Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas

Platform: PC

Genre: Online TCG

Release Date: July 22, 2014

Date Reviewed: July 26, 2014

A different review today. I will be reviewing the popular game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. To be more exact I will be reviewing the very first expansion for this game. This will be reviewed differently since it is a card game based in the Warcraft Universe.

Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas is the very first expansion set for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and it is a single player adventure. This expansion comes with 30 brand new cards including golden cards as well as a single player addition to the game. There is a new tab on the home menu which has been renamed from "Practice" to "Solo Adventures". When you access this option it will give you the choice between practice mode and Naxxramas. Naxxramas introduces us to 5 wings just like in World of Warcraft where you have to take down each boss in each wing. The first wing which is the Arachnid wing is open and

free to all players for the first month. Each other wing will open the following week after each other. You can spend real money to open these wings or spend your hard earned gold. It is 700 gold per wing or $6.99 each. It will cost you 2800 gold to get access to all of the wings, including the Arachnid wing when the free trial runs out.

My personal battle! Also a look at the naxx board.

Curse of Naxxramas offers a very fun and difficult challenge. Like in a typical raid in World of Warcraft you start off by facing each boss in normal mode. Defeating each boss will reward you with new cards to add to your collection. Defeating the final boss of each wing will reward you a legendary of that boss. So when you beat Maexxna you will be rewarded with the legendary card of Maexxna. Normal mode is not overall to difficult. After you beat normal mode you unlock two class challenges. I believe these are random classes. Right after you beat the class challenges you unlock the heroic mode version of the bosses

in Naxxramas. These are much harder with higher health (45 instead of 30) and a much stronger player power. The challenge is definitely there and might make you punch your monitor a few times.

The only issue I have with this expansion is that when you beat the heroic bosses you do not get nothing out of it. Personally I would have loved to gotten golden cards from defeating them. The only reason to beat heroic mode right now is mainly bragging rights, and nothing more. But if you're looking for a good challenge then please try to conquer heroic mode. For any new players out there with just the basic cards there is always a way to beat these bosses even on heroic mode without purchasing

new cards. There are a lot of guided out there you can follow that show you how to build your deck with the basic cards in order to beat these bosses. I am looking forward to conquering the other wings and highly recommend this expansion. It is free, so why not?

Just SOME of the cards that can be earned.

Overall Rating: 9/10

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SCOURGE2: first steps

SCOURGE2 development has started. It uses jME and LWJGL. Easy portability is the promise (low-level-of-detail SCOURGE2 version on Android anyone?).

All you can do in the latest Subversion revision is walk around on an island:

SCOURGE2 early alpha - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3go1axCwCoI

One great thing about SCOURGE2: it's not called S.C.O.U.R.G.E.2! ;)

I took this opportunity to record some S.C.O.U.R.G.E. gameplay. The first fight starts at ⅔ of the video.

Scourge gameplay (downloadable if you login on Viddler.)

I like the game very much: many items, many fights, not too hard, leveling, skills and missions. I did not progress far, but as far as I got it appeared to be a solid slash-and-hack RPG!

At my first attempts of playing the game I was confused by having a vast amount of hire-able NPCs and items lying around in the game start area and I had troubles finding out how to get started with the action (get a mission and bash some monsters), so there is a slight entry hurdle.

Another problem is that the mouse-to-game-objects interaction of S.C.O.U.R.G.E. is very sludgy: I find it hard to aim at items and enemies, often I'm not sure if my next click will cause my character to move or to attack, often the cursor is above an object but the object is not highlighted. Camera control is also a bit painful, the rotation speed is overly sensitive and in battle, the camera jumps instantly to active characters instead of a quick but smooth sliding camera movement. I of course hope that transporting content and gameplay to the new engine will be trivial and that the new engine will bring smooth controls.

To those more experienced with the game: how far did you get in the storyline? How far *can* you progress?