Grand Guilds

Game is playable and enjoyable. Yes there are UI bugs but if you can get this on a discount then why not. Story is great but ending seems rushed and it looked like they planned to add content or continue it on a 2nd game at some point, we will never know until there is news sadly.

The story although basic as a surprising amount of though put into the characters, although the cut scenes stop having sound effects midway through.

the combat was enjoyable on easy, but i can see not being able to grind freely being a issue on higher difficulties.

Meh. The game is not good, but for $3 I was entertained enough; allbeit that I relegated the game to a two monitor activity while watching YouTube videos. I've basically committed myself to finishing the game out of stubbornness.

The combat is shallow. Having your character's abilities be random based off of card drawing is a bad decision. Better to have the randomness be whether or not your attacks hit, how much they hit for, etc. Instead your abilities are random but their effects are obvious.

The story makes me curious, even though the characters are childish. Meh.

I was curious how a concept of combining deckbuilding with turn based tactical combat would feel, now I know it's not particularly enjoyable at least for me. A case where innovating too much in the core mechanics did more harm than good.

Really hard to play strategically and tactically when the randomness of your card decks really limits your options. This game might play better as a pure deck building card game while removing the tactical aspect to feel more enjoyable. In the end it might just turn off both the deckbuilding audience as well as the turn based tactical audience.

It's a shame, since otherwise the art and presentation isn't so bad and I'm a big fan of most turn based tactical games such as Fire Emblem and X-Com.

Lots of bugs. It could have been a fun game, but as it is its a difficult experience to play through, as you frequently need to exit the game and re-launch. Missing a lot of polish overall. The default controller set is a mess, with some buttons doing two actions (like the acknowledge button zooms in, the cancel button zooms out). The UI overall is very rough. Almost impossible to see the blue cursor on the blue backgrounds, so you always have to guess where your cursor is. If you use all your cards, you can only access the fixed ability using the mouse. Left/Right Trigger rotates the screen, but not spells, so you have to remap the Trigger keys to Q/E for them to work properly. Overall the UI seems to have been an afterthought.

Renaming a deck creates a new spell book. Plus no way to delete decks. So you end up having a bunch of extra garbage decks cluttering up your UI as well. The game could be really good if they had paid attention to the UI.

If it's on sale and you don't have any other games to play, this one is good enough to keep you occupied if you like tactical rpg genre.

the game VERY simple, low complicity and not very detailed.

After a while the game is very repetitive. Limited leveling system make it so that IF you change character to play (limited to 3 per fight) your main character may be under leveled.

Game description is not very clear
For example
:Some cards have condition base on amount of "common" and "rare" card, but no information on which card is common or rare.

Card system is very mediocre

I would DEFINITELY recommend Gordian Quest, same type of game, MUCH MUCH better mechanic and details.

Grand Guilds is a turn based strategy rpg using cards for ability. Deck can be build before battle using cards from 3 category ;physical damage, magical damage and support). 15 cards are allow per deck per character and a maximum of 3 characters are allow per battle. I played on the 2nd difficulty, 3 difficulty level are available.

The game as a good start as the story and character are intriguing enough to let you want to know more of whats going on.

Same for the battle, the early battles are quite interesting since your learning the battle system, deck /cards and the redraw option. As you progress, the battle becomes repetitive; always the same monster, same battlefield, the enemy just rush to their death for almost every battle. The AI aint the best, as they dont coordinate their attack, they apply debuff at target who are already suffering from debuff at max stacks (spiders with immobilize) and they block each others. You can keep your starting deck for many battle, only a few need specific strategy. The maximun of 3 characters is way too low for that type of game.

Also as you get new characters they are underleveled. The 7th character I got was level 12, the main character was 24, and the characters I wasn't using were 16. I was forced to use him the first battle after he joined. So A level 24,23 and 12 against enemy level 20. This is where I quit. I think there is a level scaling and the proper way to play is to using the lowest character to avoid overleveling the others. But when I realise this it was too late and the game has too many negative points so it wasnt worth the effort.

There is also a few bug; some attack fail on certain monster; Kadmus's water bolt on wolfs does nothing. Skyla's return fire killed an enemy (its a counterattack) but the enemy was able to attack again after it was dead.
Some passive lack explanation; like the one with card rarity. I didn't see any card with a rarity on it.

the cancel option on the redraw system doesn't work. I ended up redrawing cards I wanted to keep a few times because of that.

Also some achievements doesnt work ; I never received getting 3+ character event with 7 character in party. But it aint the reason for the negative review.

To summarize, the game has some potential but many thins need to be fixed/improved. Its very unpolished/rushed.

