Preview: Card Hog

Preview: Card Hog

Hello everyone! Today I have a new preview for you all! This will be about a game called Card Hog, developed and published by SnoutUp. Card Hog is a Dungeon Crawler, but it works with cards. They call it a ‘card battler’. The game is in early access since the 23rd of June and will last for 4 to 6 months. As the title might suggest, you play as a hog, or in other words: a pig. There are eight different hogs to choose from now, and you can play Dungeon loops, Endless crawl, and Flame escape, all three are solo-player experiences. And then there is the option to do Duels, Escape Together, or do a co-op crawl in multiplayer. But is it enough to make it worth it? Find out below!

About the game

As mentioned above, you are a piggy, there are eight of them, and they all have a different passive. For example, one leaves a fire trail, and the other eats a donut when out of combat that heals him. That last one is s a police hog, by the way, I found that a funny twist. First, I would recommend playing the tutorial. Otherwise, you will have no idea what is going on. After that, I went into Dungeon Loops. I enjoyed this game-mode and played it most of the time. I also think this is the main game-mode until they get the Story-mode in the game, which they promise on the Steam page. I started with the Officer named Donny and was having a lot of fun with him. He is definitely my favorite hog.

After you picked your hog, you will see twelve cards with one of them being your hog. Your goal is to kill as many enemies as you can by moving yourself around and collecting weapons. Once you have a weapon, there will be a number underneath your health, stating how much damage you can do with it. This is where strategy comes into play.

Of course, there are bosses in this game as well! Like a spider queen, for example, that makes all other spiders on the field attack you! These bosses can be quite a challenge at the start. But every time you kill one of the few bosses there are with your hog (once each hog), you get a skill point. And skill points are used to upgrade all your hogs! There are fifteen upgrades to get, which is fine for now, but I hope they will increase it for the full release.

What did we think about the game

At the start, I enjoyed the game, running around like a hog killing monsters and bosses. Then the repetitiveness came, and I got bored. So I started with the other hogs, searching for a nice challenge and getting all upgrades and achievements. But after that, there isn’t a lot to do. On the Steam page, they promise more content, like a story mode, more gameplay modes, more playable characters, bosses and various cards, a build-in card editor, and Steam workshop integration. If they really do get all this into the game, I’m sure it will be very exciting. But for now, I couldn’t play it for very long before the boredom set in, because there are quite limited options on what you can do.

Conclusion

SnoutUp is on the right path with this game. If they do what they promise, this will be a gem of a game. But if you are bored fast and need tons of options of what you can do in a game, I would wait for them to get the story mode in, so you won’t get bored after a few hours, as I did. I see a lot of potential, however! So if you want to help them make this game great and give feedback, it would be awesome. It’s quite a cheap game, but it will increase in price when fully released. For those who can miss even less than five euros and don’t mind that there is not a lot to do YET, I would say: support them!