Hex: Chronicles of Entrath

This is the single-player mode of a beautiful, great-sounding trading-card game that is complicated by its spikes in difficulty. Hex: Chronicles of Entrath presents an intriguing story that sets players on an adventure-filled quest to uncover their own power and purpose and promises players a fun-filled experience full of color, humor, and gorgeous effects -- which makes being left out of it that much harder to take. The first episode is set to be a series of single-player adventures introducing players to Hex's fictional world and gameplay mechanics. Trading-card games can be highly complex, requiring players to absorb thousands of details on cards to understand how their assigned powers work. This can be downright overwhelming, and Hex makes it even more challenging by adding items and character skills that further alter cards.

This added complexity cries out for a seamless, new player experience, and in that, Chronicles fails to deliver. The campaign starts with the basics, but rather than stepping up the complexity gradually, it suddenly tosses players into the deep end. That means an hour in, you're making and playing decks you don't fully understand and losing battles repeatedly without knowing why. And though the campaign presents some fun locations, characters, and enemies, you don't get to see too many of them before the game throws numerous, seemingly insurmountable stumbling blocks in your way. If the campaign was intended to serve as a story-centric add-on to the base game's online multiplayer, its high difficulty might be acceptable. But in its current form, this so-called new player experience isn't fully doing its job.