App Army Assemble: Zoeti - "Does this rogue-lite deckbuilder earn a spot among the genre's best?"

• Our App Army readers take on Zoeti this week
• The game drastically divided opinion among the group
• Ultimately, it seems Slay the Spire remains the better choice

Zoeti is the latest in a long line of deckbuilding rogue-lites looking to capture the popularity of Slay the Spire. But rather than invent a bunch of cards, the developers have opted to use a regular deck, meaning you make combos using poker hands. It's an intriguing concept, but does it work? We handed the game over to our App Army to find out.

Here's what they said:

This is very similar to Slay the Spire in most respects. It’s a roguelike deck builder where you can choose your path, battle monsters, take occasional rests, and add cards to your arsenal. The background looks nicely hand-painted, and the story is interesting enough. You’ll eventually play through from the point of view of three different characters in story mode, after which you can play adventure mode, which is less about the story and more about pure combat.

I liked the fact that during combat, you’re presented with sort of poker hand options as different possible combos. That made it easier for me to make those good combo attacks. Just as a matter of taste, I didn’t care for some of the slightly juvenile dialogue in the cutscenes, and sometimes the dialogue went on for longer than I liked. But there’s also the ‘skip’ option, so that wasn’t a big deal.

Overall, this isn’t a bad deckbuilder. It looks good and has an interesting story and mechanics. I can’t say that it’ll pull me away from Slay the Spire, but if it’s your kind of game and you want to try variations of it, Zoeti is a decent version.

Zoeti is a new turn-based deck-building roguelite brought over from PC to mobile—which I always love to see. Not only does it show that developers see a real audience for their games on one of my favourite platforms, but it also adds yet another quality premium app to a field already loaded with free-to-play titles. No doubt Zoeti will draw comparisons to the great Slay the Spire, but it shakes up the formula in how you use your cards. Essentially, you play cards from your hand and group them in pairs to use various skills to defeat your opponents.

While the story gets a bit tedious to follow along with, early on you find that you’re tasked with defeating the evil monsters that have come to your homeland. I liked the hand-painted graphics, and the excellent music really adds to the overall feel of the tense battlefield. There’s some great replayability too with three separate character Story Mode campaigns to unlock, and Zoeti features a nice Game History and Index that tracks your stats, skills, items, and accessories. Fans of the genre will definitely want to check this one out!

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The gameplay and storyline are interesting and something different from the usual combat games. It’s really entertaining due to the ways the player can alternate the character. It offers a wide range of different characters and abilities. The ability to play different characters doesn’t make it boring to restart. 

There aren’t many moments when the tutorial has felt unnecessary. It’s clear what the task is, and how to proceed. It’s efficient to be able to skip dialogues, however, you shouldn’t be able to skip dialogues crucial to the game. The first few play-throughs are hard, and it’s generally quite difficult to get a victory, even on easy mode and after several play-troughs. The graphics are really good, as well as the sound effects. Highly recommended!

Zoeti is a frustrating Rogue lite that uses cards as the mechanics for its battles. The setting is fantasy as you are set trials where you have to defeat monsters to win. Each round you are given a random set of cards, you play these cards to fight each round. Depending on your skill level you can do more damage to opponents if you get pairs of cards or a flush.

I guess it goes with the territory of being a rogue-lite but this game is hard from the get-go and you will be playing the same trials again and again, at least you can skip the cutscenes. As you level up you can get further into the game. Graphically it looks nice but animation is very limited and the music is forgettable. If you like these sorts of games then you’ll lap this game up but for me, it was too frustrating to be enjoyable.

Zoeti is a fantasy-themed poker RPG. You battle against various monsters using normal playing cards. Every turn, you draw a number of cards, and if you get a poker hand, you can play it and deal damage, raise a shield, improve your stats or decrease the enemies' stats. The art is pretty, the gameplay is basic, and it's fun for a while, until you start to notice the lack of balance (it's too random, which means cannon fodder enemies can be WAY stronger than bosses, and you just can't really build the exact deck you want, no matter what you do).

Anyway. If you never played a roguelike deck builder before, and if you like typical tragical fantasy romance visual novel stories, this game is for you. Otherwise, don't bother - the poker hands gameplay is basic, the writing is average, and there's A LOT of it. Worse still, the game wasn't adapted at all to mobile - the font is barely readable on my tablet (and obviously microscopic on my phone), the hotspots are too small (no, I don't have big fat fingers), the icons are hard to tell apart.

Sorry, but if you're asking me to recommend a roguelike deck builder for Android, my answers are still Slay the Spire and Meteorfall.

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Zoeti