Original Release: Gear Games, 2024, Android/iOS
Other Releases: PC (2024)
A fairly unsubtle Hearthstone knockoff that came out in late 2024, Arcane Rush nevertheless offers up some fairly fun casual card battler gameplay and (at least for now) the opportunity to make some money while trying it out
Arcane Rush (Android, Gear Games, 2024)
Where to Buy: Free-to-play from the Android/iOS app stores
How to Emulate: Android Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Arcane Rush is an entry into a small but highly active field of free-to-play Hearthstone Battlegrounds derivatives on mobile. The main distinction is that the developers have put this one up on “get paid to” (GPT) sites like Swagbucks and Freecash, essentially allowing you to get paid for giving it a try. That’s noteworthy as GPT games are usually not particularly fun to play on their own merits, just trying to get their addiction trigger hooks into you instead and get you buyin’ that Canadough; this is one of the rare exceptions that’s actually enjoyable for its own sake, though serious card battler genre fans may find it too limited for their tastes.
Fortunately I’m not a serious card battler, so this is kind of right up my alley. The main thing more serious genre fans might find confining is lack of true head-to-head play; at least as of this writing, you can only battle bot-controlled versions of other players’ accounts (they bring all the player’s little perks and defensive hand choice, but it’s entirely CPU-controlled). It’s also technically a “pay to win” format, though the structure makes it not all that much of a nuisance or hindrance for “free to play” (F2P) players.
If you’re already familiar with Hearthstone Battlegrounds it’s almost a direct copy, but here’s the core gameplay for those who are entirely new: each match puts you up against eight CPU-controlled opponents in a group stage. You play five rounds against these foes, getting 3 points for a win or 1 point for a draw in each round, and the top four points leaders move on and enter a final group of eight (with the other four drawn from some unseen alternate group stage). In this second and final phase you have three “lives,” lose a round to a foe and you drop one, last man standing wins the whole deal.
You can eventually pick from one of about a dozen dealers for these matches, each of whom has their own set of deck types. You start the game with just the slightly irritating Fiddle as a dealer, however, and his not-at-all Blizzard-inspired decks of Orcs and Dwarves. There are two main currency types you earn over time that upgrade dealers and cards and make new dealers available: gems and gold. All the other dealers can be unlocked trivially with a minimal amount of gems, in fact with just 100 of them you start a loop where unlocking one pays out more than enough gems immediately to unlock several more. Gold is used to upgrade individual dealers, doing things like upgrading individual card stats and giving them more deck types, and is more hard to come by.
So what does a match actually look like? If your dealer has more than three deck types available to them, you’ll see a random spin that picks out three made available for the entirety of the match. You then have a non-timed preparatory period before each round. You’re presented with three random cards, drawn from your three available deck types plus an omnipresent set of “neutral” units. With each round you get a slightly increasing amount of gold with which you can put cards in your hand, refresh the available cards, or upgrade your shop (through five tiers of increasingly powerful units). When you’re done with prep you go up against the opponent’s current hand, win lose or draw as your cards auto-battle each other, then on to the next prep round.
So there’s a strong randomized element to all this, you don’t know in advance which three of your deck types you’ll be working with, also you don’t know what cards will be available in the shop with each refresh (save for a limited ability to “lock” the current selection for the next round if something you want shows up but you’re low on gold). The game thus stresses broad knowledge of at least one good build strategy for the majority of your deck types to aim for. For example, if you get the Undead you’ll probably want to try to move to the Tier 4 shop faster to get their juicier units while stacking up the cursed/respawning mooks that feed them along the way, while Aztecs and Gnomes tend to benefit more from sitting on a jabbering mob of lower-tier units.
The other main gameplay mode available at this time is the Arena, essentially a weekly leaderboard contest. The strongest three units from each of your 24-hour play sessions are saved here, and you choose one as a defender against other players and can use each of them for an attack up to three times. Earning points and placing in the higher ranks of the leaderboard brings some added consumable rewards at the end of the week.
There is also a Clan system that offers slightly more direct head-to-head competition, but unlike some other games it’s very difficult to get accepted to one. Clan sizes are small and seem to be entirely the province of “whales” paying to win and seriously grinding away at the game all day.
The “luck of the draw” element makes it simpler than other card battle options, but it’s also part of what makes it addictive and replayable as you strive to make do with what you’ve been dealt in a poker-esque manner. The game also doesn’t shove ads down your throat; it has its own little internal pop-up offers here and there, but third-party video ads are 100% optional to gain some additional gold, gems and Arena turns daily. It’s also been sitting at a fairly respectful size of around 1 GB for me, it’s not one of those that starts out at under 1 GB from the app store but then quickly bloats itself with updates to like 20 GB.
The main appeal of the game is likely going to be making money off of GPT offers, at least in its early going, but it’s a solid choice if you want a mostly single-player card battler with zero time pressure. It also seems like a good entry point for getting your head around card battlers in general if you’re new, between the total self-pacing and the relatively simple rules and limited set of deck types that don’t really interact with each other in terms of building.
Links
Simple guide for GPT offer goals
Videos