Gordian Quest takes the joy of what the role playing game (RPG) genre has to offer and perfectly runs with each theme. The main aspects being focused on are story, combat, and skill trees. Starting with the story, the delivery takes a text based dialogue common in RPG’s which spans several acts. The first act alone takes roughly 9 hours to complete, given that the player will be trying new strategies, learning mechanics, and reading through skills. The player’s party starts as a solo adventurer but quickly expands to reach three members during the first hour of gameplay. Starting with a bard, I came to appreciate the wide range of buffs that can be applied to each party member and built the other two characters around that. Act 1 follows the story of undead attacks on a central town with mysteries unfolding through quest progression. Fortunately, the player has the option to explore on their own, leveling up and meeting potential party members along the way. In doing this, different compositions for the party are found and tested before jumping into the main questline.
Combat in Gordian Quest takes on a combination of deck building and turn based combat. Each character has one of four decks chosen when they join the party with a balance of attacks, passives, defense, and other cards to start. Entering combat on the world map places members in one of three lanes that the player can set preferences for and dice are rolled to establish turn order. The player then takes turns using action points to play cards until all opponents are defeated. While this combat seems simple at first, the deck building offers a personal style that I quickly fell in love with. Making sure my bard had high initiative allowed her to go first and buff my other party members for a strong start to combat. While I was able to coast through most of act 1 with this strategy, the difficulty towards the conclusion had me learning about other ways to buff each character through respective skill trees.
The skills, which can be unlocked for each character, vary slightly but consist of stat upgrades, new cards for the deck, health bonuses, or initiative bonuses. One more upgrade type exists but we will round back to that. Each time a party member levels up, the player can go into their respective skill tree and choose these upgrades. Once four upgrades are unlocked, however, the player can attach an additional skill tree adjacent to the original. Doing so provides unique paths chosen by the player and additional traits to unlock. The traits are a unique upgrade node which open an alternate upgrade screen. From this screen, the individual party member stats allow unlocks that further boost a stat, offer bonuses to certain weapons, increase health, and many more to choose from. The excitement to jump back into Gordian Quest to experience everything it has to offer makes it a 10/10 game.
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