It was fun and games but then my ship crashed I couldn't do a quest or the main story as the option is greyed out. The game glitched out after I completed one side mission so im stuck til fixes happen but its fun and the story is there its worth some time. I made it through the glitch by luck after spending time trying different combinations so I'll let you know that the whole UI gets messed up if you allow the game to detect your controller so don't accept when it asks.Also turrets and other summons do not function and my achievements are glitched as well.Lastly the last two characters are not unlocked when they should so you might not obtain them at all.

While it is not a 'grand' game, it is a worthwhile effort from a small studio.

What I like:
The turn based engagements, they have tactics in them
Character design
the plot is interesting

The downsides (but I knew that from the start) are the fact that the plot is fixes (I think the Witcher series has sopiled me), and, if someone wants top notch 3d graphics, they are not there. For a small game bought during a sale I am satisfied.

So I'll list the bad first. The game lacks polish, the models in the cutscenes are pretty bad and some of the dialogue needs work. All that said the passives, cards and combat are a lot of fun to find different combinations that work. Dot damage is actually very useful by the end of the game and decimating a boss in 2 hits is always fun if you get the right cards.

The story is surprisingly good despite the dialogue issues, but a lot of what happens is believable. The cliffhangers throughout are great and pace the story well. If you like strategy rpgs then this is one to try for sure and the story is definitely engaging enough to be worth it.

I am having fun with the combat system. I am a Shining Force fan and Grand Guilds reminded me of it. There are some combat bugs that force a mission restart (when an enemy becomes un-targetable after using an ability on or near them).

The storyline is nothing extraordinary, but is an intriguing enough mystery. The dialogue has some typos, but mostly the only complaint I have would be the odd flirty vibe of most characters, which creates some forced/cringy lines.

This game's combat system could really make for a hit (with added expansions, sequels, characters, skins, and villains).

I think, at the core, the card/deck/passive progression and combat is better than Children of Zodiarcs that tried something similar a year ago and has comparable enjoyment (combat-wise) to some of my favorite turn-based strategies new and old (I think only Massive Chalice or Expeditions Conquistador/Vikings I’ve had more fun with in recent years).

My only notes on the combat system besides some bugs:
• I’ve liked games that weaken/fatigue a character as wounds/HP loss racks up. It is odd to have an archer at 10% health still wreak havoc. (Though I like Raze’s build benefiting from HP loss).
• Easy to fall in love with the first three characters when un-selected heroes fall behind in level.
• I wouldn’t have minded more than 3 active heroes (or at least a variety to the cap for certain missions).

All in all, I’m going to look-out for whatever Drix Studios decides to work on next.

Ok, I'm still in the beginning but I'm having a great time and even reading what the negative reviews point out, I feel this games really deserves a better rating. It hooks me enough to feel like I'm going to play it until the end, which means something.

I agree the UI may be confusing, and it lacks more voice acting, but "Mixed" is harsh, I think. We're not talking about an AAA. The art is great, combat is engaging, the characters are charming. There's enough in this game to make me wonder what will happen next and care about the story.

So it's going to be a clear upvote for me.

Congrats devs, the game is very nice, I certainly look forward to the future.

new update: I get it now. The difficulty setting is not the main issue. When you start a new game the game for some weird reason still keeps your characters abilities from your old save. That's why I was so strong... Also the bug with not beeing able to redraw cards is annoying.
plz fix!!

old update: BIG MINUS Drix Studio please fix this: The difficulty choise doesn't change anything!?
I wanted to replay the game on a higher difficulty... but it's always on normal!?
I will give the game a positiv score again as soon as you fix this and some other bugs. For example the final sidemissions for the last 2 achievments didn't trigger for me.
plz fix! Thanks.

Update Review (after finishing the game):

+ Combat is interesting (I love the Fire Emblem turnbase Strategy and Cardgame combination)
+ Characters are diffrent and likeable
+ I am a fan of the 2D-Artstyles of the characters
+ Attack Animations look good and the maps have a good variety of diffrent themes (except sidemissions)
+ Music is surprisingly good
+ Controlls are very simple
+ Price is fair

> Story is ok

- To many and repeating Sidemissions!!!
- Bugs
- The game feels like an early access game not like a full game (yet!?)
- Dialoge and Cutscenes could use more music and soundeffects!!

Overall I really enjoyed the playtrough. It's a fun strategy game!
Drix Studios created a solid game! (Hopefully they patch some stuff)

Characters are enjoyable, the story is enjoyable and the combat is enjoyable... but only on paper.

I find the mechanics of the combat and the deck-building interesting: there's a nice variety of strategies you can go for, technically, and they're both at a visual and tactical level quite different from one another. BUT it seldom feels like you've lost a battle because of a tactical flaw on your part because the difficulty of battles do not come from the enemy outsmarting you; it comes from sheer numbers. Your team is limited to 3 people while the enemy can be 5 or maybe even 6 iirc. The bosses are hard only if the numbers written on their moves are high or they have henchmen with them. Some enemies are just annoying because they have ridiculous range and can attack your backline from anywhere, rendering positioning inconsequential and your tank useless unless you have stacked aggro-drawing cards. Btw I don't think the game is hard, especially after the first few chapters; the problem is that when it is hard, it is not hard in the enjoyable way.

