Shards of Order

My first deck builder. Really enjoyed it. Seemed like there was multiple ways to build for each character. I think I went for the slow build up but i'm not sure. Only played probably 40 hours. I accidently left it open on my PC a few times over night. One of those games that I just wanted to keep coming back for. Looked forward to it throughout the whole work week! I just finished my first run and I'm thinkin bout playing again for the alternate ending and to try the magician with the plague build.

+

Shards of Order sits somewhere in between RPG and Card Battler. It’s a dark fantasy RPG that has most of those features and mechanics you expect from the genre. There are companions who join your party and who have their own reasons to tag along for the ride. There are items that you can equip on your party members and there IS a build aspect to all these moving parts. And I’m happy to report that cards and equippable items are very much a part of this build aspect. As it happens with your favorite RPGS, you need to hone your party members to the role you want each of them to play in combat, but you also need to think what your overall strategy is gonna be. There are cool synergies, plenty of ways to strengthen your deck’s core premise, etc. The visuals, the premise of the story and the whole theme is DARK. You are trapped in a DARK sinister village deeeeeeep down somewhere inside a DARKk pit, surrounded by dangerous DARK creatures. You don’t know how you got there and you only have a vague idea about why you were kicked into this sh*thole. You also lost your identity and many of your memories in the process. So you got your work cut out for you: You have to figure out who you are and how to get the hell out of there. And make no mistake about it: This is not a metaphor for “finding yourself in a world that hates” you type of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. This is: “The world is cursed because bad actors have made a mess of it and as a consequence, people have lost their memories and their minds and they can no longer die and rest in peace. Figuring out who you are and what happened is only the initial quest of course. Soon your become involved in something bigger that entails saving everyone and sticking it up to the bad guys. The story is competently written, fairly interesting and quite immersive. The ambiance and the character design do a lot of the heavy lifting here, because man… these things do rank very high in the creep factor. None of the aspects that make up the gameplay mix is groundbreaking individually, but as a whole, Shards of Order is a pretty interesting game. You don’t roam around freely in this game. You get a series of maps with nodes and you click on them to move your character between locations. The story is fairly linear and you are expected, most of the times, to explore these nodes in a certain order, but occasionally you get to choose what you want to do and where you want to go next, and there are some quests that can be solved in more than one way, and that usually entails choosing which place to go to. There are also a few non-mandatory quests and those sometimes entail going back to maps that you have already finished. Combat uses a time system similar to the one in Wildfrost. Friendly and enemy actions take time to prepare and cards consume time units. Every round has a limited number of time units. Ending your turn will consume the remaining time units and if an enemy’s action takes less time than the time remaining on the time counter, his action will trigger. Ending the turn, of course, triggers a redraw. There are many cards and equippable items with actions that trigger upon redraw. So redraw-based tactics are a thing in this game, which is interesting. Also, as it happens in Wildfrost, you can move characters around to manage damage mitigation. A.K.A… do some tanking. Don’t expect the complexity of Wildfrost though. Cards, effects, enemies, permanent items and game mechanics as a whole in Wildfrost amount to a much more complex and much more challenging game. So if you want to play a game that challenges your card-battler talents to the fullest and uses mechanics that are similar to Shard of order’s then you are better off playing that game instead. There are some combat encounters in which you get to play as other characters in the story, who have their own decks and mechanics. These are puzzley fights that you are supposed to figure out. Sometimes there are solo encounters with special conditions, and sometimes you just have to pay attention to the story to know what you are supposed to do next in a fight. In Shards of order, each character has a skill tree and unlocking a skill adds a new card or it modifies an existing card. And I like the skill trees in shards of order. There are ZERO dumb idiotic passive skills like +1 damage or +1 shield. These skills are very tactical and you’ll find yourself going back and forth between your deck screen and your card screen to choose the cards and skills that work better with your plan. You can edit your deck at any given time and there isn’t a minimum or maximum limit of cards. Some items give you extra cards, and as a general rule, you want to take those items as the turnstone of your strategy for that character. Some quests give you crystals with which you can enhance your items, but they are precious few, so you probably want to save them for your best items. Some quests require you to appoint a party member to perform an action or to do the talking. And this usually entails using a card a from his or her deck. And since your companions have clearly defined personalities, this is usually an interesting choice. If you don’t happen to have the card in your deck, then of course that character’s option is off the table. There are some puzzles in the game, some of them are card based, and some of them are your typical lever and tile puzzles, but they feel like organic to the gameplay. They are also… insultingly easy. If you are living breathing human being, you’ll have no problem sorting them out. Being a game that was published by Awaken Realms, I can’t help but think that they drew their fair share of inspiration from Tainted Grail: Conquest. The music is similar, and therefore very extremely badass, though not as good as Tainted Grail’s in my opinion. The game takes place in a series of areas that are supposed to be real, but that feel like a limbo of sorts, which reminds me of the setting in Tainted Grail: Conquest. And the enemies are creepy in a way that reminds me of enemies in Tainted Grail as well. And like Tainted Grail: Conquest, Shards of Order has a thing or two to say about a thing or two. The writing lacks the finesse or depth of Tainted Grail: Conquest but it’s pretty good still. I like that the game’s story is not trying to disguise the writers’ opinion on some hot modern day hot talking point or pushing some poorly camouflaged agenda down your throat. The story is merely a commentary on power and the elites who operate beyond the reach of those they impact. It’s also an interesting take of the potential consequences of being able to alter reality of a whim to spare yourself the consequences of your bad decisions. And all of his is good stuff and it’s wrapped in decent story with decent pace. The game is also free of the post 2016 disease that has been contaminating entertainment. For all these reasons, I wholeheartedly recommend it to RPG and card battler fans alike. You can watch the whole review on my youtube channel Ye Old Entertainment

