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Card Shark review: it’s hard to deal yourself a good handBruce Forsyth would have loved this one, eh?
Bruce Forsyth would have loved this one, eh?
Most video games about cards are deck-building strategy games. Digitised Magic The Gathering-likes.Card Sharkis a card game about playing cards, and, more specifically, about cheating at playing cards. When Ipreviewed itI said that it turned out I was quite good at cheating, but now I have played the full build I can report that I’m bad at that, too. The worst I can say about Card Shark is that it doesn’t make failure fun.
Card Shark | Available June 2 on PC & Nintendo SwitchWatch on YouTube
Card Shark | Available June 2 on PC & Nintendo Switch
It’s a lovely world to return to, but the problem is in the leaving and coming back. I even said in my preview that Card Shark will be one of those games that it’ll be hard to come back to after a couple of days doing other things. Guess what? I was right! After playing it over a few days, and playing other things in between, it became clear that Card Shark requires 100% of your attention. Leaving it for even a day made me forget the complex rules of different types of shuffle or deck stacks, and when that happens you’re bollocksed until you can find your feet again.
Thankfully, there are tables you can go to and practice (sort of), and earn a bit more money. Card Shark also gives you infinite second chances if you die, and a community bank if you run out of money. If all your cheaty-lessons are wiped from your internal blackboard you can also call up a basic list of what steps you need to do for a particular technique - but it is very basic. It’s: ‘swap out deck, pick the best cards, shuffle correctly’, rather than ‘to in-jog a card you need to flick the thumbstickthiswise, but only do that after you’ve put the cards in the right order so the Comte gets two picture cards. Oh, he’s second in the deal? Okay so that means you need to do one low value, one high, one low…’ I don’t have a bad memory, but remembering how one particular trick was supposed to work one evening took me so long I almost burst into tears. Because you have to get every step right, or it’s goodnight sweetheart, start again from the last checkpoint.
There’s an awful lot to admire about Card Shark. I want more games that do something original like this, that find beauty from odd angles and tell stories in new ways. But playing Card Shark like a real person - with breaks, and other things to do - is hard. If you can’t count cards, and find rubbing your tummy while patting your head at all difficult, Card Shark will likely have you absolutely mogadored.
