Infinity Wars could well be the best digital card game to date

There’s no shortage of digital collectible card games (CCGs). From Magic: The Gathering and Might & Magic: Duel of Champions right through to little indie efforts like Orbs CCG, this is a genre that is remarkably good for game developers for two reasons; it keeps people playing for long periods of time and the free-to-play model works brilliantly for it.

I know I must have spent $40 on digital cards in Duel of Champions. And I’m not even close what the majority of reasonable fans will spend on their favourite digital CCG, in terms of both time and money. These games are genuine hobbies in themselves.

So it made me so happy to see at the EB Games Expo that an Aussie developer was taking a crack at a digital CCG. I’m all for Aussie developers being successful and pulling in the fans. Infinity Wars has a long way to go before it has a chance at mainstream success, but after getting access to the closed beta, the potential of this game is truly incredible.

The most obvious unique feature of the game is also one of the first things that the typical player will notice – Infinity Wars might be a digital card game, but at the same time, it’s fully animated. Pull up a card in your collection and it’s not a static image; it’s a fully animated scene. While the beauty of these cards might not quite match the quality of something that you would see in a Magic: The Gathering release, it’s more than animated and the fact that it’s animated helps make you really appreciate your growing collection.

That would be for nothing if the game didn’t play well, but thankfully it does. The basic idea is that players need to split their forces between attack and defense. Obviously some cards are better than one than the other, but players are free to come up with their own strategies.

What’s really interesting is that there are two ways to win – one is to reduce an enemy fortress down to zero health by attacking. The other is to reduce the enemy’s morale to zero by killing his units. This opens up the opportunity to build a deck of cards that is truly defensive in nature. The cards are at this stage balanced somewhat towards aggression, but I like the potential there, and as someone who generally does play a counter-punching or defensive game, this was immensely appealing to me.

Despite being in closed beta the community seems genuinely committed to the game already, and even when there’s only a handful of players online I’ve yet to struggle in getting a game going. This is a great sign for the game, because it means despite the frequent bugs and interface players aren’t deterred.

I love Infinity Wars already, and I think this game could be a very big thing. Impressive work from a tiny Aussie startup.

– Matt S.
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @digitallydownld