Card Shark Review: Good hand, but the deck is flawed

There are many card games and at least as many ways to cheat. The majority of virtual implementations are limited to the honest way of playing a hand, whether in Magic, Pokémon, Hearthstone or Slay the Spire. Not so in Card Shark: Here you use all the rules of the art of sleight of hand to fool your opponent – ideally in such a way that nobody gets wind of it. Lessons in cheating are set in a dramatic story set around the burgeoning French Revolution.

You embody the mute protagonist, sometimes called Eugene or Graciella (disguised as a lady), who is apprenticed to a real professional. You don’t compete against human players, only the AI ​​and no complete games are simulated – that would probably be too complex. Card Shark isn’t easy, though, with 28 different tricks made up of multiple steps and strategies, there’s plenty to learn.

As the linear storyline unfolds, you’ll uncover several (albeit at times predictable) mysteries, working with your partner to steal francs from naïve nobles, arrogant priests, and even the occasional other con man. If something goes really wrong, you can even try to trick Death himself afterwards – but that takes guts, because if you fail, your save will be deleted. Hard but fair!

And don’t forget the Joker!

The gameplay presents itself as a motivating cycle: You travel from place to place in a carriage, while your partner goes through the trick with you that is to be used. Then follows the game and, after a successful coup, a short story sequence and the journey continues. In the beginning you don’t sit at the table and only glance at your opponent’s cards while pouring wine in order to betray the hand to your mentor with coded swiping movements. Later, you have the whole game in your hand, shuffling cards in your fist, shuffling aces and kings into your companion’s fingers and low number cards into your victim.

To do this, you have to memorize different codes, learn shuffling techniques and cut variants, as well as how to prong cards by bending or color markings. Control is via buttons or touchscreen – it is not possible to switch freely between the control methods, you have to make a detour to the main menu. Especially the nervous sticks of the Joy-Cons often throw a spanner in the works when it comes to dealing cards correctly in quick time events. In addition to quick reactions, thinking is also required, for example when you have to take into account where your partner and where your victim are sitting when mixing. And sometimes you don’t land the trick with cards, but with a sword: In order to convincingly embody a nobleman, you learn fencing in the form of quick-time events.

Most of the time you work with a buddy at the same table. The point here is to slip your good cards into his hand.

Source: PC Games

Card Shark offers you three levels of difficulty. How easy it is for you to play the game depends on your talent for card cheating, mathematical understanding and quick reactions. Towards the end of the approximately six-hour adventure, the demand for the medium level of difficulty increases considerably, especially since all actions are provided with a timer (if too much time elapses, your wrong game will be exposed) and one mistake often means the end. Then you have to start the whole game again, including the carriage journey, in the worst case you are also broke and first have to pocket an emergency fund in the camp.

Sometimes it’s quicker to quit the game via the Switch menu and restart it once game over is in sight. There was a freeze on the switch, later a complete crash. That would be bearable if our saved game hadn’t fallen victim to a serious bug shortly before the end. Everything for the cat? Almost, there is a workaround that saved us, but you have to find that out first. Extremely annoying, because Card Shark has an unusual, fun and at the same time addicting concept!

Card Shark is out on PC on June 02, 2022 via Steam and Nintendo switch appeared. In English, “Card Shark” or “Card Sharp” refers to a person who wins card games of chance with cheating or simply a lot of skill. The term does not necessarily have negative connotations. One theory is that the word “shark” in card shark is actually a loan word from the German “Schurke”. In short: card villain!