What's more, there are bugs, A LOT OF THEM! I won't even list them but just know that there are too many that either cost you a battle (looking at you redraw) or straight up prevent your from using your selected team.

Speaking of forcing a team, this game likes to do it and I doubt anyone alive likes to be forced to play with some character they've already tried and decided NOT to put them in the team. The main issue, however, is that the number of battles you have is limited and the enemies scale with level. So, if at least one character in the forced team is one in your main team, and one of the rest of the forced characters is someone you don't use, your team is practically 2 people or if you're unlucky, 1. This is where the limited number of battles become an issue: you can't just go back and level the weak character. In that sense, the game punishes you for doing sidequests because you're just increasing the level difference between your main team and the rest. However, level is actually important in the game because it lets you take more passives for a character and the passives are the crux of your strategy. As such, whatever you decide to do, you are punished.

I truly tried to like the game but after being forced to use characters and teams I did not want to for a long time in the part of the story I'm in, coupled with the annoying bugs and overall lack of quality of life stuff I won't even address, I decided to wait (and hope) for the game to be patched. It really makes you wonder if they even tried to play the game before releasing it.

The side battles are the most monotonous things I've seen in an RPG. I have no idea why they were designed like that? Its a repeat of the same 2-3 battles.

This seems like it could have been such a fun, engaging game. The mechanics are there. The battles are relatively fun.

Go buy Fell Seal instead.

After playing the game longer and incorporating the updates the developers have made, I've edited my review.

The core gameplay mechanic is present in this game and it can be addictive had everything else fallen into place. Unfortunately, it feels like the developers released this title early and ran out of resources before doing some much-needed polishing and updates.

Game Breaking Bugs:

There's a lot of game breaking bugs (and by game breaking, I mean you need to restart your game), not limited to:

* Game can hang if you chose the wrong deck,
* Game can hang if you skip certain cutscenes,
* Some enemies become invulnerable if you use certain push/pull skills,
* Your characters can be taken out of combat if enemies use certain push/pull skills against you.

Horrible Game Interface:

Again, lacking polish here, even despite the patch updates:

* The game doesn't tell you what the card rarities are, this is something you have to figure out yourself,
* The game doesn't tell you which cards are keyed off against certain stats,
* Some maps have tiles which are difficult to click,
* Erroneous tooltips either because they're really errors (for example, fielding less than 3 characters mentions you didn't equip enough Passive skills), because they're erroneously worded (for example, quests that reward a passive bonus to "everyone" says "none"), or because there was no budget to hire an editor (a lot of cards are poorly worded).
* Some controls don't behave the way you expect them to, such as pressing ESC to cancel a card you picked.
* It's common to make misclicks (thankfully there's usually an undo button).

They ran out of budget:

Not necessarily deal-breakers, but something potential buyers should be aware:

* Voice acting is front loaded. The trailer has 90% of the voice acting, and the rest of the voices are grunts or sighs from specific characters.
* Missions are also front-loaded. Much of the polish is in the early chapters of the game. For example, towards the latter chapter, there's a series of quests where you have 9 pickable characters, but the game forces you to use a specific composition of 3 characters for some 5 odd missions. There's also the vampire boss in the latter part which is extra difficult because it's possible for them to heal more damage than they receive (they have a passive skill which heals whenever they receive damage).
* The game's language could really benefit from an editor.

Gameplay balance:

The level-scaling enemies isn't a good match for this game because it doesn't promote team composition diversity. A workaround is leveling everyone equally, but this is difficult to do, and it doesn't help that sometimes the game forces you into a specific team composition for too long. The developer's solution of sharing 40% XP is a halfway solution that doesn't really work. Instead, they should have made 100% XP sharing (all characters start at the same level and progress the same) if they wanted to keep level-scaling enemies intact and promoting team diversity.

Mediocre story:

Honestly at this point, this is the least of my concerns, and skipping the cutscenes is probably recommended.

The game looked like it was going to be a lot of fun, but the controls for the game are horrendous.

You can't just choose your targets with your mouse, you have to use WASD to move your cursor to your target.

The game's glitchy. Why is this card highlighted, even though my mouse isn't on it, and why is it covering my mana? I have to scroll through my hand to highlight a different card, just to see how much mana I have.

Then, it looks like it has controller support, with controller prompts listed on screen, but the tutorial only tells you keyboard controls, and actually using a controller is a bigger pain in the butt than using mouse and keyboard. Oddly enough, I found that using a controller in your left hand and mouse in your right offered the best control scheme? How stupid is that?

