There is something refreshing about playing a deckbuilder in 2025 where you get to keep your cards. As much as I love riding the zeitgeist, doing my roguelike deckbuilder runs alongside the rest of the world (Balatro and Wildfrost were my most recent joyrides), there is certainly a part of the experience that feels empty to me. Perhaps it is because I enjoy a strong narrative throughline, or that I have grown to love the deck permanence from collectible card games (CCGs) like Hearthstone, Marvel Snap and Legends of Runeterra, that I find roguelike card games so tiresome. In CCGs, the strategic emphasis is on how you craft, calibrate, and concentrate your favourite deck archetypes over time, rather than detonating your favourite strategy and reconstructing it differently across multiple runs. With that said, when I came across Battle Suit Aces in October of this year, a game that promised a story-rich collectible card format, I had to try it. Not many developers have successfully blended narrative proficiency with CCG mechanics, but if any studio could do it, it would be Trinket Studios.
They released their first mainstream game, Battle Chef Brigade, in November of 2017. Critics were generally favourable towards its hodgepodge of ideas: elements of match-three puzzles, brawler combat, RPG progression, and an anime-style story. The way the studio spun a gripping story across disparate game mechanics was impressive, and this same aptitude is evident in Battle Suit Aces. The studio’s ambition, creating “small games with big character”, shines throughout Battle Suit Aces, which presents to players a vibrant crew of oddballs navigating an evocative space opera via a turn-based card battler. The setup to this story hooks us from the start.
Battle Suit Aces opens with a beautifully rendered anime scene; a peculiar robot hangar is suspended in space. Here, we are introduced to Heathcliff and Felix, two meticulously hand-drawn character models, brought to life by boisterous voicework. A visual novel unfolds with additional illustrations, giving us some backstory, until they are thrust into an unexpected conflict. This is where the card battles are introduced, starting off mechanically simple but growing in complexity as the game progresses. Over the course of the game, players will be bouncing back and forth between card battles, visual novel story beats, and card upgrading via some light RPG elements.
The narrative of Battle Suit Aces is the dense core of the experience around which all other elements orbit. The emotional stakes among characters amplify the tension during card battles, and the RPG systems are at their best when they give definition to the growing cast of crew members. Players will traverse the galaxy aboard the USS Zephyr, endeavouring to both research and contain an alien threat to the universe. On the surface, this premise may seem trite, but how it plays out among a colourful squad of queer and maverick personalities is what keeps this game fresh. By the time I finished my playthrough, I had about 15 people aboard the Zephyr, each with their own motivations, skillsets, and carefully scripted character arcs that intersected each other in fascinating ways.
While this found-family spacefaring tale kept its hooks in me over its 20-hour runtime, my only minor gripe with the story is that it felt too “clean” when it came to the interpersonal relationships. Each crew member was often found taking the high road when it came to moral dilemmas, and even when they did not, they were quick to come to their senses and restore their good nature via a prompt apology. You would think there would be some bad apples in such a large group of crewmates, but the group is so uniformly wholesome, it was hard for me to take the lot seriously. None was more impossibly perfect than the captain himself, who was a paragon of virtue. At one point he says, “My only constant is leaving open the possibility to listen and learn, even when I don’t understand.” Essentially, he is always a good guy and never turns off that path. Nonetheless, even without much moral nuance, this game has truly riveting character writing that reflects the varied settings and circumstances of their noble adventure.
The mechanics of this escapade are split into three different gameplay segments. First, there is the aforementioned visual novel. During these (sometimes lengthy) cutscenes you will primarily be reading the script and watching the drama unfold with an occasional dialogue choice thrown in for good measure. Secondly, there is the social-sim/RPG component that you can tinker around with after you complete any chapter. You will have the option to upgrade the cards in your deck with certain buffs, modify the Zephyr for global deck/battlefield bonuses, talk to your crewmembers around the ship, or take on side missions to earn extra resources and faction points. Not including your starting Patchworks faction, there are 5 additional factions that you can unlock and assist to build rapport. The more reputation you build with a faction, the more rewards you can earn from them, such as additional pilots to join your crew or various other deck/ship upgrades. This brings us to the third and final gameplay mechanic, the core card battler system.
Battle Suit Aces uses three separate decks that you will draw from over the course of a battle. Players will always draw a pilot (character card) and a drone each turn, and they can choose one of those options to play onto the field in one of 5 lanes. You will also get command points each turn, and once you accumulate enough, you will draw command cards. These provide special effects (i.e., “spells” for those familiar with other CCGs), such as direct damage, armour buffs, free actions, etc. After you play your cards onto the field, you can use your action and movement points (actions require colour energy that drones/pilots add to your energy bank each turn) to position your cards and attack in a lane to damage the opposing card. If no card is present in the opposite lane, the player will deal direct damage to the opposing commander. The first player to reduce the opposing commander’s hitpoints to zero wins the game.
This combat system is deep and complex enough to stay interesting over the course of the story, even if I had to turn up the difficulty to keep it challenging. Players will recruit different pilots with varying attack patterns or buff their cards with various keywords that change how they function on the battlefield. By the time I played Battle Suit Aces, the deck-editing feature was patched in and became a crucial part of honing my strategy. I was cooking up some wild deck synergies and combos that steamrolled my opponents. The character-focused card tactics made the combat all the more enjoyable. I absolutely loved doing crew missions as a side activity, which served both a narrative purpose and added modification slots to the pilots you choose for the mission. The card mechanics were just so well integrated into the overall game design; there wasn’t much I could improve. My only quibble was that I would have preferred having all my cards shuffled into one deck instead of having three separate ones. I would have loved to take the drones out of my deck entirely, given that they didn’t fit my strategy at all.
The overall aesthetic of the game is Saturday morning anime. Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind for its visual similarities and episodic nature, as well as its heartwarming tone. The card design is rich with detail, displaying character portraits alongside their mechanised suits, while each battlefield extends these designs with colourful visual effects and animation. The soundscape fits the drama of the artwork perfectly, not only in the gregarious voice acting but also in the space-opera soundtrack. The whole presentation serves to bolster the mood: an intrepid, sensational escapade across the galaxy.
And while I thoroughly enjoyed the burgeoning kindness between the characters and the clean-cut “good guy” vibes, especially for the captain, it left me wanting some more moral nuance. Nonetheless, the narrative epic kept me engaged with its eccentric interpersonal drama and robust deckbuilding. I was able to build some truly powerful combo decks utilising card synergies and careful planning, taking out the opponent with a rewarding OTK (one-turn kill). The variety of card modifications, abilities, and strategies created an engrossing gameplay loop that makes this undoubtedly one of my favourite CCGs (collectible card games) I have played in a long time.
