Renegade Game Studios brought many of your favorite franchises to life in the Deck-Building game series, including Power Rangers, Transformers, and GI Joe, and today is the highlight of the Yo Joe crew. Jigo deck building game It is a fully cooperative game for 1-4 players, and while it does include the basic deck-building mechanics that Renegade has honed in many of the titles, they have once again adopted the unique theme and offered an experience that unmistakably feels like GI Joe without sacrificing depth and losing fun. You don’t need to be a GI Joe fan to love this game, but if you’re one, you’ll be over the moon.
Deck-building mechanics directly in GI Joe The Deck-Building Game are very straightforward and similar to other versions in the line. There is a main set of changing cards that you can recruit, transfer these cards to your deck for future use, and purchase them with the recruiter’s value in your hand. The game introduces a slight twist by having you place newly recruited cards (which can be Joes, Gear, Vehicles and Utilities) on top of your deck so they can be drawn on the next turn. This means that the cards you buy can be used more conveniently, thus changing your strategy from simply choosing the best card ever available to assessing whether another card can serve you better in the next round.
This ties in directly to one of the other major mods to the formula in Story Missions and Side Missions, where GI Joe really starts emulating the franchise. This is mostly due to a couple of elements, but let’s get to task coordination first. Story missions are plotted as they are completed, and are broken down into three main actions, each with its own epilogue, and you can choose from two basic story packs. The first is the MASS device, which reimagines the classic GI Joe story and brings it to the tabletop, calling on Joes to stop Cobra from acquiring the items needed for a laser device that can destroy cities in minutes.
The second story pack is Operation: Total Control, this is an all-new story that includes Dr. Mindbender and an adventure that sees Joes framed for an attack and suddenly run away from the government while also trying to stop Cobra’s plans. Both of these story packs take GI Joe’s themes and feel like they fit into the universe through and through, and the missions themselves present enough challenge to keep you smart about how you put together your group and team in general. They also bring more complications, cobra officers like Baroness, Destro, and more to make the game more exciting with additional challenges to overcome.
When assigning to your team, you have to consider the requirements of the current mission, as it requires different skill to complete and different difficulty to overcome. Having said that, you’ll also need to consider compounds, the second major ingredient that sets GI Joe apart from many others. You have to recruit a vehicle from your hangar to be sent on a story mission or side mission and when you recruit them from the squad you will start amassing an impressive fleet of land, sea and air vehicles. You have one vehicle always available, but others offer greater perks and buffs, so you’ll need to be judicious about the missions you’re sending them to because once they’re done, they’ll need to navigate through your deck before you can use them over and over.
Vehicles bring an authenticity to the game that GI Joe fans will appreciate, but they also offer a host of tactical options and ways to play. Ram for example only accommodates one person, but it offers a huge Recon skill bonus as well as a ground vehicle bonus if the mission you’re doing is also in that area. This is perfect for a side mission, but depending on how you build your deck and the hand given to you, you can make good use of these bonuses for a full story mission, and as Hangar gains more vehicles, your options in any given turn increase 10fold.
As the game goes on, things get more complicated because of the threat gauge, which moves up by at least one after each round, and as it moves to different colored areas, the scores increase after round. You can move the threat meter down by completing missions, so there’s also added incentive to go on a mission before you’re 100% comfortable. You’ll need to weigh that against the risk of a story mission failure, because the consequences for that can be incredibly deadly. This introduces a welcome element of risk versus reward in the game which only kept me coming back for one more spin.
Add in additional expert mode cards, two player ability, and solo play, and it’s easy to see why the game packs such a punch right out of the box. Now, there are a few things that might have used some extra levels of depth or just extra content. You have the ability to upgrade GI Joe Leader during the game, and doing so is very useful as skills are greatly increased. Unfortunately, you can only do this once, after which you don’t really have any other way to upgrade your Joes other than just recruiting more of them. Another way to upgrade your leaders or level up their skill will be welcome because soon your leaders will feel like everyone else other than cards that give you some kind of reward for starting a single mission. Apart from that, the Story Pack would have also been welcomed to increase replayability even further, but again this is probably just greedy talk as I thoroughly enjoyed what was already included.
There’s also an expansion coming, but you don’t need to to get many blockbuster game nights with GI Joe The Deck-Building Game. Once again, Renegade Game Studios offers an experience that feels like a natural extension of the franchise while finding additional ways to revamp the still tight and rewarding gameplay. Fans of this genre will have no trouble at work, and GI Joe fans will discover a whole new way to enjoy their favorite franchise. If you are a fan of both? Well, you are going to have a very good time.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
GI Joe The Deck-Building is available in stores and Online retailers now.
Review version provided by Renegade Game Studios.
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