Capcom enters the mobile card battler fray with Teppen
And everyone from Ryu to Mega Man is in it.
Video game card battlers are hardly the hottest genre on earth right now, but that hasn't stopped Capcom from entering the fray with Teppen.
Teppen, which launched this week on the App Store and the Google Play store, is a bit like Hearthstone in that you pick cards to place units on a battlefield. But it's real-time in the sense that you don't have to wait for your turn to have an impact on what's going on.
Once you buy a card and place it down, an arrow shoots across the screen, providing a visual indicator of when the attack will hit. Meanwhile, you can play active cards that impact the game immediately in some way, for example doing damage to another unit or buffing. Playing an active card turns Teppen into a turn-based game of sorts - it stops the real-time action and gives your opponent the opportunity to respond with an action card of their own. This turn-based back and forth continues until both players have finished playing active cards, and the real-time action continues.
The match timer is set for five minutes, so the idea is Teppen is a quick-fire, accessible card battler. But the true hook is it includes characters from across Capcom's various video game franchises. There are a lot of Street Fighter characters in there, as you'd expect, as well as characters from Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry, Mega Man, Darkstalkers and Resident Evil.
The main starting eight characters you can choose from are Ryu, Chun-Li, Rathalos, Nergigante, Dante, X (Mega Man), Morrigan Aensland, and Albert Wesker. Each character has a special ability, but you have to wait until you've built up enough action points to trigger it.
Teppen is a co-production between Capcom and GungHo Online Entertainment. Expect more hero characters to be released over time.