No one has rated this review as helpful yet
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 100.6 hrs on record (27.1 hrs at review time)
Posted: 9 Aug, 2023 @ 12:38pm
Updated: 13 Jun, 2024 @ 8:42am

I don't know how you managed to fail so badly implementing such a theoretically simple game.
Well, I know part of the reason, anyway: $

Complaints from when I initially reviewed the game:
First of all, requiring me to make a separate account AND the third-party developer's launcher. Steam ID could solve the first one fairly trivially, and the second one is probably just for DRM & advertising purposes. besides feeling like I'm the product, using their launcher means I get prompted to "allow this program to make changes to your computer" no less than 3 times whenever it wants to update. Don't get me wrong, I get you want to keep your software up to date, and this may require changes to the registry among other things, but could you please let me decide when it updates, since it's supposedly my computer? And why does it need to elevate THREE OR FOUR TIMES? Speaking as an IT professional, UAC prompts are not something I would want users to get complacent about, so I cannot condone needing more than one UAC elevation per play session.
Secondly, I can't even get the stupid game to launch on my laptop! It launched like one time, but now every time I click play, whether on the third party launcher or on steam, it launches and then closes after a few seconds. My laptop configuration is not that different from my desktop, what gives?
Finally, and maybe this is just a bit of a nitpick, but the lag while playing a hand (specifically while the server processes that a card was played) seems a bit extreme, sometimes it's as much as 3-5 seconds. It's not as though there is a lot of data that needs to be exchanged, right? It's a card game, what is so complicated about "Player 1 played yellow 6"?
Additional complaints as of 2023-10-09:
I got this game to be able to play it with my family, so why is there not an option to play without the turn timer and, if I so desire, without computer players? They make sense in a public lobby, but in a private one they can be just plain annoying especially when there's no option to adjust it at all.
Speaking of which, if my family member gets accidentally dropped from my private lobby due to connection error or the like, there does not seem to be a way to allow them to recover and rejoin the game, even if it's a multi-hand match. It really makes me feel like private lobbies were an afterthought, but for me they are the most important way to play.
I will not go into detail about how much I dislike the AI players as teammates, I already went into extensive detail about that on Ubisoft's Discord server. I don't feel like repeating myself here, since honestly as bad as the AI can be, it's one of the main reasons I'm still going to play this game instead of playing tabletop simulator: I don't feel like scripting my own AI (and I really don't care for Lua). I might someday, though.
Oh, and there's a bug where sometimes you can click on a valid card and it won't let you play it at all. That's just plain annoying and it crops up randomly.
edit 2023-11-02:
nothing has improved, it's just gotten worse. Today ubisoft's friends list feature wasn't working and I struggled to invite my family member to a match. I ended up having to go around it. and in the process of troubleshooting that, the game crashed one time without any obvious error message. Again, as an IT professional, any error message, even a vague error code, is better than nothing!

Edit: 2024-06-13 Most of these issues (Including, intermittently, the aforementioned difficulty launching the game) still exist. Maybe someday I'll care enough to reword this into github style issue format, but currently I feel like I would be doing Quality Assurance's job (because they sure as hell didn't do it)
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