PvP is way too buggy to be considered fun. Of every one game I have completed of PvP the game has failed another three.

There is an unbalanced attack move when one reaches the top level of the game for the Crowe Commander causing a massive hit (i've had a 28 hp attack) direct to Commander. Very frustrating when you have dominated all game to get their hp to 3 and then they pull that move!

This game is not so bad, but it relie to much on server data, it will retry connecting for "hours" (minutes).

20th Dec 2014 update
Campaign can now be unlocked for 5000g which is approx 600 PVP wins. That is a massive grind. Champions are 2000g which is a substanial grind. Still this game is somewhat fun despite being an 2012 Facebook game. Compared with Hearthstone or Hex shards of Fate dose not stack up well and its age is really showing. Shards rewards to craft cards are quite generous and you can craft a decent deck, Developer has promised more content, later on. For the moment still cannot recommend.

Only 1 champion and 1 Campaign avaliable for free players. The rest are all behind paywalls which require real money to unlock and the price is currently expensive.
Once you finnish your one campaign, and spent the campaign rewards there is no more content, leaving only PVP. Against paying players whom have better cards and high level champions its impossible to win. Currently it is little more then a generous demo.

Keeping in mind that this game is still in early access here are my thoughts.

TLDR VERSION:
After roughly 3 hrs of playing this game i have already done the first play through, beat 5 people online, and edited the starter deck i picked. All without paying a cent. Was it worth the time lost? sadly i think not.


Pros:
simple gameplay that anyone can learn (even without a tutorial)
base decks are pretty ballanced
very few errors and bugs encountered so far
fast games
no account energy (aka you can play more than 5 games w/o being asked to pay money to play more)

Cons:
Deck building is limited to your champion
(currently) not enough champions to build a deck of each two color combination
(currently) only way to get more champions is to buy their base decks with real money
very similar cash shop method as most games on iTunes
compettive play is not new player friendly

even with this game being in early access most of these con's are based on how the game was initionally designed. Meaning that inorder to change them they would basicially start over. When you start you can choose from 3 champions each representing 2 colors/archetypes/whatever these decks can only contain cards that match these types and a colorless type that all can use. So why is this an issue if eventually they will have a champion for each color combination? Because each champion comes with 3 set abilities meaning you pretty much have to build around what they are designed to do. Even worse you do not have access to 2 of these abilities until you've leveled up your champion up to it's maxed level (one will unlock about half way). This is why multiplayer is not friendly to new players. The matchmaking seems to be completely random meaning your first match could be up against someone with all abilities unlocked giving them a huge advantage. You don't need to pay anything unless you want to get more cards faster or if you want to open the seccond storyarch, and without a trading system or AH this generally keeps it from becoming a Pay to win and more like a Pay and if you are lucky you will win.

Regardless i think this game has potential. It could become a very popular game if it allows the player to adapt more but that would require rebuilding almost from the ground up (from my perspective). Honestly, it's one of the smoothest games in early access I have found in a while and i think that even though i was forced to build the deck a certian way I did find some enjoyment in playing.

Final score 5/10 (playable but not reccomended)

Ignore the positive reviews and down votes on the negatives, they are idiots who have obviously never played a good game. This game has potential but right now it's horrible. The main issue is how buggy it is, it's pathetic. Almost every pvp match I play it freezes and I get no credit for it. The second issue is how hard it is to get new cards. If they added some way to gain more shards and/or gold it might be good then, but as of now you must spend real money or win a TON of pvp games which is really quite boring and tedious. I understand games must make money, but the real money cost for the packs is inappropriately high considering the chance of getting something you'll use is almost non-existent. Either lower the pack cost, increase the shards/gold per pvp fight, add a way to grind that isn't pvp, or increase the quality of cards from the pack and then I MIGHT recommend it. But even then there's just not enough content to keep me interested.

Overall: 1. Game is too buggy. 2. totally pay to win. 3. very little content, seems dead

Needs to be more flashy... Played up to Apollo and all the rare cards i've been getting aren't even usable because its a different element of my own hero. The other heroes have to be bought with real money too. Not F2P-friendly.

Extremely simplistic and fairly boring(at least in my time playing it). Also it is, like most free to play card games, imbalanced so to win PVP you probably need to drop money on it. Also glitchy currently, as it reset my XP multiple times while I played. The game is not hard, but it doesn't teach you very well anyways, especially the interface out of game which is not very intuitive.

