Developer: Metagalaxy Panda
Publisher: Milk Bottle Studio
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
反图灵测试/Anti-Turing Test – Preview
New roguelike deck builders have been popping up left and right recently due to the genre’s increase in popularity caused by Slay The Spire. Today we take a look at Anti-Turing Test, a new roguelike deck builder developed by metagalaxy panda that is currently in Early Access.
According to the Steam page, this game is all about going through an endless series of trials that see you die, respawn, and try again. It’s a hell in which you are constantly tested to show your true potential, while you wade through impressive cities and bloody battlefields. Or, at least that’s what the game description on the Steam page will tell you. Sadly there isn’t much of this story to be found in the actual game. The story in this game doesn’t make much sense, partially because it is poorly translated, and partially because it is just a collection of unimportant things. If you wouldn’t read the description of the game on Steam, most people would probably not even realize there is a story in the first place.
The visual aspect of Anti-Turing Test feels very cheap and underwhelming. Everything looks very basic. The character models feel out of place and only have a single animation. You will for example see enemies shoot when they are shielding themselves. The background doesn’t change a lot. There are some blurred textures here and there. As a whole, it feels as if the foundation isn’t even finished. We do understand that the game is still in its development phase, but even so, there is still a lot to be done before the game sees its full release.
Overall sound design is okay, but things do get quite repetitive. Nothing really sounds out of place; the sound of drawing cards feels satisfying, the jingles when you hover over buttons sound nice and even when enemies drop loot you’ll hear a satisfying sound effect. However, there’s no variation in these sound effects and after a while, they tend to get annoying. The same counts for the music as the soundtrack is extremely basic with there only being a few tracks in the current build of the game. You’ll have music for different situations, but we would have loved a bit more variation. After a while, we opted to put on our own music when playing through the game.
Anti-Turing Test is a roguelike deck builder. The goal in this game is to survive as many stages as possible, with it getting harder and harder with every stage. You start with a simple deck of cards that you can use to guard yourself, gain buffs, cast debuffs, or damage opponents. Every stage has you choose between four optional paths, which can either be an enemy encounter, an elite enemy encounter, a store visit, a supply point where you get one random item, or a checkpoint where you can heal yourself. Every encounter you can choose one of three potential cards to add to your deck.
Adding the right cards to your deck and using them in a strategic way is key to surviving as long as possible. This is why it’s very important that the cards actually do what they are supposed to do, and sadly that is not always the case in this game. Not only are some cards hard to understand due to poor translation, some cards simply have a different effect than what they say they would do. For example, there is a card that says “Release a beacon that deals 12 damage to the enemy’s middle Row” which gives you 6 shield power. Sadly, this is not the only card that does something completely different from its text, but a significant portion of cards actually has this problem. About 10% of cards and items, if not more, don’t do exactly what they’re supposed to do, which makes this game much harder to play than it should be. Perhaps this is all part of the ‘anti-turing test’ and is meant to test our memory, but it seems much more likely that this is just an unintended issue caused by poor translation.
Conclusion
Although the game is reasonably fun and has potential, it currently has too many issues to be considered a good game. The concept of the story seems great, but it is poorly executed to the point where you don’t even realize there is a story. This game has to spend a lot more time in the oven before it can be fully released. We do hope that certain bugs get fixed soon. The most annoying bug in the current build is the issue with the card effects and descriptions texts not matching. We suggest waiting for a few more patches if you had this one on your wishlist.
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