannot defend next turn. When attacking, you do not chose which cards to attack, the decision is up to the defending team. Even if you have enough characters to defend with, you may chose not to use them, and let them attack you directly and drain your own HP bar. The advantage is that cards in your area generate force which can then put the better cards into play. The game is over when one players main HP bar is empty.

There are many cards in the game, but since I was only familiar with the Street Fighter franchise, I only recognised a handful of characters. Most character cards also have special abilities that can be activated by spending force icons. Again the text is poorly translated so its unclear what some attacks do. Also, I thought that these attacks weren't worth their cost, and only used them a couple of times throughout the whole game. After playing for a few hours, you quickly realise that a good strategy can be achieved by playing basic, low cost cards as quickly as possible to outnumber your opponent, and this will also generate as much force per turn as possible, which allows you to play the big guys in to finish the fight if need be. Overall, if you like card games, then it may be worth a look, but there are enough frustrating aspects of the game to ruin your fun.