Gordian Quest

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.

I got bored with the combat pretty quickly, and this game is 95% combat. I don't feel like I was making any meaningful decisions. Mostly I was just playing whatever cards did the most damage, either directly or indirectly through buffs. Most of the characters seem focused on doing straightforward single-target damage, which makes them feel vaguely the same. Not *really* identical, but not as varied as you'd expect a RPG party to be. There's something wrong when two different flavors of magic user feel identical in niche to a rogue. The main exception was the bard... who was notable mostly because she was very efficient at adding damage buffs to everyone else. Still, it felt like a slightly more interesting variant on doing damage like everyone else. Enemies tend to either select single attack or single defense actions, and any enemy that's taking a defense action is effectively taking themselves out of that round of combat, and you can safely ignore them. This felt decidedly off, that some enemies seemed to effectively doing nothing since all they did was play defense actions. There's a tactical map, which has some pretty odd restrictions, and often feels irrelevant. Your characters can move around, but are only allowed to move to spaces on their side of the map. Characters can attack anyone in their row or an adjacent row, even if they're well back from the front and are strictly melee, which meant there's little difference between ranged and melee attacks. Mostly positioning seems to be about managing who is going to tank any enemy attacks by placing them in front of that enemy. There are a few card combos, but generally you can't play them because you don't retain cards between turns. Card games which facilitate combos generally require that you have a persistent hand, so you can keep cards that are part of a combo against drawing the other cards. Ultimately, all the trappings of a RPG without the complexity and very different roles of different classes from a real RPG made me want to play a RPG instead of this.