Pox Nora

Pox Nora offers an interesting take on the turn-based strategy genre. It offers the addictive nature of tactical strategy with the zen-like practice of managing all different types of party builds. The difficulty of the offline game means some people might lose far more battles than they win. Just like Dark Souls, every defeat is an opportunity to learn from mistakes and try different strategies. Unfortunately, what holds the game back, at least on the console, are technical issues that made me feel that I was struggling to tame this beast. To those interested in Pox Nora enough to try it out, it might best to take on the PC version instead.

Over the past decade, Pox Nora has built an amazingly deep strategy universe for tactics junkies to really sink their teeth into; we’re talking Marianas Trench levels of deep. When you take a moment to think about how complex all the interactions in Pox Nora must be, it staggers the mind. It’s unreal, it’s awesome, and it’s just a wee bit intimidating. But if deep is what you’re after, Pox Nora delivers.

It doesn’t even matter that the gameplay here is so good and delightfully complex. Pox Nora on PlayStation 4 is a failure in execution rather than concept; an excellent card and strategy game that few will likely stick with because of the frankly unacceptable technical issues. Even frame rate issues could be overlooked, but parts of the UI failing part way through matches rendering them unplayable and the usual F2P always online syndrome casts a dark shadow over the rest of the game. Maybe just play it on PC instead.