Update: Multiplayer now seems to work, but time/opp name is still not working and I just got stuck. They also added gold purchases to champions/campaign. Good to see quite updates.

Boring game. More boring cards. Phone games have even better graphics.
Connection keeps getting disconnected. When trying to play again, it won't let you. There are other free card games around that are much better and don't have this problems. That's the reason why I don't recommend this game.

Dont waste your time

Made a legitimate thread pointing out the fact that packs were not giving out 3star (rare) cards that by the description states one GUARANTEED per pack bought and the response was to delete the thread asap. From this reaction i can only assume that the devs are too lazy to:
A. reward players with whats promised or
B. simply change the description so it does not mislead players.

Plenty of other issues/bugs with constant crashing on trying to collect rewards and quests not registering as completed.

The game itself when not dealing with these crashes was actually enjoyable

I like card-games but this one is not playable for me ... every 2 minutes "re-establishing connection - please wait" ... really sad, because i like this one

I like it but i get to many cards i cant use and I have to pay money to get any better or get a new lvl.... i thought it was fun but kinda lame. i was hoping for something like magic the gathering.

In Blood Realms the players receive mana every turn. Additional mana is added to the pool with each consecutive turn. The player can also allow the mana to pool, overflowing into the next turn. So the mana from turn one and turn two would be added together. Allowing the Champions to do more. Champions can use Blood to activate innate abilities, these abilities are determined by which character is chosen. The character I was using starts out with an ability that use 3 blood to give 2 additional mana. The same ability cannot be used in one turn.

The strange part about this game is that currently when one creature attacks the other in normal combat. It does not receive damage in return. Giving a free hit. I am uncertain if this is intended or if this will change down the road. Currently there are only 3 characters that you may choose. Something that is note worthy is that there are realms of magic and each Champion can only cast from 2 realms. This encourages the player to purchase other champions.


The Campaign is light and PVP will not exceed turn 1. I am unable to recommend this title in its current state.

For more details click the link below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwu434H1vkM

Check out my group for more reviews!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/WastingSanityReviews

Just ... don't.

no

FINAL SCORE: 7/10 will probably be an 8 or 9 at launch; is not worth your time if you LIKE HEX or if you don't like glitches.

This game is a turn based SIMPLE online PvP card game. BUT is it worth a try? Read more...


The main reason to play this game is if you like the art themes in it and want a VERY FAST PLAY card game like hearthstone to go with it.

Its card art and themes reference one of four things.
1) mythological creatures like the Hydra, Sirens, Kraken, and Cyclops. The art style is VERY fitting. 11/10
2) Ancient Rome with Centurions, Legions, Ballista, and Ancient Cavalry troops. The art is 10/10 for these.
3) Egypt and undead creatures, Sphinx, Mirage, Skeletons, and Cthulhu type minions. The art for these is sometimes lacking but mostly good 8/10
4) Roman religious and fey creatures: Puck, Faries, wisps, the Roman gods Jupiter, Apollo, Mars etc. the fey creatures art and card abilities are sometimes not very fitting but still drawn similar to the other game art so a fair 6/10, but the GODS look tremendous and I'd say their art is 10/10+.

Pros: ^ That art and theme is the selling point for me. F2P, Mythological/Ancient Rome theme. Legionnaires battling against the mighty kracken etc. REALLY QUICK MATCHES and REALLY QUICK TURNS, no labyrinthene style rules set like magic or hex. In short, its like SoulFORGED but without all the Super Dump out of place creatures and ultra overpowered abilites. Its ultra surprisingly well balanced!! The music is very pleasant, and fitting for the theme of the game as well.

CONS: Game crashes ... A LOT. Expect it. I was reading other reviews and I almost uninstalled it before I even played a single match because of all the bad reviews saying its crashing. I don't mind it anymore. I just restart when it crashes or freezes. It'll probably be fixed in the release version.
-Despite the crashing and glitches, none of the stuff I had to deal with felt like it hurt the gameplay so much I didn't want to play anymore. Its annoying at times, but thats an early release for you. I still had fun.

-Crafting: There isn't much variety to craft currently, but later this will improve I'm sure. You'll have enough crafting crystal to make almost any cards you want for one good deck after you play through the tutorial 3 times. Pay to Play lets you try EVERYTHING.