I think I would've loved this game as I'm a big fan of grid-based tactics-like games, and then you throw in the deckbuilding, and you've got 2 of my favorite game types rolled into one, but I just can't get past the poor controls.

From what I have seen so far this game is great! The biggest thing that Grand Guilds has going for it is its core card-based, tactical game play. I am a sucker for these kind of games, and this one adds just enough of a spin to keep things interesting.

- The characters are unique, and as far as playable characters it appears there is a good number that you can unlock to fit your play style
- The cards also have a distinct feel to them and there's plenty of mixing and matching that is allowed for decks
- The actual game-play has been riveting so far, and on the medium difficulty I am finding a good balance between too easy and too hard.

All that being said, there are still many places where the game could be improved to push it leaps and bounds above where it is now in terms of a polished and complete feel.

The only 2 real qualms I have with the game are...
1. There are times when I'll click "start quest" over and over again and it won't carry the action through, or I'll buy a new card and it won't show a change in the in-game currency. Also when selecting cards during combat, sometimes the games gets confused on if I am moving or using a card and I'll have to cancel the action, re-select the card and then finish the action.
2. It's extremely anti-climactic when you kill an enemy, especially a boss, and then their figure is still moving like it's alive even after you've killed it. Does it really matter? no. But it's hard to get immersed in the game like that.

Some nit-picky things...
- The voice acting is decent, but having full voiced characters would add a lot to the story. Not to mention hearing the same few phrases from a character after every action can become a bit tedious.
- The game feels generally slow. Walking to a location or taking an action takes a little bit more time than it should
- The music is pretty good overall, but I was a little disappointed at the boss fights because the music didn't make me feel any higher stakes. Well placed audio SFX could also work some wonders for a more immersive experience

Overall I would drop a 7/10 for Grand Guilds. If you are a tactical/card-building fan then this game is certainly worth it, and I can't wait to see the improvements the Devs bring to the table!

Edit with another 10h.
This review is for the current state on release date. At first, I believed I would give this a mixed/slightly positive response, but after giving it several more hours of my time, I can strongly recommend avoiding this title until a lot of glaring issues are fixed, some of which are covered below.

After a few hours in game, the combat systems are fairly engaging, and a bit more predictable then traditional RNG hit% systems using a deck building format, but getting off the ground early game might seem rough depending on your chosen difficulty. Even so, you might find yourself out of luck on your starting hand / redraws. The game tries to provide you with all the information in some way, but much of this information is difficult to access and un-intuitive. Highlighting debuffs with your mouse for example will give you more information in a very small font text field that's easy to miss, lack of character enemy movement information or skill information. These things have become staple of the TRPG style for a reason.

Higher difficulty tends to mean an upwards scaling of raw stats. Given that you have limited characters to field and that focus firing opponents might not be enough to thin the opposing team on the first/second round, the higher difficulties are simply more of a nuisance relying on the AI splitting its attention and restarting encounters for the correct card setup.

The story is fairly engaging so far by chapter 8. The writing can be quite forced at times but the characters and direction are interesting overall.As new characters, passives and cards get unlocked, various synergistic combinations open up which offer different approaches to suit the different player gameplay styles. This is quite valuable for replay or simply adapting to the different game scenarios. That being said, not pooling all your resources into a dream team on normal/hard settings will result in a frustrating experience.

Unfortunately, there are several significant bugs in menu navigation, certain combat effects and graphical/sprite management issues that are quite glaring for an official release. Furthermore, the script/dialogue itself is in need of a serious review for grammatical consistencies, sentence structure and word choices. I understand this tends to happen often when developers are not necessarily linguistic prodigies or non-english nationalities, but the basics can at least be contracted out to an English post-graduate or other industry standards.

The story is a solid addition to the realm of TRPGS and can make a very compelling base on which to build a game. This game, however, is not what such a design should be. At the end of the day, you simply fight the same 3 vs 5 battle, of which there are about 3 variants, over and over with the same party (Encounters are scaled, exp is not shared. Dreamteam or bust) With many encounter re-rolls and do overs later now into the 8th chapter, I have to ask myself why bother and continue? This isn't particularly fun or engaging.

So far it is pretty good. I have completed a few missions and am on the world map. The main character is likeable and she has got the heroine thing going on. Let me preface by saying I am not a fan of the use of cards in RPGs, but I am finding the combat system pretty fun. There are a couple of things I wish it expanded on(items, gear, character progression), but my guess is they wanted to have a polished, focused scope rather than a ton of systems that don’t mesh.

[edit]Seems the fixed this in Hotfix 1.0b shortly after launch[/edit]
I have already ran into a bug, in which, if you taunt an enemy and it has no way to get to the character, it will move to the top-right (my guess this is the origin point) corner of the map. Often this makes the enemy unreachable and softlocks the game.