When you get down to it, the ultimate barometer for a game is whether or not it’s fun. Is the game hard to put down? Is there enough content to keep you entertained for a sufficient amount of time? In all three cases, Shadowverse get a resounding YES. That’s not to say that the game is without its flaws. The biggest problem I found was the plot getting in the way of playing the card game. I’d want to get back to card battling but you have to take long breaks to let the plot continue.One of the measurements I use for the quality of a game is whether or not I’m playing for the fun of it or playing it just to collect items and meet achievements. In Shadowverse, you get some reward regardless of whether you win or lose and there sure as heck is a huge collecting element to the game. However, for me, the game is fun just for the sake of playing. Even if there were no rewards, the card battling would still be fun. The collecting element only adds to the game. The real fun is facing off against a new opponent who wallops you. Then it’s time to adjust your deck for another round. You can just play with the premade decks, but I love to tweak.There are eight different classes of cards as well as generic cards that can be placed in any class of deck. With a total of 600 cards in the game, that means there’s probably in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 cards per class with the rest being generic. There are 40 cards in a deck and a maximum of 3 cards of one type so there are a lot of chances for huge variations. Each of the card classes have a very strong and obvious theme that you can exploit. You start with premade decks that you can then modify. What I would do is remove all the generic cards from a deck and then over time determine which cards really didn’t work and replace them with something better.As much as the plot can often get in the way of card battling, it is good for slowly ramping up the difficulty through the story. It also forces you to spend significant amounts of time with different deck classes, which is pretty cool. There are loads of side quests for someone like me who loves to explore as much of a game as possible. If you’re trying to get 40+ hours out of a game you should easily find it here and this is the kind of game that has endless replayability. Shadowverse has an 82 on Metacritic which to me is a low score. It might not be the slickest, most polished game on the Switch, but it makes up for that in shear fun. This is definitely one of the hardest games for me to pull myself away from.
