Dark Cards Reviews

Pretty fun game, though would be nice to have a bit more explanation, note that when you select a card you can pick from anywhere and also that the gems near your name is a growing number of draws made each turn. Couldn't quite figure out the "good" ending for the campaign yet but is an overall fun card battler.

It is a decent card battler with a pretty fun twist on the mechanics featuring a board where both players decks are played face down. Each turn, rather than drawing, you can flip some cards (yours OR your opponents) and it has a lot of cool ways that it utilizes this main feature. The mechanics are pretty fun and solid, although there are some pretty blatantly broken cards like Mask, that can easily carry you through a whole game / run with almost no effort. The game has a bit of a silly, surreal, SciFi vibe and It is much more story focused than their other games, I always wanted the story and lore for their Blood Card games, although unfortunately I did not really like this ones aesthetic or story, but that is purely personal preference, if you are down for the more strange and silly approach it may be for you. Its a fun and short game, it has a lot of potential, and the PVP could have been epic, but sadly the servers do not seem to be up, and I think the company went under so patches are not likely to happen. While it gets a positive rating since I had some fun with it, I ultimately rate it pretty low due it not getting any more content / patches, having balance issues, PvP servers not being functional, my self not vibing with the aesthetic, and just being on the sort of a short side with a limited amount of content. Worth getting on sale if you just want some laid back fun,, but I would not pay full price for this one.

I do enjoy their other card games, but this one is just so boring and slow. Music was really annoying as well. I found the controls sometimes delayed, and the text box collision to display the full text without animation should be based on the box not the text itself.

Someone PLEASE pick up these devs and make a high production touchscreen cardgame together!!!! Everything they create is INCREDIBLE!!!!!!! HOWEVER! ...this one needed more TLC to be considered complete. The idea was solid, might make for a good boardgame, but in it's current state it's not enough. Major Kudos though for them crafting a funny storyline out of the visual assets, it was awesome lol

I would not recommend the game in its current state. The game's idea is fun and all but at this point it feels like an unfinished product. This game requires a lot of polish to become a good game. the animations aren't that smooth and feel a bit laggy, which can be seen in the few examples in the store page. I also encountered two bugs which broke the game and stopped it from responding to alt-F4 in my 30 mins of play time. Nevertheless I still believe in its potential so I will leave my review positive for now.

This games is so slow and boring. Every battle is slog to get through. Even if you like deck builders you won't like this.

The other games by these devs are underappreciated gems, particularly Dark Mist, but also the better known Blood Card, both of which are fantastic. In this case, however, the devs have missed the mark, badly. It's worth noting up front that Dark Cards at this point is essentially abandonware. Seriously devs, please ask Valve to withdraw this from sale, write it off to experience and move on with your lives. Continuous microimprovements really aren't going to be enough to make this game any better without breaking the entire thing down and starting again from scratch. Dark Cards plays out as a series of battles in which your goal is to whittle down your opponent's 30 health to 0 before they whittle down your 30 health to 0. You do this on a board of face down cards not unlike the kid's game Memory but without having to match pairs. Cards on the board are made up half by your premade deck and half by your opponent's. You know whose deck a card normally comes from by the colour (blue are yours, red your opponent's), but you can click on either your or your opponent's card back without penalty, after which any abilities of that card become yours regardless of the deck the card started in. Each face down card has an ability, either attack cards to directly attack one of the players, utility cards that mostly help you, or trap cards that damage your opponent if your opponent clicks on it. You start with a general idea of what type of card each of yours is (attack/utility/trap) before clicking, but have none of this information for your opponent's cards. On paper the approach has opportunities for both interesting tactics and strategy, and there's quite a lot of customisability if you dig under the hood, but incentive to tweak your deck is low and I got more or less through the game without making a single change to the starter deck. (In fact, the ability to tweak your deck isn't ever advertised, anywhere - you literally need to click around randomly in menus to discover that this is even an option. I still have no idea how new cards are even unlocked, perhaps they are all just enabled at launch.) The game tutorial is also woeful to non-existent, with a few tips only inexplicably popping up a few battles after starting, by which time you've kinda figured things out. Performance of the game is generally poor, with dialogue having odd delays and not scrolling fluidly, and other choices just tedious and time wasting, such as resetting a board by turning over one . card . after . another . card . after . another . The AI is also just generally crappy. All up the entire thing still feels very much Early Access despite having now been given a full release build number. Finally, the game plays out primarily via a campaign mode with visual novel-style click through cut scenes that are equally cringy and creepy in the extreme. Think semi-naked anime women with a running 'joke' of the main character constantly being called a 'pervert' for looking/not looking... oooh, so awkward, so elementary school, so done too many times already and it wasn't funny any of those other times either. Even ignoring those bits, the dialogue goes on too long, takes too long to click through, and is brimming with squirm-inducing stereotypes and grossly inappropriate power dynamics. Stay away from this one, pick up a copy of Dark Mist instead.