It seems like we get a new roguelike/deckbuilder every week nowadays. Just last month, I reviewed Battle Train, a roguelike/deckbuilder that had you building train tracks to send exploding trains hurtling towards your opponent’s base to destroy them. Where Battle Train failed was not having enough depth in its combat and railroading (no pun intended) the player by forcing them to see an arbitrary number of story events before they could win a run.
Shuffle Tactics, a new strategy RPG roguelike/deckbuilder from developer Club Sandwich, has its own spin on the genre that adds some very interesting mechanics. However, it is held back by a myriad of small head-scratching design choices and oversights that add up enough to really dampen the whole experience.
An Unrelenting Challenge
Shuffle Tactics begins with a short tutorial that gives you a very basic overview of the game’s mechanics. You draw a hand of cards from your deck each turn that you then use for various actions such as attacking, jumping, debuffs, and buffs. You also have a set amount of basic movement every turn that can be extended with card abilities. This basic move pool is a smart design decision that gives more freedom to your deck by not having to stuff it with movement cards or leave the player stuck when drawing an unfavorable hand. It’s very rare to draw into a dead hand in Shuffle Tactics, and I never felt like I lost due to not drawing the right cards. That being said, be prepared to die a lot. You’ll quickly realize that even the smallest misplay can lead to disaster. I had a number of promising runs go south at the drop of a hat because I misjudged an enemy’s range, made a reckless decision, or (and most commonly) misclicked due to the very clunky camera. When a game is this challenging and a single misplay can lead to disaster, it is inexcusable to have such a frustrating camera system that seems like it is actively working against you.
You see, Shuffle Tactics uses an isometric camera view that is fixed to one angle that you can’t rotate. This doesn’t seem that bad in the early encounters when you are only going up a couple of enemies and controlling one character. Once you start progressing through a run, the body count quickly rises, and you’ll find the battlefield to be much more cluttered. This leads to many scenarios where you are trying to move to a specific position, but the grid space is blocked by an enemy or ally sprite. I did discover that you can switch to a bird’s-eye view by hitting L-Ctrl, but even this found certain grid spaces to be obscured by other sprites and made it difficult to click the right spot. The game also immediately takes you out of the bird’s-eye view whenever your turn ends, and you have to switch back to it at the start of every turn. It sounds nitpicky, but having to switch the camera back to this view constantly every turn becomes super tedious.
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone
Throughout a run, you will have the chance to recruit up to two allies that you will then be able to add to your party and have specific roles assigned to them. These range from a necromancer who can raise ghouls from fallen enemies to a mad professor who corrupts the land around him to weaken enemies and make his spells stronger. Every ally I brought in felt unique and would change how I would approach each encounter. They also have fun ways to synergize with each other that add another layer of strategy to the game. Once again, however, the game sabotages itself with strange design choices that drag the experience down. In order to use an ally in battle, you have to either click on them while in battle or use the tab to cycle through your characters. The game doesn’t explain this, so during my first few turns with an ally, I had to fumble around with the controls to figure out how to use them. Since enemies and allies share the same turn, ending the turn for one character ends it for your whole side. This led to me wasting character actions and movement for my first few battles with an ally.
I understand wanting to let the player learn the game as they play and not overwhelm them with tutorials, but with a game like Shuffle Tactics, which has so many systems and keywords, it’s frustrating how many mistakes you’ll make simply because the game doesn’t tell you anything beyond the very barebones opening tutorial. This isn’t mentioning the countless bugs and crashes I experienced during my time with the game. I had cards from allies show up in my hero’s deck that would then disappear after switching to a different character, characters refusing to move or use their abilities, and visual bugs where enemies were stuck in the ground so I couldn’t see what they were. It’s a shame because so much attention was put into the art style and game mechanics of Shuffle Tactics, but it seems like UI and QA were an afterthought.
Wasted Potential
In between encounters, like most games of this ilk, you are presented with branching paths to pick how you want to traverse to an area’s boss. Along these routes, there are a plethora of merchants and NPCs to visit that offer various ways to upgrade your deck. You can also talk to them for a brief interaction that gives a little insight into the world and its lore. I was surprised by the amount of different vendors Shuffle Tactics has. There are also interesting ways to upgrade your cards. You can upgrade them and boost their effects, you can attach charms that add bonus functions to the cards, and there is even a merchant that allows you to combine cards of the same rarity level to create a new card of the tier above the ones you combine. It adds a nice amount of crunchiness to the game to allow those who really want to fiddle around with their builds the opportunity to tweak their decks to their heart’s content.
I actually have very few qualms with the deckbuilding aspect of Shuffle Tactics and think it is the strongest aspect of the game. I enjoyed reading new cards to see their effects and trying to build my deck, as well as my allies’, to match certain themes and playstyles. It’s a shame that the game fails on so many other levels that the actual mechanics get completely overshadowed, because I truly think there is a fun and complex game underneath it all. It just needed more time to cook and have these problems ironed out.
A Long Road Ahead
The developers have released a couple of patches since the release to address some bugs and other issues, so maybe they’ll eventually get Shuffle Tactics where it needs to be. As it stands now, I just can’t forgive Shuffle Tactics for all the cut corners and design flaws that add up over the course of my time with the game. There are just too many shortcomings that muddy the waters just enough to really recommend this game to anyone but the most hardcore of roguelike/deckbuilding fans who are willing to work through all the bugs and frustrating camera system to get to the fascinating game beneath the rubble.
Disclaimer: The Arcade Crew provided a PC (Steam) copy of Shuffle Tactics for review purposes.
