PANOPTES Demo

Defeating huge monsters is the quintessential video game experience, because it’s always a rush to hunt and put down demons from another dimension. However, the actual gameplay is important as well, because no matter how cool or scary the said monsters are, frustration can still ruin your day if the mechanics feel very clumsy and annoying.

Panoptes may look like a regular CCG at a glance, but it’s actually quite different when it comes to how you progress through the story and how you handle each confrontation. As such, it’s actually a combination of adventure, CCG and RPG, which allows you to experience the game world in a much more personal way, while also being able to use your CCG knowledge to have fun.

The background story is quite interesting, especially since it mixes a lot of ideas together, such as undead monsters, sci-fi concepts and fantasy tropes. Thus, you play the role of a man who’s in charge of an organization called The Club, which is involved with activities like relic hunts and supernatural anomalies. As such, the game story takes you through a variety of interesting situations along the way.

The actual gameplay is a tad different from many CCGs out there, in the sense that you cannot use the same strategies most of the time. In essence, you are actually going head-to-head with multiple waves of monsters instead of another hero, so survival is sometimes more important than actual tactics. Other than that, you can still choose from multiple character classes and build a deck with the desired cards.

As always, the action takes place in turns, and you have a limited number of action points at your disposal to make the desired moves. Drawing a card costs you action points as well, so that’s one more thing you have to keep an eye on, but other than that the system is not very different from the one that uses mana or energy instead of action points.

Panoptes is still in early access, which means that it’s constantly improved and fixed when it comes to balancing and gameplay issues. However, it already has enough charisma to keep you playing for a while, especially since it’s breath of fresh air in the genre.