Solid Game, Room to Improve
Sun Nov 17 2024 FrogmoodThe pros:
-the core gameplay is good. the mechanics are fun and engaging, with a good amount of depth
-the card art is great
-the rpg elements are a cool twist on the genre
-theres a nice amount of customization options
-does pressure you into micro transactions
-only costs a buck and half
The cons:
-the UI could do with an complete overhaul. the bottoms often kind of blend in with the rest of the UI and are hard to see
-it’s kind of clunky and a bit buggy, with some ocasional long load times. for instance, occasionally after a battle, it gets hung up and takes upwards of 30 seconds to load back into the map.
-the tutorials could also use work. The highlighting, again, has too little contrast and is easy to miss. And there are things that aren’t explained or obvious from the tutorial, such as the fact that you need to tap on the “victory” or “defeat” messages after a battle to continue. It’s not a huge deal, but little things like that add up to detract from the experience.
Overall, it’s a good game, and the pros definitely outweigh the cons, but a bit of polish and tidying up would go a long way. I would suggest looking at games like Hearthstone for cues on UI design. Generally, the simpler and sleeker, the better. obvious the dev doesn’t have the resources of blizzard, but you know what I mean.
Really Good Game
Sun Jul 03 2022 TSAbshearI love this game; been playing it for years. It's fun, engaging, and interesting, with a ton of cards and great gameplay. The developer keeps patching it and adding to it, which is amazing to me, and it keeps getting better, with a new expansion added just a little bit ago despite this game being several years old. The randomly-generated areas accessible through a portal are an excellent touch for replayability, and I absolutely love that the developer recently made the special cards unique to each opponent drop more frequently, cutting down severely on grind.
Buy it if you like single-player, easy-to-pick-up card games with no microtransactions, no lag, good mechanics, and continuing love and attention from its creator. To say so, I favor gameplay over story or setting for something like this, so it doesn't bother me that the writing isn't tight, but if you're looking for that it's not here, sorry. Just battle after battle, with some occasional "Please help my brother!" which, of course, translates to "Go fight ______ in a dungeon colored thematically but which is otherwise essentially the same as any other!" The enemies are different, though, with interesting combos and deck composition tailored to them, and their own aforementioned special cards you can get when winning.
If he ever makes the spaced-themed game he appeared to be working on, I'd be psyched to play that too, I'm sure.
All the fun of HS with none of the pain
Fri Feb 02 2018 ClubdemerJust what I was looking for! Got to the point in HS that I didn’t care if I won and hated it if I lost— not a great recipe for enjoyment. On the other hand, Lost Portal is simply pure fun— love it when I win and, if I lost, try again! The adventure format simply adds another dimension to this enjoyment and I can imagine interesting updates where it may even play a bigger role.
A couple of requests from the developer: Playing on an iPad Pro and the attack button and discard pile are a bit overly particular as to where they get activated. I often have to try to discard more than once to hit the sweet spot (same goes for the attack button). Also, the game seems to require a vertical orientation with the home button at the bottom. As I like to play with the iPad plugged in, the plug gets in the way at that orientation. It would be great if it could be flipped to put the home button at the top.
You have something really good here— looking forward to even better!
Fantastic CCG
Sat Dec 10 2022 zcxcjdkkzkskxkcjxNever written a review before - had to for Lost Portal. Great CCG for a player who likes a challenge. Easy to pick-up and put-down to fit in throughout the day, so I’ve played a lot!
I had to work my way up to the hardest mode and “lose cards or gold” penalty, but the challenge is worth it. Really have to intelligently utilize all the tools (smith, shop, level up) available to win.
I haven’t yet gone into the ‘past main storyline’ stuff, but I’m looking forward to it. For the price the game is fantastic.
Not game-breaking, but a couple bugs I want to point out in case the developer wants to know:
1. For any battle, if you shut the game off before the penalties (gold/cards) are dealt fully, the battle is reset. I used this exploit to work my way up to handling the hard mode on a early playthrough and avoid penalties.
2. For the card penalties, you can “lose” cards that were placed in your graveyard through the battle. Effectly nullifying a penalty. Interaction only happens if you have cards like Torakal, Master’s Will, Death Undone, in the deck that can steal enemy cards.
