Poker Quest: Swords and Spades Reviews

Great

Without this game, there is no Balatro. Please appreciate this.

If you like roguelike, card-based strategy games, you'll love this. If you don't, you probably won’t. The classic game mode can be unforgiving—sometimes the RNG feels brutal, but when the odds swing in your favor, the payoff is incredible. I've been playing this since its early days as a flash game on Kongregate, and I still play it regularly.

For the record I've played this game waaaaaay more than 7 hours, probably upwards into the high hundreds (I've made it to the Astral with every character) It's an excellent game. I'm really picky... so much so that the only two deck style games that hold up for me are Slay the Spire and this one. To anyone first starting to play this game I recommend going straight into standard run and select classical mode, which is the actual game. When I first started playing there wasn't a lot of info out there so I wasted a little bit of time with the upgrade selection, which certainly makes it a little easier at first, but you don't advance in the game that way (it's kind of pointless aside from perhaps making it easier while you learn, but I recommending learning as you go). Some new players may dislike this game at first, but you just have to give it a chance to evolve. The difficultly in this game is not unrealistic, which many new players based on the reviews think it is… unless you mean by difficulty, beating the astral level, then yes this game is brutal because I’ve never done it (beating this game with a character is getting to the astral, the astral is more of a bonus). Making it beyond the castle in the astral is a realistic feat that I’ve done a decent number of times, but I’ve only made it to the final boss in the astral/game one time. I may be wasting my time on a character that’s easy to consistently go far, but lacks the possibility of going all the way. You accumulate new characters in this game really fast. For me at least, not every character is fun to play.... after having played a bit there are only a handful of characters that I enjoy playing. I believe you get the Ninja 5th and that was the first that I really had a fun time playing. There is one element to this game that I'm not sure is a positive or a flaw and that is, there are sooooo many potential variations in this game (not in a run, but in the game), so on a given run you’ll rarely run into them or see them. Whether that be weapons (there are so many weapons, you may only see a weapon once every 100 or more hours and this game is 100% random whereas Slay The Spire of course uses probabilities, however each run you eventually learn has a design to it, so you learn to build your run in a way to nurture the design of a given run). Same thing with the Temple of Aces-Dueces along with the temple of Clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds, odds evens, red, blacks. Of all those the best one is evens, followed by red or blacks and you're not going to see those very often. Same thing with the Wizards Tower which you may not even come across on a run and these are expensive and not always good, but they have the potential to give you a super run if the stars align and those stars align so rarely and if and when they do, it’s usually just partially. There’s a goofy thing in this game where your character falls down and loses 3 hit points which happens maybe once every 50 hours 3 hit points is nothing but it’s so random). I forget what it’s called but you’ll randomly get a frog jump where you can jump to anywhere on the board... this is more common (you’ll probably average one per completed run) but when you get it is very very random and most of the time you won’t use it. As a near absolute rule, you'll never have enough money in this game. I've had many runs where I've received the double your money twice and I let my money accumulate to over 100 before doing it the first time followed by another one and you'll still feel like a broke bastard who needs more money to upgrade your things. One more piece of advice - don't ever waste your time trying to get a perfect kill for 1 point. It's astronomically insignificant in this game (it's nearly as insignificant as voting in a national election), so don't bother unless a perfect kill gets you a gem or something. But all in all this game is insanely underrated… it was the only game that fulfilled by Slay The Spire itch and I tried all the recommended ones… and in some ways surpassed it since there are so many probabilities, whereas in Slay The Spire once you get 20 level with your 3 characters… which it’s still fun for a time after that, but eventually you’ve done everything to the nth power, so aside from daily runs my motivation in the game has mostly diminished but it lasted a long time and I’m glad part 2 is coming out. For me my motivation in this game on a given run is trying to build a game that’s going to get me deep and potentially beat the astral. Highly recommended if you like Deck builder games… just give it chance and allow yourself to accumulate some new characters.

This is a phenomenal, unique, and underrated game that can be replayed endlessly, but you must accept and enjoy it for what it is, rather than comparing it to superficially similar games. The developers perfectly explain this: "Poker Quest feels a lot like a deck-builder, but is fundamentally very different... [it] contains a vast, novel set of game mechanics that centrally focus on the properties of the playing cards." Really it's not a deck builder at all, but a kind of dealer's choice poker game where each (combat) round's format is determined by the enemy you are battling. You don't build a deck, but rather optimize a character, whose skills, stats, and equipment, combined with the enemy's, form the ruleset for these rounds, and thus change dramatically through the course of a run, and between runs. Unlike most generic rogue-likes or deck-builders, where choosing skills, equipment, and cards IS the game, and decisions in combat itself are often little more than perfunctory proofs of your build, in Poker Quest your build merely determines the mechanics and parameters of a combinatorially rich card game, which you then have to skillfully compete at by drawing and playing cards using probabilistic principles typical of strategies employed in traditional card games. If you have no interest or facility with this latter aspect, then you are apt to fail or simply not enjoy the game. For this reason I suspect it will be far more appealing to those interested in poker, bridge, or skat than to the average slay the spire player. Playing your hands is the meat of the game, and although you can choose more "autopilot" characters and load-outs to reduce the complexity of your choices and speed through battles, this can mean sacrificing opportunities for an edge and exposing yourself to more random losses. Since heroes and equipment fundamentally alter the rules, rather than simply modifying stats, each character and build feels deeply distinct and uses completely different strategies in a way that stands out from any deck builder or CRPG I've played. And I much prefer the vehicle of standard playing cards for conveying randomness, which has been familiar, tried and true for centuries and across continents, rather than yet another statistical invention of some game developer. The game can be played as casually or as brutally as you like depending on the mode you select and whether you take a smaller win or "raise the stakes" to reach the final boss, and as with any traditional card game, you can occasionally find yourself in situations you just can't win. But I quite enjoy losing and improving at this game, which is to me an essential mark of a good one.