#Card shark switch series

Play involves a combination of card playing and adventuring. These at-table tricks are paired with exploring the world, talking to the people you meet and getting involved in other violent misdeeds. It looks like a card game, but actually it's a heist game where you trick people to win. With your partner, you go from location to location swindling politicians and royals with the devious card cheat mini-games you learn. I applaud the effort to pull together a unique concept, but the accompanying frustrations mean I have to discourage a sit-down at this particular table.Card Shark is an adventure game about a French 18 th century con artist. But I couldn’t get past my dislike of the core gameplay encounters and the endless teaching segments. But it’s problematic that the gameplay is frustrating enough to warrant such a need in the first place.Ĭard Shark features an attractive art style, subtle writing, and a promising premise. Especially in later multi-step affairs, it became a welcome relief to have the choice, so I’m glad that option exists. Upon repeated failures of a story-essential card game cheating sequence, the game eventually asks if you’d like to skip the strategy and see the story play out. To paraphrase a well-known show, everything is made up, and the points don’t matter. Fortunes amassed (or not) seem to have little to no impact on the story itself. A personified “Death” always eventually sends you back, finally tiring of your arrivals and granting another shot at life because they’re weary of seeing you. Upon dying, you can “cheat” death or choose to give up your soul and have your save game erased. Save game states are applied automatically at every step of an encounter, from gains or losses in your monetary fortunes to death itself. But the need for rapid button presses and attention to timing did what QTEs have always done (and likely why they’ve gone out of style): take me out of the experience.Ĭard Shark layers in another element that undoubtedly aims to invoke excitement in the player, but for me, it only resulted in tension and a lack of desire to invest in the experience. I could sense the gleeful fantasy of deceit and high-stakes encounters during fleeting moments. A third might require a glance at an opponent’s card suits while pouring their wine. Another demands you shuffle high cards into a specific order in the deck. You might have one trick where you need to mark the cards with a splotch of make-up. The tutorials themselves can be exceedingly infuriating in their own right, as specific strategies are often poorly explained, and you must repeat exacting inputs without mistake before the story progresses. That means that nearly the entire game is a tutorial, often teaching specific instructions that you’re likely to forget within minutes.

#Card shark switch series

You must remember a series of controller inputs, time your button presses, and quickly react to onscreen prompts to fool your hapless fellow players. These gameplay sequences usually amount to some variation of old-school quick-time events.

Unfortunately, almost without exception, I found the various ploys frustrating, tedious, and sometimes difficult to comprehend. More than two dozen of these tricks come into your repertoire throughout the game, each introduced in the minutes before you’ll need to deploy the trick to cheat your opponents.

You gradually learn new tricks and strategies from your mentor, a figure based on the real-life eccentric named Comte de St. You’re not actually playing out the hands and choosing to cheat or not it’s all about pulling off the ruse, or failing and getting caught.

Instead, Card Shark is about jumping from one sleight-of-hand trick or con to the next, fleecing wealthy opponents out of their money, and slipping away before they get wise.

While early glimpses might suggest this is a game about playing poker or some other familiar game, the card-playing itself is only background. With gameplay that feels like a chore from beginning to end, I was eager for this card game to reach its final round. It’s a clever and appealing setup, but it can only carry the game so far. Along the path to riches, a deep conspiracy is uncovered, touching the lives of everyone in upper-class society, and playing out in backroom parlors, Corsican pirate dens, and royal palaces. Set in 18th century France, players take on the role of a destitute and mute drink server who is lifted into high society by a puffed-up card cheat. Novel concepts are worth their weight in gold, and Card Shark comes out swinging with an idea you’re unlikely to have encountered before.