Yomi 2

I came into Yomi 2 with the usual shooter-brain skepticism: turn-based card game dressed up as a fighter sounds like marketing copy waiting to disappoint you. It is not a disappointment. What David Sirlin built here is essentially the high-level decision layer of a fighting game with all the reaction-time gatekeeping removed. Every turn you are committing a card face-down, then both players flip simultaneously. Throws beat blocks. Blocks beat attacks. Attacks beat throws. Dodges punish attacks and set up counterstrikes. You already know this loop because you have played Street Fighter, even casually. The difference is that here you have to live with your read for a full beat, which somehow makes a wrong call sting more than dropping a combo in a real fighter. The mechanics that sit on top of that foundation are where the game earns serious respect. Each of the 20 characters plays a distinct archetype. Zoner types like Jaina build hand size while lobbing low-risk projectile cards, pressuring you to come forward into their traps. Grapplers like Rook want the knockdown so they can run high-low mixup pressure. Super meter charges when you discard matching card pairs or land chain combos, and when a super lands it can completely swing a match. On top of that, each character has a pre-match gem selection that drops a suite of extra cards into your deck - the red gem adds projectile damage tools, white gem increases draw, and so on. It is a small customisation layer but it meaningfully affects matchup spreads and gives every session a prep-phase tension that feels familiar if you have ever picked assists in a team fighter. The single-player career mode sends you through a series of card venues, fighting regulars, entering tournaments, and climbing fake social media notoriety. It is charming set dressing and the four AI difficulty levels give you a genuine practice partner, but reviewers and the community are consistent on this: solo mode is a warm-up room, not the main event. The real game is against a human being. Online synchronous play works and cross-platform support means the PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, and console player pools merge. Async play is also in, which matters for people who want to play seriously without blocking out a session. That is a thoughtful concession to adult schedules. The biggest honest complaint is the tutorial. It front-loads concepts at speed and leaves gem interactions and advanced hand-reading almost entirely unexplained. Multiple reviewers, and plenty of Steam users, reached for YouTube guides before their first real online match. That is a real barrier on a game where the skill gap between a prepared player and an unprepared one is brutal. There is also a moderate RNG element baked into card draw that will occasionally cost you a match you read correctly. It does not dominate outcomes at any competent level, but it will irritate you on day one. If you are the kind of person who needs to know why you lost in precise mechanical terms, budget time for the learning curve before touching ranked. For shooter players crossing genres, this scratches the same itch as a well-balanced 1v1 ranked mode without the hardware ceiling. Your 144hz monitor and sub-50g mouse mean nothing here. All that matters is whether you can outread the person across the table. That is either liberating or frustrating depending on your personality. I found it liberating.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

Be the first to comment on Yomi 2.