Shuffle Tactics Review — Dog Knight

Shuffle Tactics is a roguelike deckbuilder in the vein of Slay the Spire, and players who give this game a try will find it familiar enough to others in the genre while still managing to stand out a bit in its approach. A bigger focus on tile-based tactical combat steps away from the norm; however, at times, it clashes with its deckbuilding elements or otherwise simply doesn’t feel very intuitively designed. Paired with slight performance issues and bugs, Shuffle Tactics is not a game I would say to skip, but one that can feel a bit hard to justify for its admittedly modest price point.

To begin this review, it’s important to let you know what you’re in for with Shuffle Tactics.

Shuffle Tactics is a roguelike where each run features procedurally generated battles and buffs in no predictable or consistent order. As you progress, you unlock new relics, followers, and cards for your run and become progressively more powerful to take on stronger foes. While many games in this genre feature a way to permanently increase your character’s strength after each run, usually by gathering some kind of currency that can only be spent outside of your current attempt, Shuffle Tactics features no such progression. While you can unlock new buffs to be found during your runs, each attempt you make in the game will start at the same level of strength.

This is especially noticeable because Shuffle Tactics can feel especially punishing, with the jump in difficulty between your first and second battle being pretty significant. While much of the early difficulty can be attributed to the game’s learning curve, with different effects and enemy/player interactions being something you simply have to learn through trial and error, there are aspects that feel rather poorly designed or at least poorly executed.

For example, your starting character is the Dobberknight, a fairly interesting protagonist that uses the very same energy he seeks to destroy in his quest to destroy it. This translates to a frontlining fighter-type character that hits fairly hard and applies defensive buffs to himself or damage buffs, often at the cost of his own health. This character also makes use of abilities that move enemies around the map to either damage them or make it easier for him to attack.

The problem here is that these movement abilities do nothing against bosses, who are immune to being shoved or pulled or colliding into terrain. This essentially makes a good chunk of this character’s deck, your only starting character, useless when facing boss enemies. With very few options to cut cards or otherwise manipulate your deck, much of the game’s deckbuilding can feel less like a strategically designed tool organized by the player and more like you taking whatever you can get to hopefully pull the best cards when you need them.

This difficulty spike is managed in some way by the fact that you regain all of your character’s health at the start of each battle, something that isn’t present in other roguelike games, and the fact that you can gather followers who respawn from battle to battle if they are killed. However, the game is instantly lost if your chosen character dies in the fight, something that seems weirdly inconsistent with the behavior of followers and kind of incentivizes you to use them as meat shields at times where it would otherwise betray their playstyle. I think allowing your character to die and not game over, so long as you still have followers in the battle, would be a fair way to ease this demanding difficulty, even slightly.

There seems to be an understanding from the developers about the game’s difficulty and how hard unlocking new characters can be, as the game’s settings have options to unlock all of the game’s characters (three in total with drastically different playstyles), as well as max out their level and even make them more powerful in-game. Progression should not be a matter of accessibility but instead something you should feasibly be able to do naturally while playing the game, and these options show me that the developers were not confident that you would be able to do so.

A couple of unpleasant bugs also plagued my playthrough of Shuffle Tactics. One particularly frustrating one caused the game to crash at the start of a new game, something that delayed my review of the title past my intended embargo significantly. The game’s tactical camera also breaks your view, and occasionally your characters can be too short to select behind some terrain despite appearing clearly on screen. Strangely enough, the game still features the wishlist button prominently after its release, something I suspect to be a holdover from the demo. It doesn’t affect performance at all, but I thought it was interesting to point out.

For $15 ($11 during the game’s introductory offer sale), Shuffle Tactics is not the worst game you can buy. The game’s art is incredible, the story is interesting, as are its characters, and the gameplay still feels fun to play, even if it feels unintuitively difficult or lacks rewarding progression. It is not that the game is horrible, but that it simply feels a bit underthought, like perhaps a longer playtest period or an Early Access launch would have been better to help this game polish and smooth out into a more enjoyable experience.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Shuffle Tactics. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Shuffle Tactics is available on Steam.