Naxxramas Is Cursed All Right

Blizzard recently released a single-player campaign of sorts for their online collectible card game (CCG) Hearthstone. It's called Curse of Naxxramas and while it did its job of getting me to load up the game again, it wholeheartedly failed to keep me engaged.

The format Blizzard chose for this content was episodic. Basically every week for 5 weeks, a section (or wing as they call them) of the Naxxramas dungeon unlocks and people are able to play it—provided they have put up the cash. Now if you get in early enough, the first part of the dungeon is free, if you wait too long than you have to pay for it like the rest (apparently you have one month from the initial release on July 22nd, 2014). Personally I think the first part of any episodic content in this format should be free, as the whole point is to make it so compelling that people want to pay for the rest.

The problem is Blizzard failed with that last point. I was really expecting this dungeon to be a real single-player experience, with its own narrative—I wasn't expecting anything crazy like new gameplay—but it didn't even have that! Naxxramas boiled down to 3 "boss" fights, which are just glorified bots. No narrative. No dungeon path either (I was maybe thinking something along the lines of a simpler Puzzle Quest map, but it didn't even have that). Without anything to keep me engaged with this content, why the hell should I even spend any money on it Blizzard?

The cards you get are the only real incentive to even purchase this content. You get 3 distinct cards for beating the 3 bosses and a legendary once you best all 3, each of which is themed to the dungeon. You also get another card for a specific class once you beat a challenge with that class. Basically you have to beat a specific boss with a specific class using a deck they give you, not one of your own. There are 2 such challenges in the first wing of the dungeon. In total you get 30 different cards after completing all 5 wings.

Getting all 6 cards in the first wing—which entails you beating all the bosses and challenges—took me roughly an hour. This is pretty lame since each wing is supposed to cost you $7 (or 700 gold, which is the in-game currency). Just for a frame of reference: purchasing all 5 wings at once is $25, and if you got the first one free than the remaining 4 wings are $20.

Back on point: very short + pretty easy = not very good single-player content. The only thing that almost saves it but doesn't at all is the fact that you can play the bosses a second time on a hellishly-hard difficulty. So hard that it actually made me want to not play anymore.

Maybe I'm just a little butthurt; I don't know, but I spent more time trying to beat the bosses on the "heroic" difficulty than I did beating the rest of the content. The worst part is that defeating the bosses on this difficulty doesn't even net you anything. Truthfully, saying that might be a bit pre-mature, as apparently if you beat all the bosses from all 5 wings on heroic it will unlock you a new skin for the back of your cards...whoopty-freakin-doo. I was able to beat one of the bosses on heroic in the extra 2 hours I spent playing Naxxramas, and it literally just came down to random luck. The advantages each of these bosses have are just so astronomical that I felt you needed all the luck you can get to defeat them. If I spent another few hours I could probably beat the others as well (I got really close to beating the second one) but I just don't think it's worth it.

Final Thoughts

Good try Blizzard, but in my opinion Curse of Naxxramas could have been so much more enticing or entertaining. Add a story, like an actual mini-adventure, instead of just making them simple AI battles skinned in a fancy face.