HOUSE OF CARDS

After revisiting Blizzard's popular free-to-play deck builder game based on the Warcraft series, we look to see if they retained and built on the success of the early days

- STUART APSEY

WHEN HEARTHSTONE LAUNCHED IN 2014 IT DID NOT TAKE ME LONG to get hooked and subsequently fall just short of needing to go rehab to get the addiction under control.

It was then a free-to-play game that had simple mechanics to grasp yet was complex enough to be hard to master without many hours of practice and experimenting.

It was also launched with great balancing, granting the player many possible strategies to fit their play style, and rose quickly as a highly contested competitive e-sports game.

Progression was well paced, with rewards constantly propelling your collection of cards forward. Daily quests felt like a must to complete every day to maximise the number of free card packs you could buy with in-game earnings.

Blizzard regularly released new content and additional cards every four months, keeping the regular players constantly invested.

I stopped counting how many hours of play time I had accumulated years ago but it would easily be in the thousands thanks to Blizzard always innovating new mechanics and new game styles.

And that brings us to today, and whether Hearthstone is still keeping the community fulfilled.