Game file / ROGUE BY ROGUEArcanium
Arcanium is an Open-world, Strategy Card Adventure that merges Roguelite and Deckbuilding genres like never before. Control your party of three heroes, craft your deck, unlock a vast amount of cards and items and save the world of Arzu from corruption!
Why this score?
Original text · Simplified Chinese
可自由调整三人牌组和地图路线是优势，但长局节奏、窄牌池及解释不清让策略发挥受到限制。
Core gameplay
Weight 25%7.5 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
三英雄共享回合资源让出牌和承伤安排有趣；大地图与慢界面拉长单局节奏。
Builds & strategy
Weight 25%8.0 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
战外可调整牌组、英雄换位和装备配置给予控制力，但单英雄牌池较窄、强弱不均限制组合。
Replayability
Weight 20%7.0 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
自由路线和队伍组合带来不同发展计划；重复事件与大量解锁要求使新局变化不足。
Randomness & fairness
Weight 20%6.5 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
换位与威胁计量帮助选择风险，说明不清与扣行动点、伤害免疫等首领机制削弱应对反馈。
Polish & usability
Weight 10%6.0 / 10Original text · Simplified Chinese
快照记录卡牌必须拖动、物品查询困难以及读档节点和奖励异常，界面是最明显的完成度短板。
- Reviewer
Original text · Simplified Chinese
Rogue by Rogue · AI 资料评测- Version reviewed
Original text · Simplified Chinese
具体构建未知；以所引资料描述的版本为准
Scope and limitations
Original text · Simplified Chinese
基于收录资料与官方页面的主观归纳，未进行试玩。依据已收录玩家反馈，没有重新运行存档或验证奖励 BUG；官方机制说明不代表每种三人阵容都有效。
Review sources 02
- 01Archived materialView archived external material ↓
Original text · Simplified Chinese
收录评论与社区资料（2026-10-01 快照）
使用 作者观点摘要 的 Tier list Part 1 (2023) 及 玩家好评与批评 中的机制、交互、重复与易用性反馈；未将外部分数或旧等级用于计算。
- 02Web sourceView original ↗
Original text · Simplified Chinese
Arcanium: Rise of Akhan 官方产品说明
2026-10-08 访问。确认三英雄、自由地图与威胁计量、战斗换位及战外自由编辑牌组和装备。 官方页面不单独证明平衡或稳定性。
Video reviews
Reviews and deep dives from YouTube and Bilibili, in every language. Open the original video to watch.
Other voices, for reference.
Archived third-party reviews and community material may refer to different versions. External opinions and ratings are presented separately; consult the original videos for their full context.
Community discussion
An open-world, single-player roguelite deckbuilder by Supercombo in which you lead a party of three anthropomorphic-animal heroes across a semi-open procedural map to stop Akhan the Calamity.
Players rate it Very Positive on Steam (about 82% of roughly 817 reviews), with praise for its hero variety, the three-character party and the editable deck, and a polished cartoon-animal look. Critics covered it only lightly: the two OpenCritic reviews (6.5 and 6 out of 10) call it enjoyable but complex, difficult and sometimes restrictive. Recurring complaints are a long grind to unlock everything, a slow UI and run pace, uneven hero balance, weak tutorialisation, and cards that turn out to be samey. It left early access on 22 September 2022 with three new heroes and an Arena mode, and later came to Epic, iOS and Netflix Games. It is a niche, low-volume title today, with only a handful of concurrent players on Steam.
