Gordian Quest

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
You will never understand how the majority of mechanics work without experimenting yourself, and there isn't much information on the internet. If you can't tie your shoes without watching a guide and spending five hours on Reddit, you might feel frustrated and discouraged.

This is an ambitious game, but from this perspective, it overpromises and underdelivers. The core gameplay is fun, but it is burdened by too many half-baked and shallow features, which turn the entire experience into a slog. Sometimes, less is more.

This is a well crafted game. clean art-style, and has been a rewarding experience so far.

I can't really get into it and I played a lot (check my playtime).

so i'm loving this game.

it's everything you loved about Slay The Spire but with more.

You get to maneuver your characters around a 9 or sometimes 12 "square" battlefield. So you can avoid some attacks just by moving your characters from one row or column to another.

Each character gets their own base deck of cards and abilities to draw from with the option to specialize into 3 specific subclasses based on their initial class.

Each character gets their own skill tree which upgrades cards, or adds new cards into their deck. These skill trees also access passive abilities and can remove cards from your deck, which is quite handy.

Characters have the ability to equip items which provide passive bonuses or even new cards. Equipment has rune slots as well as the ability to attach cards from your deck to that item so that the runes places in that item augment the abilities on the card.

The heroes journey around a map where enemy groups spawn,
There's also Special Encounters where a text screen pops up and random things can happen from there,
Exploration points on the map feel like a hastily added minigame, but allow for other game mechanics if you happen to need a break from the main gameplay.

game has consumable items potions and the like.


As for things i didn't care for.

Game has tutorial it darkens the screen allowing for the player to only click where the tutorial wants you to click. This in itself isn't a bad thing until i came to one part where i wasn't able to click or advance the tutorial at all.

Some of the card effects like "might" or "Agility" or "Channeling" isn't really explained what those abilities do until you use them and the buff is applied to the character.

in order to use cards on yourself or others you have to click in the space they are standing in, sometimes trying to click this you place your cursor over the character's health and status bar getting mouse-over prompts instead of anything you can click.

6.5/10 It's kind of like Iron Oath, but with heroes that use small decks. Surprisingly deep and rather satisfying to create complimentary decks... but a lot the depth is unnecessary. As others have said, you basically just refine your "deck" into a couple really good cards and rely solely on those.


Pros:

- Deep game with lots of gear/deck/talent options

- Actually has a combat log. Huge plus, though it was doesn't actually detail how it calculated things

- Some really cool combos available between heroes in the group

- Music is pretty good

- Seems to be a good variety of starting decks to suit all kinds of playstyles

- Good character art; it's not too anime feeling though it's got that influence. Kind of like Legend of Vox Machina, which is a compliment


Cons:

- Game's complexity mostly serves to waste time

- Big issue: no text/UI scaling. Card text is borderline too small until you actually click on a card to make it bigger (wouldn't be an issue but sometimes you literally cannot make a card bigger). Other text is tiny and there's SO much room to make it bigger at any resolution. People have repeatedly asked for it for YEARS on the forums and the devs always say it's planned, but never improved it

- Most legendaries are a trap. Low level gear with low/mid level runes will be *far* superior, which is hugely disappointing since there are so many legendaries

- Card mechanics aren't explained well, especially for the more complex classes with lots of keywords

- Getting new cards takes a long time and is largely random. I'd like more control here because a single good card can literally make or break the whole group's strategy

- Likes to crash or become unable to do anything in combat, forcing a restart

- Doesn't seem to have gotten much post-launch support

- AI controlled allies are extremely stupid and constantly move around even when it's very detrimental to do so. Pets aren't... quite as bad, but still waste attacks on empty tiles or something else dumb

- On top of previous issue, pets are a drag to use because they slow down combat and there's so much in the game, you'll want to be blowing through easy fights with area damage. This means your pets get maybe 1 whole weak hit in before the fight is over. In boss fights, your pets aren't smart enough to move out of attacks and you can't realistically keep moving them with skills, so... pets kinda suck in normal fights and kinda suck in boss fights. Sad

One of the few card game rpg's that has good story and long term progression. I like rogue-like card games, but I always felt like I was missing a true campaign. I think the class design, card choices, and optimizations are great, and it has some slight tactical rpg elements as well that end up adding a lot of depth.

I would highly recommend this to any card game rpg fans looking for something a bit more long term than a roguelike. Expect to restart 1-3 times though as you get used to how to level and advance your characters, as respeccing isn't something very easy or likely to do. Would love to see this game dev make more games in this vein.

The idea is nice, feels like playing a diablo game but with cards really. The thing I got confused by the "vast and ever changing world", you don't really know when to grind and when to go forward in your quest with constant respawn on very big dot map and loads of npc to talk to so it feels like you are wasting a lot of time otherwise it is a neat game, pleasing to play, it just did not catch me I spent too much time grinding around the initial village waiting for some signal to go forward in the story.

7.5/10

yep

Quite pleasant game, similar in its base to Slay the Spire.

Main problem for me is in small amount of characters in the party. We can have maximum three out of eight available. This clearly does not allow many tactical decisions and severely limits possibilities of party creation (unles we find pleasure in struggling with some strange setups).

After some more playing. I am fed up with challenges reduced to "hey, lats give boss 1k HP. And just in case let him rebirth with another 1k HP. Hey, still too easy? Let him rebirth another time or two". In two bosses fights Iin III Act I faced bosses with sick amount of health, regenerating, attacking like "800 HP"; summoning minions etc. All of that against three heroes team with altogether some 250 HP. No, thank you.

Tried it for a few minutes, but the extremely cheap combat animations turned me off.

In short you find a combo an repeat it infinitely, there is no reason to swap heroes and each hero progression is boring. After certain time new cards are worse then what you already have.

Judging by the achievement stats 70% of players never made it past the ACT 1. They left all these positive reviews and stopped playing?

I'm not a fan of the cards combat but this game graphic and design makes it interesting and less painful.