Acolyte of the Altar Review – Big Monsters, Little Content

Look, I’m a simple man. I hear a game is about hunting colossal beasts and I want to play it. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t take the maybe expected shape of a Monster Hunter-like action RPG, but instead is nothing more than a card game. If you let me fight big monsters, I will be there. Acolyte of the Altar promises exactly that. It’s a deckbuilding roguelike developed and published by Black Kite Games, in which you venture through the wasteland fighting off magnificent fantasy behemoths.

What’s noteworthy about this deckbuilding roguelike right away is that it doesn’t really play like the usual suspects in the genre, à la Slay the Spire, but more like your classic collectible card game along the lines of Hearthstone. There’s no Attack: Deal 6 Damage and Block: Gain 4 Armor cards here, but instead you have a mixture of minions and spells that you can play to establish your board turn by turn as your mana increases and attack to whittle down the enemy’s life. In retaliation, the enemy increases their rage bars every turn, which triggers their abilities once filled. So, you know exactly what your enemy will do and when they’ll do it, but this also allows the developers to perfectly synergize any enemy’s abilities, including their timing and everything.

As a result, any beast you fight makes for an interesting fight. And it’s not uncommon that you’ll come across gimmick fights that aren’t simple ‘bring your life to zero’ encounters but challenge you to play in certain ways around the enemy and interact with them beyond hitting each other over and over again. They’re rather well designed, but there do seem to be some balancing issues. Too many enemies just deal direct damage to your character with little to nothing you can do about it, making many of the fights a ticking time clock for no apparent reason. And if you’re unlucky enough to run into a few of those in a row, you will simply lose. Visually, they all look fantastic, though. Creating creatures that are frequently inspired by myth or common monsters found throughout pop culture but are well designed and simply cool-looking.

You can start your run as one of three factions. The Ravagers, which is the aggro class if you want to run and burn your enemy down, The Empiricists, which is the more defensive class, that tries to survive with heals before summoning huge minions. And the Sylvans, which play around status afflictions and other spells. You can combine two of them for any of your runs, which makes for a little more variety, but at the end of the day, it’s still just these three classes. And they don’t come with a whole lot of individual cards either.

This is one of the biggest issues I have with Acolyte of the Altar. The game works fundamentally and has interesting ideas, but as of now there’s simply not enough content (after a few runs you will have encountered every enemy as well), and what is there still needs some balance tweaks. Acolyte of the Altar in its current state would make for a pretty solid early access title that I would believe would become something great in a year or two once it has built out everything a little more. But as a full-game launch, I do question if it can justify that given where it is right now. I will continue to keep an eye on this game and hope it gets updated continuously to turn into the great game that it has the potential to be. But at this point, while I did without a doubt have fun while it lasted, it did not last particularly long. Especially for a roguelike.

Nairon reviewed Acolyte of the Altar on PC with a review code.