Floppy Knights

My first hour with Floppy Knights felt deceptively simple, and then a late-world mission handed me a commander death in turn three and I had to rebuild my entire deck strategy from scratch. That pivot is what this game is actually about. Rose City Games took two genres that each demand full attention and fused them into a single combat loop: every move, summon, buff, and retreat is gated behind a card and an energy pool, meaning tactical positioning and hand management are inseparable decisions, not separate phases. The core works like this. Before each mission you choose a commander, the anchor unit whose death means an instant loss. Each commander drives a distinct playstyle: Captain Thistle (Plants) is a mobile vanguard who boosts movement speed across the board, Vera leans into healing and unit preservation for attrition-heavy objectives, and Big Mad of the Monster deck is a controlled-aggression bruiser who gains attack power proportional to damage taken. Three deck factions in total - Plants, Monsters, and Hooligans - each play differently enough to demand separate skill sets. Plants favor methodical positional defense and healing. Monsters are explosive, low-cost swarm units that burn hot and die fast, similar in feel to red aggro in card games. Hooligans run on poison and status effects, relying on evasive movement to keep fragile units alive. The game unlocks these factions gradually over 27 story missions and 24 challenge missions, pacing new decisions without overwhelming newcomers. For anyone who worries about the "two genres at once" learning curve: the tutorial does real work here. Units always get one free attack per turn regardless of hand state, which acts as a safety valve when draws go sideways. The deck-size ceiling of 30 cards forces trim construction rather than Swiss-army bloat, and the mission-specific objectives - capture zones, flag steals, beacon defense, even knocking a giant off a cliffside - rotate the puzzle framing often enough that you rarely feel like you are solving the same problem twice. The difficulty curve is fair for most of the campaign, with only a handful of notable spikes. Even experienced tactics players will want to bench the impulse to over-build, because a leaner 18-20 card deck will cycle key synergies far more reliably than a stacked one. There are friction points worth flagging. Enemy turn animations are slow and cannot be sped up, which is a real pacing issue in longer late-game missions that can stretch toward 45-plus minutes. If your commander dies deep in one of those missions, you restart from the beginning with no checkpoint. Some locked cards in each faction limit the customisation ceiling more than they should, particularly the mandatory movement cards that cannot be swapped for upgraded alternatives. The story wrapping all of this is light and pleasant but lacks any meaningful narrative pull - it is functional context, not a reason to care. Mod support is absent, so once the 51 missions and challenge objectives are cleared, the replayability question is largely answered by difficulty retries rather than fresh content. That said, at its Metacritic-83 quality level, Floppy Knights earns its score honestly. The commander synergy discovery - finding that Big Mad with Treefolk Rock and a Succulent Kicker generates nearly unstoppable momentum - produces exactly the kind of "I figured this out" satisfaction that makes tactics games stick. It is not a 200-hour commitment; it is a tight, focused game that respects the player enough to make every mission feel like a distinct problem worth solving.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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