I’ll admit that when Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey teased a collectible card game along the lines of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, I was stoked on the idea of 100-foot high Blue Eyes White Dragons blasting me from the arena as my underfed deck folded before them. VR obliteration would add a certain spice to defeat. Dragon Front, from High Voltage Software, doesn’t look quite like that.
While the spectacle and presence—at least from the trailer—isn’t as grand as I was expecting, there’s no reason a card game shouldn’t work well on the Rift. Positioned above the 4×4 playing field, you have the vantage of a general deploying units. Games like Hearthstone pride themselves on their physicality, and VR can’t help but enhance that. The absence of hands seems an odd choice though.
High Voltage has listed figures like 260 collectible cards, 80 different ‘encampments’ and more than 100 spells, but they don’t mean much without context. Without seeing Dragon Front in play, who knows how it compares to Hearthstone, Magic, Chronicle: Runescape Legends and the myriad me-too CCGs springing up like mushrooms in a soggy lawn.
The one unique snippet I can find concerns ‘Legendary Champions’, one of which resides in each deck and whose cost to play becomes progressively lower the worse you’re doing. Dragon Front wants you to snatch victory from the fiery jaws of defeat.
Dragon Front is coming in spring, and though it’s not billed as a launch title, that window means it can’t be far wide of the mark.
