Criminal Dissidia Review: An Attractive Deck Builder That Hides Plenty of Problems

I’m a bit of a fanatic when it comes to both deck builders and rogue-likes. So when I saw Neon Doctrine was publishing a mixture of both called Criminal Dissidia, I knew I had to review it. At first blush, it looked really promising, with gorgeous character art and hundreds of cards to build decks with. And then, I sat down to play the game, and the problems became readily apparent. Though it’s far from a horrible title, it nevertheless disappointed me overall. Keep reading our Criminal Dissidia review to see why this rogue-like still needs to iron out plenty of rough spots.

Save The World From Mutanian Hordes

The game is all about a chosen Champion trying to save the world from destruction. At first, this seems to be a result of the invading Mutanian hordes, but the longer you play, the more you’ll start to question that simplistic narrative. You have your choice of Champion from three initial characters, and I tried out 2 of the 3 in my time with the game. First up was the hard-hitting Arista, who wields scythes and was pretty good at tanking damage. Later I tried Freya, who does less overall damage with a sword, but can chain tons of weaker attacks together to devastating effect. I definitely resonated more with her playstyle, but I don’t think there’s a wrong choice to make. Each of the characters has their own strengths and weaknesses.

Beautiful and Deadly

After picking your Champion, you’ll be introduced to the basics of how to move around and fight, as well as fast travel to points of interest on the HUB village map. There’s a handy Narrator that only you can see and who seems to be a long-suffering entity. I started to suspect they knew much more than they were letting on, but I’ll let you discover the truth for yourselves. Depending on who you chose, small story and gameplay elements will vary in each run, but overall, things will play pretty much the same. The rogue-like aspect of the game is more about the cards you’ll choose from at the end of every battle and points that carry over to future runs which an be used to unlock a whole variety of features.

Any good deck builder is about the tightness of the strategy, and I’m sad to say Criminal Dissidia is spongy at best. Sure, the different characters have their own playstyles represented by their deck of cards. But combat is more attrition and staying healthy than it is precise strategy. Also irritating is that while every character is supposed to have a special ability that works during combat, I was never clear when I actually activated them. For example, Freya is supposed to get additional energy whenever she uses 6 skill cards, but I don’t think that ever happened. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to press a button or otherwise to activate them. All I know is the tutorial that explained the basics never clarified the matter.

Besides my issue with special abilities and the general lack of tight strategy, I did enjoy the combat for the most part. Each turn, you’ll recover all of your energy, which is used to activate cards. They each have their own cost, but in general, it’s better to focus on low-cost cards than load your deck with more expensive stuff. Some cards are used for offense, some for defense, and some provide passive effects, but which take up one of three slots. You can also inflict status ailments such as Poison, weaken foes, and much more. You’ll even gather elves that can grant random effects during your turn, but most of those had really underwhelming abilities.

Better yet, whenever you level up, you can spend points to increase an attribute. Each time it will cost more, but it’s well worth your time. You can do things like increase the starting size of your hand, reserve some energy to use the next turn, and more. I appreciated the fine control here, but there’s an issue. Each time it’ll cost progressively more experience to level up. And while that sounds pretty predictable, I feel that it wasn’t well-balanced here. Though maybe I’m mostly complaining because it’s hard to find healing inventory items and the only surefire way to get all your health back is when you level up.

Wandering Around

Criminal Dissidia has a HUB area where you can do things like enhance cards, remove them from your deck, rest at an Inn, buy black market cards and that sort of thing. While I didn’t love the chibi sprites used on the world map, I did appreciate how you could select points of interest on the map and have your character just jog over to them. Once you are ready to start a mission, you select it and then jump through a wormhole to that area. The downside is that once a mission starts, you can’t warp back to the village and heal until it’s over. That means you’ll have to rely on healing cards in your deck, healing items in your inventory, and leveling up.

Please don’t croak me…

That wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s really hard to gauge when a random encounter will be a pitiful affair or when you’ll get steamrolled by an unexpectedly difficult foe. Unlike your need to rely on energy to play cards, enemies can play the same amount of cards every turn. Sometimes they’ll waste their turn with cards, other times, they’ll bombard you with status effects, shatter your defenses and wallop your health. Despite the general level of foes being displayed on the world map, enemies one level higher than you can be total bastards. And that’s not even talking the boss fights, just standard encounters.

I hate to complain about the translation of any game, but it’s pretty noticeably egregious here. At best, Criminal Dissidia’s translation is mediocre, at worst, it’s lifeless. It often tries to come across as funny and cute, but fails pretty miserably. Not to mention there’s some misspellings that pop up at unfortunate times. More than anything, the writing makes it hard to care about the world of the game, or feel like there are any real stakes.

Pretty As a Picture

Visually is where Criminal Dissidia fares the best. The static artwork for the characters is totally gorgeous, and full of wonderful details. It also looks very solid during battle. Where it isn’t quite up to snuff is on the world map. The game uses these chibi models that look just as soulless as your typical Funko Pop. I normally wouldn’t mind, but when compared to the rest of the artwork, it’s painfully apparent. As for the music, it’s passable, but doesn’t do much to lift the game up. It’s mostly generic fantasy tunes that mostly avoids to overstay its welcome. However, I do applaud the game for featuring voice acting, even if it’s not in a language I can understand.

Room For Improvement

Though I’ve already mentioned some problem areas in the game, I have to talk about a few more. A big one is that when I’m using my gamepad to play the game, the cursor can jump around unexpectedly. Mind you, that’s only happened playing this game, so it’s likely not a technical issue on my end. I also really didn’t like the random shops that you can access from mission maps, but which the game does a poor job of telling you when they’re active. And while I already talked about the translation, there’s a related problem – the game uses lots of repeated dialogue. Granted, you can skip a lot of it, but it just made the experience feel unfinished.

I only found this screen by accident.

More than anything, I feel the game wasn’t built to accommodate the player enough. The game just teaches you the basics, and really fails to help you learn any nuances. For example, I didn’t realize after my first death that upon dying, you’re rewarded with souls that you can spend to make the experience work a bit more in your favor. I’ve also had times where cards didn’t do what they were supposed to. And then there was a time I was fighting a giant polar bear. It didn’t use any defensive spell cards or have any passive effects protecting it, yet more than half of my attacks did zero damage to it. There was no rhyme or reason to this that I could discern. While that didn’t make me hate the game, I feel truly good deck builders need to provide a means for the player to fully understand what is happening and why.

Dealt a Bad Hand

I really was hoping to fall in love with Criminal Dissidia, but as it is now it feels woefully incomplete. Though it does feature attractive artwork, tons of cards to use and a metric ton of Steam achievements, it nevertheless was held back by poor translation, confusing combat mechanics and inconsistent difficulty. Fans of rogue-likes and deck builders might enjoy the game more, but even then it’s a hard title to recommend unless the developer makes a lot of quality of life improvements.

Final Verdict: 3/5

Available on: PC (reviewed); Publisher: Neon Doctrine; Developer: Monoceros; Players: 1; Released: September 27, 2022; MSRP: $12.99

Editor’s note: The publisher provided a review copy to Hey Poor Player.