Великолепно! Всем фанатам чёрной книги рекомендую

評分: 4/5 難度: 2.5/5 非rogue的deckbuilding+rpg 雖然只能用三個角色, 但三個角色各有build (而且玩越久有越多build) 整體遊戲流程難度是 難>中>易>中 吧 終於除了steamworld quest hand of gilgamech外再多一款類似遊戲

I really like this one, it has problems, and so I'm not going to bother being nice about them. First, you should be fully aware that this is an RPG, not any manner of rogueness. The way I see it, Hand of Gilgamech ran so this game could slightly slower but in a dark fantasy setting which is a massive plus for me. The focus of the game design, at least in my experience, is making builds. There's not a lot of challenge here, I felt like I was playing normal difficulty and needed a hard mode but that's fine, I certainly enjoyed myself. I'm a little surprised I finished this in under 8 hours but I'm a special case when it comes to card games, you're probably looking at 12-20 hours of goodness which is well worth the price if you're into this kind of thing. As far as the meat of the game goes, building, it's decent, you're going to only have a deck of 18 cards if you've got any experience in card games and several of those can be single use which burns your deck down to 10-14 once you've got everything set up... not that there's much reason to scale or blitz, or tank, or anything really. The game provides good, fun fights but this isn't a high difficulty game. The small deck sizes means you're REALLY having to consider how much one card is better than another. Now what makes this game especially fun is the presentation and story... kinda. It's also where all the problems come in. The visuals are incredible, absolutely drew me in the whole time. There's some good music but there were only certain points I really noticed it, it's generic a lot of the time. Writing has issues and I'll go more in-depth without spoilers on that later, but where it never fails is the tone. The game sets the tone and succeeds at world-building fantastically, which really just made this a great experience for a card nut like me. Firstly, this is one of those games where the first act is extremely dynamic, offers choices and branching paths in small stories (nothing too meaningful but very much what you'd expect from games like HEX, Gilgamech, etc) and then the rest of the game becomes very linear and feels like they ran out of time or it was tedious to develop it that way. It didn't really bother me that much because I was into it at that point. Next... the writing. The writing wasn't offensive I suppose but the dialogue was pretty bad. There were only a few typos, mostly in the early game, and that kind of thing goes away, but the written dialogue was... really rough. It made it hard to get invested in the characters and it's one of those cases where you're given dialogue options and I don't want to choose any of them even for a pre-written character. This feels like a symptom of localization with the awkwardness however which I completely understand but be aware of what you're getting into. And it's a shame because the narration in writing is usually fantastic... though again awkward in cutscenes, it's just clunky and sometimes feels like it was written by an alien or other non-human. I did pay attention to the story through the whole game so that has to count for something, I was genuinely excited for every possibility of a boss fight and they were absolutely the highlights from beginning to end, though the final boss was a little lackluster in gameplay, but maybe that was just being too strong in the endgame, not that I had any kind of crazy or optimized build. In summary, if you like card-based RPGs which are a tragic rarity this is absolutely for you, it's a great time and I think the short play time is absolutely justified by the pricing, and if you really love a game you can always play it again. There's no form of NG+ and I don't see why there would be, you just play this one again from start to finish and you can take builds in very different directions if you want replayability. I would love to see a hand-made (not half-assed) higher difficulty mode and then a sequel. If I were making a wild wishlist it'd be to rewrite the acts after the 1st since it's all text and no voice acting but I don't think that's in any way necessary.

Bardzo przyjemna gra w przyjemnej cenie, czekam na kontynuacje.