Mahokenshi is a new deckbuilding game inspired by Japanese mythology. The game was developed by Game Source Studio and published by Iceberg Interactive. The story of Mahokenshi is set within the Celestial Isles, floating islands plagued by demons, cultists,  and evil spirits. You are one of the Mahokenshi, an order of warriors chosen by the spirits to wield incredible magic and protect the innocent.

It’s a fairly generic narrative, frankly. The story acts as more of a vessel for inventive gameplay than anything else. Nonetheless, the world is well-realized and manages to feel alive despite being nothing more than a series of maps, voice-over narration, and visual storytelling. The artwork on each card is phenomenal and adds a lot of personality to each of the main heroes without any form of dialogue whatsoever.

Gameplay is where Mahokenshi really shines. You travel around a grid-based map completing various objectives related to defeating dark forces. Both movement and combat are linked to the cards in your deck. As you advance through each map you can collect more cards, gain stats, or upgrade your cards through various randomized events on specific tiles. Each level will also give your character experience that will expand the card pool and give you equipment that can augment your character. Completing objectives will also allow you to upgrade all your characters simultaneously by investing skills within three major skill trees.

Each of the four main heroes is extremely unique and plays differently from each other. They all have a few different mechanics that allow you to create various builds throughout every level. For example, the ninja Sota focuses on mobility and poison-based attacks. On the other hand, Kaito the samurai is defensive and can deal big damage with area-of-effect attacks.

I loved discovering various combos between certain cards and adjusting my gameplay based on the changing objectives. Additionally, each tile on the map can grant extra terrain bonuses. Forest tiles grant additional defense while mountains give strength. However, both types cost more of your mana to traverse over. This ensures a deep level of strategy within every level and encourages you to pick up mobility cards in order to cheat costs. It certainly helps the game to stand apart from other deck builders.

My major gameplay criticisms stem from some of the enemy types and the randomness associated with card battlers. This game is incredibly draw-dependent overall considering your movement and combat are intrinsically linked. Therefore, it can be easy to suddenly be stuck surrounded by enemies while having little to no attack cards. As a result, you are sometimes forced to pass the turn and allow enemies a free turn to continue whittling your HP.

This becomes even worse when you encounter a specific enemy that focuses on filling your deck with useless cards that hurt you after drawing them. On top of that, the attack which plants these cards is ranged and thus the AI will constantly run away from you. This single-handedly destroys the flow of the game and turns every conflict into an extremely irritating grind. Each negative status inflicted on your character can be interacted with and has some kind of counterplay, but for some reason, this does not.

In terms of graphics, the game runs decently. I didn’t have any performance issues, especially when playing after the official launch. The graphics aren’t groundbreaking but look decent enough. Additionally some of the attack animations are very visually appealing. The music is also solid with a traditional Japanese sound. It helps to sell the mythological tone of the whole game and is a nice accompaniment.

Overall, I think Mahokenshi is a rock-solid deckbuilding game. It delivers some interesting ideas and a relatively polished 6-10 hour experience. If you like card games, I would definitely consider checking it out on PC.

A PC review copy of Mahokenshi was provided by Iceberg Interactive for this review.   

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Mahokenshi

24.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Four unique characters
• Interesting card mechanics
• Great card art and worldbuilding

Cons

• Levels can grind
• Draw dependency
• Annoying enemies