One of the best digital card games ever released, with the caveat that even with so many great selling points, it's also an incredible investment in time and brain power to get to a point of competency.

Artifact pulls a ton of flavor from Dota 2, but it’s not necessarily a game for Dota 2 players. Artifact is instead a highly cerebral card game of push and pull, with intense resource allocation and randomization management. Artifact is absolutely not for everyone, but it excels at creating a crazy strategy cocktail pulling from every bottle on the shelf. For card game fans, Artifact is not to be missed.

Innovative mechanics designed by Richard Garfield (Magic: The Gathering), rules that you can grasp after just a couple of minutes, clear interface – Artifact is a great game. It’s a shame that it’s huge esports potential can be squandered, because Valve doesn’t seem to care for it enough to implement progression systems, leagues, rankings or means to comfortably communicate with rivals outside an invitation-only friendly tournament. [01/2019, p.58]

Artifact is as hard-core as Dota2 and you might feel exhausted when you finish a single round which usually would last half an hour. The greedy economy system is lacking in long-term reward and it gives players no choice but to spend more and more money. But despite all those flaws, Artifact is also an innovative game which fuses basic MOBA mechanics and TCG rules together, and those elements actually work well. It's still full of potential.

The game offers a great experience with an intense concept. The input mapping is hard to handle at first but offers, with a controller, everything you can do with keyboard and mouse. Sadly, the game suffers from technical issues, especially clipping and framerate capping.

CCG fans looking to sink their teeth into some juicy tactical complexity should consider giving Artifact a try.

There are no reasons why you should buy this game, unless you are the biggest Dota 2 fan in the world.