➤ Teppen, the review 🎮

Teppen has a tough challenge to face. The kind of card games he is experiencing a moment of fatigue in terms of new ideas; not that players are missing, but by now the economic model that is the background is strongly consolidated and game designers are struggling to find solutions that they do not know already seen. Capcom and GungHo Online have tried to have their say on the subject by launching Teppen, a card game with the characters of Capcom as the protagonists, which takes a little from Hearthstone and a little from Clash Royale to try to emerge.

Game mechanics

The game mechanics of Teppen are simple to explain: the player has a certain number of carte randomly drawn from his deck, which must be played on a board divided into three lines. Placing a unit card on one of the rows, it will start attacking the opponent, causing damage if it does not find any defense or confronting the values of the opposing card if one has been played on the same row. Each unit card has attack and defense values that determine how long it can withstand the hits it receives and how much damage it can cause per single hit. Depending on the overall value of the card, it will also take more or less time for it to be playable after being drawn from deck or after playing another card. The action cards and special techniques of the characters make the game more interesting: the action cards are played on their own cards, against the opponent's cards or on the entire board and produce different effects. For example, they can increase the defense of a unit card, or they can give it a strong boost for a turn at the price of destroying the card itself after the attack.

The powers of the characters, which must be charged by accumulating the AP points obtained by playing the other cards, are also different and can be active, that is, they can hit the opponent directly, or passive, that is, give bonuses to their cards on the board. The player who resets the opponent's energy, whose value is always clearly visible on the screen, wins the game. The characters, eight for now, are not all usable right away, but must be unlocked together with their basic decks, by playing dedicated mini campaigns in single player mode. Let's say that if you don't mind seeing Chun-Li battling Mega Man or Albert Wesker battling Rathalos, or Dante battling Morrigan, chances are it will be a pleasant couple of hours, also great for practicing. Once all the characters are unlocked, the main mode of Teppen becomes that of the challenges against other players in the flesh, obviously online, which is also the only way to verify the goodness of the deck you have.

In fact, most of the game time is spent in the deck customization menu, where it is possible to create cards, exchange them and do all the typical operations of the genre. It is also here that the economic system is introduced, based on classic packages.

Decisamente pay-to-win

We specify: playing for many, many hours you can get gold and tickets to buy with card packs without spending real money, but if you want to become competitive as soon as possible it is inevitable that you will resort to microtransactions, i.e. the purchase of jewels that can be spent in the aforementioned packages or in the Season Pass, the latter heralds several advantages such as a faster accumulation of experience points and access to special cards, which only later will be unlockable from all. In short, we are faced with a typical economic model for the genre of card games, definitely pay-to-win since it benefits, and not a little, the spenders, but which has shown on several occasions to be the only one that really works. . Unfortunately it is (also) from this that the main problem of Teppen currently derives, namely the strong imbalances of the decks.

In the genre of card games it is taken for granted that better or worse ones can be created, but in this case, despite the game being launched a few days ago, solutions adopted as standard by many players have already established themselves, which make it substantially superfluous. the rich variety of cards present and cut out all those who are still building their deck at a slower pace. In short, in a certain sense either you adapt or win becomes impossible, also because the game mechanics, extremely rigid, inevitably favor some choices over others. The essence is that the construction phase of the deck is reduced to trying to get the cards needed to have the most used decks, whose codes the network is already full (it is the game itself that allows you to create and share them). From a technical point of view Teppen is excellent, between special effects and character models taken from the original Capcom titles. Stylistically it is a bit confusing and at times it has the effect of a shop of Chinese trinkets, with flames and lights popping up everywhere, but it can be seen given the genre and seen who developed it.

The soundtrack is also in line with the technical side and is made up of sound effects and the most iconic songs from the series of provenance of the characters. I mean, what would Ryu be without the Ryu theme?

Comment

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6.0

Readers (6)

7.1

Your vote

Teppen is a card game in some ways refreshing, thanks to its mechanics that allow fast and exciting games, which at certain moments seem to imitate the rhythms of a fighting game more than those of any Hearthstone. At the same time the game is penalized by its system of microtransactions, definitely pay-to-win, and by some imbalances in the decks that hopefully will be mitigated with future updates, because it is a bit sad to see that after a few days of launch some cards and some characters are no longer used by anyone online.