‘Magic: the Gathering’ meets ‘RuneScape’ in this deck-building battle royale

nme.com:

Inferni: Hope & Fear without playing it, but once you have, you understand it instantly. Created by Village Studio, helmed by developers who worked on RuneScape, Rust, and Angry Birds 2, Inferni looks like something thrown together during a game jam but it’s immensely satisfying to play and much more than the sum of its parts.Unlike most card games, Inferni takes place in real time as up to four teams of two duke it out simultaneously.

You draw cards from your deck, pick one from your hand, choose a target, and wait a few seconds while you cast the spell.Rather than effects instantly taking hold, attacks appear in the middle of the battlefield as orbs that fly menacingly toward their victim.

This gives all players a chance to react and creates a living, evolving board. Some cards can interact with already cast spells, weakening them, speeding them up, reflecting them, or increasing their damage.

Players can also cast defensive spells on themselves to block incoming damage or bounce it back to the original caster. During our hands-on, there’s real fear when you realise three spells are going to hit you at the same time but your reflection card isn’t going to cast in time.The real-time combat creates a different type of strategy from what you normally experience in turn-based card games.