-Pay to play players as of this REVIEW will only have a TINY bit better of a deck than you if they spend a lot of money so don't worry about that. Pay to play lets you add more variety to your deck but the game is so balanced it doesn't make much difference. The biggest imbalance you'll ever see is if you don't level up your hero. V more info below V

-The tutorial is a bit more of a grind than most people would like-> if you play through it a full 3 times to grind exp to get all 3 of your hero's abilites; It IS a bit steep. I've almost got it after about 7 hours of actual gameplay. You can easily win PVP without the other two abilites as the Mage or Crowe, but the Barbarian hero's first two abilities are really ♥♥♥♥. Her third ability is really good though, so if you want to suffer and do trials of patience and learning like Hercules she's dead on accurate hahaha!

-Pick your starting hero WISELY. I STRONGLY SUGGEST looking up the 3 heros, their abilities and the special cards they get to use BEFORE you install and pick your hero. Each hero gives access to TWO set colors of cards so if you want to use cards of a specific color you might have to pick a hero you don't like currently.(More heros will no-doubt be added later)

-You can spend 15$ or 2000gold(earned in the game) to have 2 of the three unlocked. You can grind enough gold to unlock all three heros and all the cards if you want. The amount of time you have to spend grinding in this game to unlock a hero is comparable to how it is in LoL.

-finally combat is pretty simplistic since its a limited version of the game out mostly just for testing, but I still have fun playing it. Some of the background art in the game isn't very pretty as well, but it wasn't so bad as to bother me.



tl;dr:
- Fun if you like the Mythological creature/Ancient Rome combat theme and want a quick card game.
- NOT Fun if you want to be able to pay enough to win every match, want long turns with overly complex card powers that boggle the mind, want card trading so you can make IRL money selling cards, or want a finished game with no glitches.

Score : Point : Reasoning
6/10: GAMEPLAY: (simplistic but in fun ways, quick combat, glitches, crashes)
10/10 ART and THEME: (couldn't ask for better)
6/10 DECKBUILDING VARIETY: (game is only bare-bones atm)

FINAL SCORE: 7/10
...will probably be an 8 or 9 at launch; is not worth your time if you LIKE HEX or if you don't like glitches.

Final thoughts? Rants?
I like how almost none of BloodRealm's creature cards are either "Garbage art", "Too weak", and or "Too strong". SolForged, Magic the gathering, Hearthstone, and HEX really suffer from having too many HORRIBLE ART or HORRENDOUSLY BADLY THEMED ART on too many of their cards. And to make it worse they give those $HITTY CARDS some of the most BS powers so that you almost HAVE TO PLAY with them in order to have a decent deck. Its a super turn-off for me and I'm glad that this game doesn't make that same mistake; AND that's why this is the only online card game I can honestly say I really like and enjoy playing. The creatures and soldiers and combat are all so simple, fun, and cool, that I hope it succeeds. I'm also glad pay to winners don't dominate the game, completely because its so balanced.

When the game is finished and it releases more content it might become complete pay to win garbage though, and they might release a bunch of pay to win BS cards, so you always have that to fear, but at least you can enjoy the well balanced current version of the game.

If you're not going to play this game, play HEX. Their people are super nice and refund you properly if you get a glitch. I don't care for almost all of HEX's weird bad art including: spacetech-dwarves, pregnant bunnies, smilie faced flowers, etc... That kind of card themeing disgusts my senses and isn't fun to fight against even if you build a deck of non-awful cards.

For me, This has ben an enjoyable game. I'm ot someone who useally plays card games, but i saw this one and tried it out. Some of the other reviews say things like "don't waste your time" don't listen to them download it and make your own opinion. This is the early stages of the game and there are some things that i would like to see added (e.g. A mana shard shop where you could buy specififc cards for the shards.) Overall if you like card games or just want to try something new this game is worth a shot.

please, no

If you are new to TCG I suggest this game because it's really simple. I've played the game before at Kongregate and really enjoyed it. So far, i've encounter a few 'connecting' errors in this version that made me restart the game. Just hope that on full release all the characters and modes are available without any issues.

Could be good, but if the version right now is not far away from the complete version then i see no future for it. It just needs more than that to make me spend any kind of real money. Its pay2win for sure but if i see that hearthstone works perfectly with this system then i dont think it wont work here. But yah if thats all then rip. I give it 3 Month the idea is good and i want somethingelse then bling bling yolo swag hearthstone. So thumps up !