Warhammer 40,000: Warpforge

“The game bombards you with microtransactions: separate $20 premium passes for each faction, "campaigns" that cost the same and offer nothing but extra currencies (no new mechanics, no story), and absurdly overpriced cosmetics — up to $50 for a card back.”

“Extremely predatory monetization (20 dollars per starter deck, 12 factions = 240 dollars for full content + hundreds of dollars of additional cosmetic content).”

“But warpforge has taken it to a new level of pay, so for some examples to buy a legendary card in the store it works out at 25 pounds; that's 25 times more real money than MTG Arena, which has a much bigger player base. Cosmetics cost up to 50 pounds for a card back, making this company a complete cash grab development team. The game offers nothing new, just a generic card game with Warhammer skin hoping that skin alone will sell it. You will have no real value when the game shuts down in a few years; physical Warhammer items offer much more joy and resale value.”

“The game has no story, no actual campaign although you will see the word "campaign" thrown in there.”

“Marketing the battle passes as "campaigns" is deceptive and obfuscating for persons that come into the game expecting a fully voice-acted storyline campaign that unlocks cards as you progress through it, only to be met with another bog standard battle pass system.”

“The storyline and characters seem shallow and probably require familiarity with Warhammer 40k.”

“No graphic settings.”

“You can't even go actual full screen observation mode on the cards to admire the artwork; it is just 2x the normal board zoom, so it is hard to see the details in the busy Warhammer style with the sigils and the cloaks and the demon parts sticking out everywhere. Half the time, you just see a distant vague humanoid form with weapons and a helmet.”

“The graphics and general movement in game are very lackluster and not very immersive.”

“There's no meaningful way to earn cards just by playing well—everything is gated behind weeks of grinding miserable daily tasks or opening your wallet.”

“Building a competitive deck requires several months of grinding, encouraged by the usual free-to-play incentives to play very regularly: daily login bonus, daily missions, daily skulls, weekly challenges, store rotations. The missions are menial chores like 'draw 20 cards' or 'trigger 10 times this keyword.'”

“The game mechanics are really fun and I love the voice lines and art, but the game is horrendously slow to progress, taking weeks of grinding to even toy with the idea of getting higher rarity cards to create a more unique deck; forge rewards take thousands of points worth of tiers to get defenses/offenses, a mechanic that works regardless of your deck construction and impacts the game based on whether you go first or second.”

“Bugs on bugs with game-breaking results like soft locks, hard freezes, and as of new with a brand new biggest change (that ruined this game and doomed it for competitive players) has some API hard locks on game start/finish that, of course, are the devs' fault, giving you an automatic loss.”

“Honestly, everything is convoluted, slow, unintuitive, and buggy, from the cards screaming the same dead-tone single liners on each attack over and over, to the user interface having a mini stroke every time you click on a card to see what it does or to change your attack options from melee to ranged.”

“You still encounter freezes from time to time, memory leaks when playing the game for too long (apparently they did not think this would be possible), and still get paired with high-level players/veteran players that show a clear unbalance in deck building during ranked sessions (at least it can be considered fair to some extent). The draft mode also needs some rework.”

“Soundtrack is just one or two songs, gets repetitive.”

“Exact same music playing across all of it, resetting every time you complete a match.”

“It's not good music, either.”

“When I select a card to reorder my hand, there is stuttering. This is unacceptable.”

“The UI is optimized for smartphones and it shows. The UI on PC is buggy and dialogue windows prevent you from doing certain actions, annoyingly making you wait for the card dialogue to finish.”

“So rather than play with your favorite faction, you have to spam bot games with factions you don't like that aren't optimized to complete dailies.”