Mage Gauntlet was good and Wayward Souls was great, so I had to pick up Five Card Quest.
I'm a pretty big fan of strategic games that implement a degree of luck, like random card draws. But I can't help feeling that the difficulty in this really hampers the strategy element.
I can carefully move my heroes around to spread the damage, preventing it when possible, but there's ultimately too many enemy encounters that increase in difficulty (in terms of amount of enemies per encounter, damage they do, speed in which they do damage) while your heroes just stagnate. The very minor upgrades you can get for heroes seem pretty nominal. You can stack gold decently, but what I've been able to buy so far hasn't seemed all that game changing.
There's also no progression saved between attempts, which is more in line with traditional roguelikes than most games that borrow the term. I don't think that it helps here, since the story is extremely bare bones. That draw to keep pushing for something would greatly benefit the game.
I like hard games. I like games that force you to conform to what it is putting out there. Without a draw to keep coming back and with a heavily skewed difficulty curve, this one will wind up being one of those fun little time wasters that you play on the can or waiting in an uncomfortable chair for your name to be called. Unfortunate, because the core game is so good.
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