Lots of interactions to discover and decks to build. I definitely feel like the game was built for someone who takes CCGs seriously, as on easier modes you kind-of become super powerful and rarely if-ever lose, and eventually don’t have a use for the shop & smithy. But that hardest mode is frustratingly challenging in the best kind of way. Great game!!
Its ….pretty good
Mon Aug 18 2025 Trent81700The bones of the game are good, characters are well drawn, game mechanics are good. My issues lie with the core flow of the game, from the boot your given not a ton of options with deck building, I ended up switching multiple colors before I landed on green as I was finally able to beat early game bad guys. The precons your given feel kneecapped compared to the starting enemies. The only other main problem im noticing is the card drawing generator? I have switched cards around numerous times exchanging more aeon taking some out. I get Rng gods blow sometimes but more often then not the AI gets bricked as well as the player, the level of frustration I felt after carefully scanning each cost of card to aeon ratio only to draw aeon… aeon… aeon…aeon all while getting wally whooped by the AI makes me happy I have apple care. All in all its a fun game! It draws me back to play! But more varied card options from the start and a peak into how the cards come out of the deck to hand would improve this greatly!
Great job overall though 🤩
Hands down my most played app
Wed Feb 16 2022 LunaticAceI’ve had this game for years now and I still break it out all the time. It’s the perfect filler to play just a single battle when you have a few minutes to kill. And I’ve had immense fun tuning my decks to get better performance. I love this game and am so overjoyed to see some new content just released! My only request to the dev would be to employ a way to reset the story progress for a character build but NOT reset the card library or built decks, so I have more game to play once I’ve beaten all levels but don’t have to go through all the card management again. Alternatively a “custom single battle” mode or something using my developed characters would also be fun, as long as I could set it to give me a tough challenge. Awesome game all around, thank you for making and continuing to support!
Just what I was looking for
Thu Dec 27 2018 SziencemanThis game allows you to play a single battle in just 2-5 minutes. Random drops keep you coming back to get new cards and try different strategies. Thanks for developing the expansions. One thing I’d like to see is the ability to choose the frequency that you get cards versus gold. Can we always get cards and have the option to just sell them for money? At this point in the game, I no longer have a use for gold and it can become a grind to find those rare avatar cards that might be the linchpin for a new deck style.
Great game overall, and highly recommended for those looking for an experience that allows for collection of items (cards) and character advancement without a continue to pay to get rarer stuff model. You have to earn the rare stuff. How it should be.
Played the heck out of this game...
Thu May 23 2019 PsdnThis game meets all of your expectations for a game spawned from the likes of MTG and others in a single-player format. The towns/dungeons/quests are straight forward, and are a great way to explore a format like this. The balancing of the cards is quite well done. Also, portrait mode by nature....can’t be beat!
I have one request if developers read this and still have an interest in furthering this game (unless a sequel is in the works). The expansions add a decent number of cards, but the campaigns are quite short and don’t allow you take full advantage of them. Lengthening the expansions with an extra town and few extra dungeons seems easy enough and would satisfy players to a huge extent.
Anyway, been playing forever, and it’s one of the best pickup game apps if you’re a ccg fan... ever.
Love it, buy it
Fri Apr 26 2019 Des138For a few bucks, this game is worth hours of good game play. Like other deck building games, you start off with a base deck and through eliminating monsters and other threats on behalf of various towns/cities, you gain gold and cards to make your deck awesome. Similar to Magic, you can make Red/Blue decks, Black/Green, one color decks, etc. I love this game. You may find some monsters draw godly well one time, then you pull out some crazy stuff and win. Do remember that you can forge cards, buy more from the merchant, and find more off of monsters. All in game currency of course, no p2w or other stupid micro transactions that plague other games. Two expansions that add variety and more content to play. All in all, gooooooood game. Haven’t played a satisfying phone game in ages, but this one does it right.
Love this to death
Sun Aug 22 2021 TaznakIf it wasn't for this game, I'm not sure what I would play on my phone, if anything. It is a single-player card collecting game where you build your deck of cards and face off against various AI opponents. I've loved other card games in the past, but they've been ruined by greed (Hearthstone) or power creep (Legends of Runeterra). Lost Portal may not have their production budget, but that just makes this a lovingly crafted, affordable game that is a lot of fun and endlessly replayable. There are no ads, no microtransactions (though there are paid expansions), no energy system limiting your play time, no daily quests pressuring you to play every day. Once you buy this game, you own it forever, the full game. That is both wonderful and rare, nowadays.
