The Buzz

If you’ve ever spent an afternoon playing Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering, or have ever gotten hooked by an collectible-driven game the appeal of PoxNora should be easily apparent for you: you are a summoner who collects various monsters, spells, relics, and Avatars and summons them to defeat your *opponents [*both human & computer opponents are instantly available round the clock] in fully realized turn-based battles against other summoners. I picked this game up, played through all of the starter campaigns back-to-back, and now I’m knee-deep in creating and customizing my ideal Battlegroup; An elusive, yet oddly addicting task. Honestly this is the only online computer game I’ve made a habit of playing daily. 

The real beauty & addictive quality of PoxNora appeals to any gamer looking for an addictive and strategic online game. It has triple-A makings, SOE [Sony Online Entertainment] is handling the title & gleam of polish that nearly all ‘free-to-play’ titles are missing.

Check out this video to see if PoxNora up your alley:

The combat in PoxNora is highly strategic, turn-based, & grid-based. If you’ve ever played any of the games in the ‘Final Fantasy Tactics’ series you should feel right at home after a few adjustments to some of the games interfaces. For those of you who’ve never played a Tactics title it’s better for you to imagine PoxNora like a mix of Pokemon [or Magic: The Gathering] and Monopoly. Complete with guilds, tournaments, and even booster packs. There are 1,000+ runes in PoxNora for you to add to your deck.

You still collect characters, abilities, & spells but you play them at the cost of your Nora, the game’s main currency, on a game board that serves as your battlefield. Across the battlefield there are Nora Fonts that add a set amount of Nora to your Nora bank at the beginning of each turn [think Energy in Pokemon or Mana in Magic: The Gathering]. Game are won by destroying your opponents Shrine [their base, basically].

In the standard mode of the game you find players in heated battles over control over the vital resources of Nora Fonts, which adds a nice little ‘king of the hill’ aspect to the gameplay, and feverishly defending their Shrines while plotting the demise of their enemies. Gameplay takes place over turns with preset a time limit that, like many other of the game’s rules, can be manipulated by the players. 

All in all PoxNora is one of those easy to pick up but abitch to master games that will suck you right into to it’s addicting web if you let it.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.