Card Shark absolutely dazzles with its color palette, animation, and framing. By the time Card Shark did start letting me feel things out for myself, I was in the last handful of missions, which felt too little too late.Įven if the game grew a little too complicated to be invested in, the first and most lasting impression Card Shark made was in its art.
Eventually, my parlor tricks lost their magic. Since you literally learn moves up until the very end of the game, this led to an overreliance on reading the UI or tooltips, which flattened the satisfying feeling of hustling into something more mechanical as time went on. Some offhand repeatable missions let me mix things up more, but even the moves they let me pull off there were randomly selected. The game’s structure literally sees your patron teach you a technique just before arriving at the place where you will use it, and while you can practice the one move in this brief window, the game offered scarce other places to apply techniques or invest in mastery. The game literally never stops bombarding you with jargon and increasingly complicated string of mechanics that form the late-game techniques, meaning there’s very little breathing room to figure any of it out on your own. To complicate things just a bit more, Card Shark has a strange tutorialization problem. Others, however, felt clumsy, which made for a reliable source of tension in late-game bouts, but sometimes just unnecessarily drained my time. Some of these, like injogging cards in between shuffles, began feeling like second nature and rolled right off my back in a breezy, satisfying way as I picked up on the aforementioned rhythm of parlor tricks. You can thumb through a deck searching for aces or “injog” a card as a marker where you’ve tampered with the deck, for example.
#MAGIC BAR CARD SHARK SERIES#
Tricks in Card Shark mostly boil down to a series of quick-time events and inputs on the analog stick that can make any number of things happen. This all means that Card Shark’s gameplay has to be tight and snappy, which it typically is. To add to the tension, you’re always under the watchful eye of your opponents, who will eventually see enough to call your bluffs, incarcerate you, or even have you killed, which is its own whimsical in-game delight. I never knew parlor tricks could be so complicated, but Card Shark boasts a whopping 28 of them, and they build atop one another once you start reaching the double digits. Once I began nailing the pedestrian magic tricks, though, the world of Card Shark’s tricks exploded. The first tricks I learned outlined the necessity of a rhythm, since trickery takes confidence, not luck. In reality, Card Shark is less a card game and more a game about cheating at cards. Instead of playing by the rules, I spent the entirety of Card Shark seemingly creating my own. On the other hand, you do everything but play conventional card games and in the process unfurl a whole other exciting way to ponder simple playing cards. Almost everything you do in Card Shark revolves around basic playing cards. On one hand, your character and his patron, Comte de Saint Germain, do engage many a noble in what appears to be an innocent card game. Despite this nagging feeling that the good ol’ days were behind me, though, every time Card Shark’s split-second gambles paid off, I couldn’t help being reeled back in.Ĭard Shark, the latest take on card games from Nerial (who gave us the excellent Reigns), almost immediately establishes itself as a different kind of game entirely. The more I worked my way up the food chain, the more I wished I was back at my humble but satisfying roots. More importantly, as satisfying as my hustling game had become, executing on it began to border on tedium.
However, I wished that I cared more about who I was hustling, who I aligned myself with, and the why of it all over the course of my adventures in Card Shark. Arsene Lupin himself would have had a hard time getting one over on me, and as much as I’m a straight-shooter in real life, I grew enchanted with hustling my way through the frivolous French nobility on my way to the top. Over the course of mere hours, I’d somehow gone from a hapless server to France’s premier gentlemen thief and gambler. I have to admit that I was at least a little impressed with myself near the end of my time with Card Shark.
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