Choose wisely, everyone remembers everything you do!
Decisions Matter - Killing foes may incur the wrath of their friends, but sparing them leaves a dangerous piece on the board.Get powerful item cards from fallen foes, or as rewards. Master Hundreds of Cards - Each character has unique negotiation and combat decks to draft from.Build a Team - or Buy One! - Hire mercenaries, find pets, or impose upon your friends to accomplish your goals.Battle Challenging Bosses - Test your combat decks against powerful foes with unique mechanics and attacks.Since the game isn't all about taking down weird creatures in combat, it's also about dealing with people directly, where you can "attack" multiple points on their character and so you get a special negotiation deck making it also a conversational deck-building battle game merged into everything else. The way it mixes together different decks is great too. While I adore other deck-builders, Griftlands has some nice story elements to really back it all up and keep you interested. Compared to the likes of Slay the Spire and other similar deck-builders, it feels a lot more like you would expect from an RPG adventure. There's consequences to a lot of what you do, be it making new friends or enemies and the way it's all blended together is pretty clever. Not only are you building up a deck and throwing cards around as your abilities to conquer foes, you're also needed to think a little about your actions. Even though their Linux support for it is quite new, the Linux build runs to perfection. You have to hand it to Klei, their games always bring a certain special flair and Griftlands not only looks good - it's genuinely great to play through too. View cookie preferences.Īs far as deck-builders go, Klei has managed to jump into a popular genre with some already incredible games and do something none of them are doing yet. I wish the developers had trimmed off some of the fat, but since they didn't, it means that you're getting a game with tons of content for a very reasonable price.YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. It's not as addictive as some of the strongest games in the genre, but it's still fun to play. It goes all-in on the RPG elements, which is both its greatest strength and biggest flaw. Overall, Gordian Quest is fun deck-builder that's similar to a Griftlands-style campaign that's absolutely packed with content. Since this is a team game, there's an emphasis on making sure abilities synergize with one another, since status effects are way more powerful if multiple people can exploit them. This allows you to build up defense, damage enemies, or use buffs and debuffs. Every character draws a random selection of cards from their deck and can expend energy to use them. At the start of battle, each character rolls an initiative dice, and then friends and foes take turns beating the living crud out of each other based on their initiative order.
The gameplay is where it's at.Ĭombat is a deck-builder through and through. There's a plot but it's "go and defeat evil" stuff that offers enough to be interesting but not stand out. The general structure is straightforward but less linear than many other games in the genre. You gather a party of heroes and go out adventuring, progressively fighting harder battles unless you retreat to base, all in the name of advancing the story and earning that precious loot. Gordian Quest is effectively a combination RPG and deck-builder game. It isn't perfect, but it is one of the heftiest deck-builders on the market. Gordian Quest is the latest of these, and its long time spent in Early Access really shows. One of my favorite methods is incorporating deck-building into a larger campaign-driven game, like Griftlands or Steamworld: Quest. Some attempt to alter the playing field, others add action elements, and others try unusual mechanics. It takes a lot to make a deck-builder stand out these days. With a unique blend of tactical combat, strategic gameplay, and boisterous animated heroes, Gordian Quests takes players on a journey to defeat an ultimate evil plaguing the land.