Its a great game but...

I want to give this 5 stars because its a genuinely good combat system with some cool strategy. But it has three crippling issues

1. Its unbalanced. You basically have to have a Guard in your party, because HP conservation is important and guards have all the good damage-avoiding abilities. Also, the Priest and Mage are significantly better than the Rogue and Archer.

2. The replay value is low. It would have been easy to add something like a simple "do less damage take more damage" hard mode or a challenge mode with more limited cards or weaker character classes, but they didnt, and there really isnt much to do after you win for the first time, except maybe try a no-guard run. Also the golden shuffle is pretty useless.

3. And most crippling of all: Its incredibly buggy. Enemies dont show up in the correct positions, sometimes attack indicators show up when theyre not supposed to, enemies sometimes delay their attacks for no reason, cards that say they give you a free turn occasionally just fail to do so, and a lot of the card descriptions flat out lie to you. Among these: the rogues vanish sometimes causes him to disappear indefinitely instead of attacking the following turn, the archers tactical shuffle sometimes doesnt interrupt the enemy, the guards mirror shield blocks and reflects all damage, not half (and is incidentally the most broken move in the game because of this), the archers injury to insult targets the wrong enemy and doesnt do any extra damage, and the priests Wither move WILL kill him if he uses it at low health, despite the description saying it wont, and whats more, if he dies while casting it, the attack just stops.

If the bugs were fixed, I would upgrade this to 4 stars but as it stands, I cant give it more than a 2.

Viddaric about Five Card Quest - Tactical RPG Battles, v1.2