QUICK UPDATE TO THE REVIEW: At some point I mentioned the difficulties, the game has been updated, and now you can play one difficulty with one character and the next one with another, Thanks devs!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shuffles 'n Scuffles is a roguelike deckbuilder with two main highlights. First, the papercraft-like visuals are pretty charming (yes, they don't really add anything to the gameplay, but it's really nice to see in motion). Secondly, and more importantly, in this game you have the ability to "freely" modify your cards by playing with the words they have. Because of the same, the game will constantly be offering you cards with weird effects (like, deal 2 damage to the player 3 times, split 4 healing to 2 enemies, give 3 mana to the grid and so on...) and sometimes you will HAVE to take them, having into consideration that you will be able to modify them for more interesting outcomes. Taking all that into consideration, you will end up having cards that can attack everyone with over 20 damage, you can easily get over 10 mana or over 20 healing in one turn. Does this make the game repetitive? Not at the start, because you have more than a few options to play with. You can deal poison, ice, burning, electrify or just plain damage; then you can be applying to enemies, to lanes, to grids, to rows or random; then you can be applying it once or multiple times. It's all on you. So, if you find once a really good combo and you keep doing that everytime, that's on you, but if you like to experiement, you will have fun for more than a couple of runs trying different broken combinations.
I spent a lot of time talking about the cards themselves, and I haven't talked about another good aspect of the game and that's the presence of... I think 8 different characters, each one of them with different HP, cards in hand, mana and a passive skill, some of them changing the way you play the game (my favorite one being the character that can play cards using HP). The game also counts with 5 different difficulties, and that's where one of the bad aspects of the game comes. I haven't really mentioned it, but the whole charm of the game comes with the card-building; you won't really see big difference in the enemy department, not even with the bosses, where it feels like the further you progress you are just fighting a slightly stronger version of same boss. The only difference would come on some enemies getting shield or turning into an invulnerable state sometimes. Why is the difficulty a problem? Because you can't play different difficulties with different characters. So, if you want to play the max difficulty with a specific character, you will have to go through every single one of them, until you unlock the final one. Then, if you want to try it again with a different character, you will have to go through all the difficulties again and repeat. The thing is that, by then, you probably would have seen most of the interesting part and it will become tedious to do them all and see the same (which is a shame, because the most interesting characters take a while to unlock). This game would be more enjoyable if you could just be doing different difficulties with different characters, so you can be switching freely depending on what you want to try and on what difficulty.
Anyways, pretty enjoyable roguelike deckbuilder, especially while discovering new combinations of words during the first couple of hours. You can check out some gameplay here if interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3wfDL-7kKQ
