Little Alchemist Review

You know those game ads you see on Facebook? They all look awful, right? Well, I decided to try a few randomly about a month ago. While most were pretty bad, one ended up being a real gem. That gem was Little Alchemist.

In Little Alchemist, you’re given a 35 card starter deck and a skill to pick (healer, attacker, or direct damage). You play against the computer at first, but later you can play against the decks of other players (controlled by the computer to prevent lag issues). You can play one card per turn, unless that card can be used with another in your hand to make a combo. If you do they become a totally different, and usually more powerful, card. Then the power and defense of your card and your opponent's are compared and damage is dealt. It's pretty simple, but there’s some complicated nuance to it as you get better.

The key to Little Alchemist is combos. If you combine a pair of cards, you cause a combo. Each turn in a row that you do this your combo gets more powerful, to a cap of 5. If you're a healer, you'll heal 1-5 life every turn. If you chose direct damage, you'll deal 1-5 damage directly to your opponent each turn. If you chose attack, your creatures will slowly get more and more powerful each turn. Judging by the online arena attack is the most preferable skill, but I still like healer, personally. You also have cards with an F instead of C. These won’t combo with anything, but keep your combo going at the previous level.

Little Alchemist is freemium based, and it certainly lets you know it is. You can earn cards by playing; every 50 coins you earn will get you a free pack; each pack has a single random card in it. While I've gotten some awesome cards in these packs, 98% have been complete junk. You can get better packs by spending gems (which are very hard to get) or real world cash. You can also randomly get specific cards from computer opponents, but this feels about as rare as the coin priced packs. You also power-up your cards through levels, making them better. This becomes time consuming if you don't spend money as well. Still, if you're patient you can do it for free.

Lastly, you have to work to get the combos to unlock. In a way this feels like Doodle God, where you pick two cards to look for a combo. Based on how good it is, it can take 1 to 24 hours to process. You start with two slots to research with, but unlock others with cash or at level 30.

Little Alchemist is really fun and has some awesome humor, but it comes at the cost of being patient or forking over lots of cash. If you can deal with that, this is a wonderful game that I greatly enjoy and recommend. Look me up if you're on there – my user name is Skye.