Gordian Quest Review (cazminah)
tentative recommend, have played nearly 30 hours on top 2 difficulty levels but haven't made it out of Act I yet. >< I restarted after ~10hrs due to a suboptimal starter deck choice I made at the beginning when I didn't understand the game which ended up being too difficult to adapt
Pros:
→ extremely deep combat system, utilizing cards along with a position-based grid for combat
→ each character has three schools to specialize into with unique mechanics, creating a wide-ranging set of builds (good variety, can spec into damage/support/DPS/summons)
→ three characters on your team plus this huge range of options = potential SYNERGIES GALORE
→ the skill tree grid thingy is really cool and exciting, lots of different nodes to provide new cards, card rank-ups, card removal/respec, stat boosts, passive traits, and so forth. gives you a lot of agency over how you can progress your build.
→ if you like overanalyzing things, this is a theorycrafter's wet dream (thought maybe overanalysis has been my downfall here)
→ super flexible difficulty adjustment (change at any time, including toggling permadeath)
Cons:
→ the game is TERRIBLE at teaching you how it works. the tutorials are minimal and there is very little info online so you basically need to test things out to understand the intricacies of how anything works. how many cards do you draw? is there a hand limit? what's the range on a "melee" skill? how much SP does each card generate? this is just the tip of the iceberg, I've had so many instances of "wait so how does this work?" and then I test it and it works in a different way to how I expect and I get screwed.
→ the predicted number of how much damage a card will do is wrong in a lot of cases! definitely when multi-hit is involved, and sometimes when buffs/debuffs are involved (which is often!). I've been playing with a calculator open on the side so I can work out how exactly how much damage my cards will do before committing to any actions (because if you don't, you will die)
→ UI is very frustrating - it does not telegraph a lot of important information and a lot of it feels very clunky. would love to be able to see an informative decklist like: 5x Bleed, 3x Crit, 2x Guard, 10x Attack, 4x Melee, etc.
→ inventory management is a bit of a PITA, there are a LOT of equipment slots, plus card slots and runes. optimizing does make quite a difference so if your brain gets sucked into math problems (like mine) you can end up spending a lot of time re-jigging everything when you receive a new set of equipment -- probably a bit *too* much complexity in this area to be fun
→ the little exploration / camping mini-games are interesting but again, quite complicated and not taught well.
Conclusion
despite my rants above, I am obsessed with this game and am upset to be going on holiday which means I can't play it for the next 5 days. some elements are a bit overthought / overcomplicated but at its core it is an excellent deckbuilding tactics game (just with major UI issues which makes it often frustrating to play!)
would love to see a patch or a mod that fixes all my gripes with the game. I think it's like 85% there. a detailed wiki would also help.