Gordian Quest Review (borings)
i really wanted to like this game - it has a very nice visual feel and interesting story - but the gameplay is just not good. As others have stated, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the best thing to do is just spam aoes to kill the enemies before they act.
looking through the skill trees, it is obvious there is meant to be other tactics, but they are just implemented terribly. looking through the abilities, it seems they have sacrificed balance for flavor purposes. take fire/frost/electric damage. fire does 50% damage to adjacent, electric causes adjacent units to trigger their electric, and frost causes an attack penalty. additionally, a unit cannot have both fire and frost, obviously for flavor reasons. while on paper that might seem good, in implementation it makes fire significantly better than the other two, and makes frost just a trap build. theoretically, frost would be better against single targets (i.e. boss fights) but since the vastly overwhelming amount of fights are groups, and you cannot swap decks easily, frost is just bad. add on top of that the card pool for fire has better synergies and frost builds just are bleh.
bad ability balance could be overlooked, if the other mechanics of the game weren't also just so terrible. the leveling system uses this awkward plate system where abilities you want to learn next are sometimes just not in reach, which means you don't really have a lot of control over what abilities your characters actually know. Or at least, that is how it appears at first. However, you can farm money to get books to get respec points, and then you have a small chance for each of your abilities to reroll into something that you like. which means you can actually build your character how you like, but you hafta sit through grindy battles that all play out exactly the same for a few hours just to tweak things how you like.
Of course, you might be wondering, why bother with that grind, why not just accept the random abilities you get? because the way the game is "balanced" is that they obviously assume you have done this grind in order to get through fights, which means that if you don't do it, your team will just get wiped by random average monsters. starting in the second act (of 5?) average monsters start doing OHKO attacks. So if you aren't going first and killing them all before they act, your characters die and you need to start a new run. Since you need to go first just to get through, all the fights start becoming the same exact fight. Added to that, by the time you are done with act 1 you prolly have all the abilities your characters will ever need to learn. So you get through the first area and then its another 20 hours of the exact same fight, no new tactics, no new abilities. just damage going up, and monster hp going up.
basically i think the core of the prollem comes down to the over-use of randomization in character growth. if players could actually plan their builds, the abilities and fights could be tuned to not just be rocket tag. the player and enemy damage could be lowered, and more creatures could be added in that require specific tactics.
to put all this in perspective, in my last run after clearing chapter 1, my main character that always went first had over 74k damage done. the other two characters each had about 1k damage done. i had grinded a bit more than normal, so that i could get respec points onto the two side characters, because i wanted to see if different builds were viable, but it really didnt matter, the one character that went first just always did the same thing.