Card Shark

I found Card Shark off a friend’s recommendation, though I later learned that they didn’t actually finish the game or even play it that much. So recommendation is probably a big stretch, rather they just posted it and I saw it and it looked interesting!

The main premise of the game is about cheating with cards, which as a non card player in real life, it seemed pretty novel for a card game. The art style is also pretty unique and the presentation’s really good so I picked it up as I usually do on sales and delayed playing it for a lengthy period of time.

Now, there’s a few things that are… hm, I wouldn’t necessarily call them turn offs, but for a large majority of the game, I think calling it a card game rather misleading. A good way to put it is that it is fundamentally a series of mario party styled minigames, at least for a large majority of the game.

What I mean by this is that the mechanics by which you cheat are mostly handled by quick time events and minigame styled “identify X and signal it with Y”. Of course, it’s pretty understandable considering the game is trying to translate sleight of hand tricks to controller.

That’s not to say all the mechanics are like that, and some of them are actually quite complicated and involved. Especially near the end when you learn more advanced shuffling techniques and those are the techniques I would consider to be more in line with actual cheating that I think were cleverly implemented (though as to how “realistic” they are I couldn’t comment).

However one thing that I found a bit of a letdown is that it never really “feels” like you’re playing a card game. Sure, you’re manipulating the cards while shuffling, dealing, playing your own cards, but you never actually see the cards played out outside a few small animations of players throwing down cards. Hell, I don’t even know what game they were actually playing, they just vaguely refer to it as playing cards.

Now, I totally get the reasoning for why this is the case. Beyond the fact that the focus is just on cheating itself, there are some techniques where sure you can have an advantage from cheating but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee you the win and it would be frustrating to pull off the cheating trick only for it to fail anyways. I felt like there was room for a bit more presentation regarding the actual card game themselves that would’ve made the end result of the cheating feel more rewarding.

What did surprise me the most though was I actually found the cast of characters to be quite charming and fun. The setting and story aren’t overly complicated but they were interesting enough to keep me wanting to play until the end. The dialogue was witty too!

Anyways, overall I still had a really good time with the game! Other than wishing for a better presentation for the card games themselves, I found the translation of mechanics to be done pretty well considering the limitations and the story/setting/characters to be really good.