A fantastic recreation of ongoing superhero comics, the mechanics do an excellent job of mirroring the medium. The game forgoes detailed mechanics in favor of recreating longform superhero narratives. The number crunch of games like Champions or Mutants & Masterminds are great for the minutia of superhero debates, like if Superman can punch harder than the Hulk, but this doesn't try to approach that. Instead, it gets at what matters more in those narratives: who can Superman save? Who gets hurt in the Hulk's wake? We all know the hero wins at the end of the story arc, but how bad do things get before that happens?

The card drawing mechanic supports the theme of the game well. In my playthroughs, the suits encouraged running themes, callbacks, recurring characters. Sometimes, the random nature of the draws could sometimes make things a little awkward (I found the defeat of an enemy happening the round after they were introduced, in one game), but that keeps the ongoing game interesting, as you don't have any guarantee of what is going to happen.

The die mechanic is simple and quick, allowing players to know how things turn out and get moving with the narrative smoothly. In one of my playthroughs, it felt as though the character was accumulating a great deal of success quickly, hardly ever failing a roll and accumulating a great deal of success quickly (rolling on d6's, I had a lot of 6's). The city in my game wasn't taking much collateral damage, which makes you go through your deck of cards faster, which makes the game itself take quite a bit longer. However, characters in Anyone Can Wear the Mask eventually reach a downfall that they can't avoid (the "all is lost" moment, in the narrative), and I found that my character's overwhelming success made the inevitable failure all the more hard on the city. Rules as written, the hero's downfall impacts the city based on their renown,  causing more suffering and chaos for the city, forcing them to discard from the deck. If the deck runs out, a crisis happens, and by the time my character was picking things up after their downfall, they had about five cards left, making that crisis feel rather immediate. That early success, the highs that your character reaches, mean that your eventual fall is farther, and grant it more weight. Even though you know a downfall is coming, it still feels dramatically important, and weighted against everything you had achieved before that point.

In the end, the game does exactly what it sets out to do, and that makes for an excellent experience to play through. If I had one issue, part of me feels like the climax, the uprising against the villain, might feel a little unearned or anticlimactic (you draw a card, after everything you've been through, and reach the point where the hero wins), from a gaming standpoint. From a narrative standpoint, however, taking in everything that happens to get there, it feels as important as you're willing to make it, and can make for a fulfilling experience if you let it. Along the way to that climax, the story builds up all the triumphs and tragedies that show the people affected in the hero's wake, fleshing out the city and showing who the villain hurts, giving the game a gravity that I usually don't see just from the mechanics of an RPG. I'll definitely be heading back to my city and character for another game of Anyone Can Wear the Mask, and I can't wait to take some friends along with me.