Shards of Order is a dark fantasy RPG with a card-based combat system. In this broken world, you will lead a small party of three on a journey to restore order. The Laws have been shattered, and it is up to you to restore them. If you are up for the challenge. Join me as we explore this world and see if it is worth digging deeper.
You start the game in a pit with no knowledge of where you are or even who you are. You quickly find out that the ancient Laws have been stolen or broken. Including the Law of Identity, which is why you don’t even remember your own name. You team up with two other nameless people and decide to try to fix the Laws, or at least die trying.
There are three characters in your party. The soldier, the exile, and the scholar. They each have their own story arc and motivations. They also all have unique playstyles. Each of their playstyles can be modified and amplified based on the equipment they wear and the cards they unlock in each of their skill trees.
Each time they level up, your characters will get a skill point to unlock something new on their skill tree. These are different kinds of cards that you will then have available to add to your combined combat deck.
The cards you unlock range in type from attacks and powers to skills and upgrades. You also have the ability to refund skill points as needed. This handy feature lets you experiment with each character and develop different strategies for the assortment of enemies you will encounter.
The gear you give to each of your characters can also have an effect on their playstyle and which cards they have access to. For example, you can gear your soldier up to be a high-defense tank or a high-damage dealer.
You might give him a sword that unlocks a card with serious damage every time he is enraged or maybe armor that starts out with max block. It all depends on your playstyle and strategy.
Enemies in Shards of Order range in difficulty, and some of them can be quite difficult. Sometimes you might have to change some cards around in your deck, and sometimes you might need to start from scratch and reset your entire skill tree to find the combos you need to defeat a really tough boss.
There is no limit on refunding your skill points, so feel free to do it as often as you like until you have each character just the way you want them.
Combat is similar to other deckbuilding games. You have a deck of cards that you have built with the skills and abilities of your party.
You will draw a hand and use the cards in your hand to attack, block, etc. However, Shards of Order adds an interesting twist. There is no mana that limits how many cards you can play on your turn. There isn’t even a my turn, your turn system. Instead, everything is based on a timing system.
Both the enemy skills and your own have a set amount of time that they take. As you play cards, the timer goes down for each of the enemies.
If you play a one-time unit card, then the enemy counter will go down by one before they use their next ability. If you use a two-time unit card, the enemy counter will go down by two. This means you have to be very strategic about the order you use your cards. You might have a very strong attack that does 60 damage to a single enemy, but that card also uses up 5 time units. This means that when you use each of your cards is even more important.
On top of that is a time counter for your redraw. As you use cards, the counter will decrease based on the cards’ time cost.
Unfortunately, your zero-time cards, which normally are favored in other deckbuilding games, do not count down your redraw timer. That means you might have to spend time drawing a new hand while the enemy gets to make an attack.
All of these elements of time combined with challenging enemies can make combat frustrating at times. Especially while you are still figuring out the system’s scope.
Once you figure it out and you can find the perfect combos to beat the bosses, the game is very rewarding. You just have to be willing to work for it. There is a lot of strategic depth with all the different gear and branching skill trees to unlock, which makes every successful combat satisfying.
I don’t talk about it very often in reviews, but the theme is really on point here. Everything in Shards of Order bleeds the dark fantasy setting.
The entire world is grim with what feels like little to no hope. All the enemies are dark and gruesome, with every attack feeling like a crushing blow. The art style really matches the theme, and so does the combat music. Overall, I felt it was very immersive, whether I was playing on my ultrawide monitor or on the small screen of my Steam Deck.
All in all, I think that Shards of Order is a fantastic game that brings an interesting twist to the deckbuilding genre. There are a lot of card-based combat games out there now. It seems like there is a new one every day. The developers at Fardust figured out a way to make their game stand out from the crowd and made it a blast to play.
If you are looking for a new style of card-based combat or deckbuilding game, then you should definitely head over to Steam to check this one out. You won’t be disappointed.
A review key was provided by the developers at Fardust.
