From: Nerial
Front: Switch
Rating:
To cheat. The forbidden word in all games, whether serious or casual, becomes the main hook in Map Sharka game that revolves around defrauding some royals from some serious coin and passing the profits on to the poor, like a sort of French Robin Hood – but with less archery and more dexterity.
Set in 18th century France, the story follows a mute peasant who is pulled from his ordinary life into a world of scams, deceit and deceit by Comte de Saint Germain, a skilled con man who becomes a sort of mentor and father figure. to the boy. A nice touch is the diary, written by the main character, which starts out as barely legible, as expected from a farmer, and grows slowly as he learns language. One minor niggle is that the game offers you a lot of choices, but many of them don’t seem to do anything but give you an extra bit of dialogue; it is extremely linear.
The main gameplay is participating in the tricks and cheats that your character is going to learn. Using precise analog stick movements and timed button presses, you manipulate cards or send signals to an accomplice to win more and more money, usually from a French nobility. Every time you go to a new area, you learn a new skill, usually a continuation of the skills you’ve developed so far. In the end you will have to put together several tricks to win. It’s a lot of things to remember, so luckily the game reminds you of the controls in the pause menu.
To constantly pressure the procedure, there is a suspicion meter. This fills up slowly as you shuffle cards or send signals, so you want to be quick. If the suspicion meter fills too high, you’ll be thrown out of the place you’re trying to rob – or you’ll just be killed, keeping the tension high throughout. Interestingly, not doing a cheat intentionally or accidentally will lower the suspicion meter, so you may need to drop a round here and there.
The visuals in this game are striking. It kind of reminds me of “paper” stop motion animation (think… Hedgehog in the fog), and it’s beautiful. It feels like you are watching an epic play controlled by a few people behind a screen. The environments are also modeled in a similar way and it brings a strange life to these areas.
The main problem with this game stems from bugs. I’m not sure if it’s just a Switch thing or not, but the game crashed several times during my time with it, and there were several times when the analog stick movements happened on their own and I couldn’t do anything. This wasn’t just the classic JoyCon drift – there was an issue in the game that kept me having to reboot. This came to a head when a cutscene was playing and then my character didn’t move. I restarted the game several times, but unfortunately my character remained frozen, bringing my playthrough to a brutal end where it seemed almost complete.
Map Shark continues a long tradition in video games: being the “bad guy” is always fun. Switching characters out of pocket is always satisfying, especially when they talk a big game and fall into an angry mess when they start to lose. Although the game throws you in the deep end at points, and I couldn’t finish it due to a game ending bug, I still really enjoyed my time with it and recommend it to all potential card sharks.
By Michael Robertson