What players praise
- Party of three heroes with a hand and deck for each, so every turn is a puzzle of splitting action points between characters
- Lots of heroes to play with and many party and difficulty combinations, which keeps things feeling fresh
- Deck is fully editable outside and between fights, with no forced bloat as in Slay the Spire style games
- Semi-open map you can roam freely, choosing which regions to hit for rewards or XP instead of following a fixed node tree
- Appealing cartoon-animal art style that draws people in
- Lots of unlockables (cards, artifacts, ability customization) and multiple difficulty levels give long-term replay; reviewers with 80 to 110+ hours report it
- Fun, approachable casual deckbuilder that is easy to pick up for relaxed sessions
- Items and artifacts can be reused after battle, which players found a pleasant surprise
What players criticize
- Heavy unlock and achievement grind; meta-progression needs a huge number of runs
- Slow UI and very large maps make a single run take a long time, so it is hard to fit in a session
- Hero balance is uneven, with some characters strong and others near useless
- Explanations are poor: artifacts and effects like Burn are unclear or lack audio feedback, and the game is hard to learn
- Card pool per hero is narrow, so builds get samey and depth can be false
- UI pain points: artifacts are hard to look up, and cards must be dragged rather than click-and-target
- Some boss mechanics (removing action points, damage immunity after a threshold) feel like turn denial instead of interactive challenge
- Bugs reported: quest rewards not granted, map nodes becoming undiscovered on reload
Distinctive features
- Three-hero party with three separate decks and hands, instead of the usual single-character deckbuilder
- Open-world semi-open procedural 3D map where you can travel anywhere and start from any point, and enemies get harder the longer you linger in a province
- Completely editable deck with a collection you swap cards in and out of, inverting the no-removal convention of the genre
- Hero leveling and ability card unlocks persist between runs, giving it an RPG progression flavour
- Arena mode focused purely on combat against corrupted versions of the world's heroes
- Distinct anthropomorphic animal setting mixing magic and technology
Divided opinions
- Depth: some find unending combinations and a lot to learn, others call it false depth with few viable builds per hero
- Difficulty and complexity: praised as a challenge by some and cited by critics as limiting its audience to hardcore players
- Editable deck: seen as freeing by some and as undermining deckbuilding tension by others
Repetition and friction
- Unlock grind for heroes, cards and achievements described as abysmal by some players
- Runs are long and the UI is slow, so even one run per sitting is hard
- Dragging cards on every play is fiddly
- Having to manage three hands and many factors per turn is demanding and at times confusing because of poor explanation
- Late bosses can shut down your plan through AP loss or damage immunity, which feels unfair to some
- Lack of controller support and no undo irritate some players
Hoped-for improvements
- Add click-to-target card play and controller support (currently drag and drop only; no controller)
- Add an undo option for mistaken moves
- Improve tutorials and in-game tooltips or an artifact compendium, and add audio/visual feedback for status effects
- Speed up the UI and offer smaller or faster run formats; rebalance the unlock grind
- Expand card pools and rebalance weak heroes so builds are more varied
- Let players change their ultimate ability mid-run, possibly at a cost, to adapt to found artifacts and cards
Metacritic has only one critic review and no user ratings, so no Metascore; OpenCritic has two reviews and no aggregate average. Early access began before 2021 (Gaming Professors reviewed in 2021); it launched 1.0 on Steam 21/22 September 2022 at $24.99 (now $19.99) after adding three heroes, new final bosses, a new enemy type and an Arena mode, with translations into 15 languages. It has since appeared on Epic Games Store, iOS and Netflix Games. Steam is Windows only. Third-party estimates (Steam Spy range 50k to 100k owners; steam-revenue-calculator about 133k USD gross, about 39k net) are order-of-magnitude figures only. Steam reviews extend through 2026, so it still has a small but active player base.
Community sources
- Top helpful positive and negative English Steam reviews (local file) ↗
- Steam store page data (reviews summary, price, developer) via local steam_data.json ↗
- OpenCritic critic reviews list (God is a Geek 6.5, Gaming Professors 6) ↗
- Metacritic page: one critic review (65), no Metascore, no user score ↗
- God is a Geek review; seen via its OpenCritic/Metacritic summary (page itself returned 403) ↗
- Developer piece on open-world editable-deck design philosophy ↗
- Publisher launch post: 1.0 release, new heroes, Arena mode, price ↗
- Press release for early access exit, 15 languages ↗
- Netflix Games mobile release news ↗
- Third-party revenue estimate (about 133k gross, 39k net) ↗
Archived creator commentary 1
Third-party summaries based on automatic captions may contain transcription or interpretation errors.
Tier list Part 1 (2023)
Arcanium is a deck-building roguelike with a huge roster of playable characters, played as a party of three on a board-game-like map. He finds it very strategic, challenging and replayable, with the fun coming from discovering new character combinations. The outside-world layer is minimal and events repeat, and the animation bothers him a little. He places it in A tier, but only recommends it to people already used to deck builders because of the amount to track.
What the creator praises
- Enormous number of characters, giving many builds and combinations
- Strategy and moment-to-moment gameplay are really fun and challenging
- High replayability from hunting for new character combos
- Art shows a lot of effort
- Uniqueness comes mostly from the character variety
Issues raised by the creator
- Not a fan of the animation, though he calls it a small thing
- Overworld is minimalistic, like a board game, with little to explore
- Events are almost always the same
- Overwhelming amount to keep track of, unfriendly to deck-building newcomers
Design observations
- Controlling three characters at once, with a very large roster driving build diversity
- Character-based uniqueness rather than world or event variety
