I bought it, but I'm only at Battle 5 (if you count the Tutorial), so remember that.

The game is very similar to the Fire Emblem series, complete with weapons breaking after a certain amount of use(I loathe this mechanic!), so if you are a fan of that series, the game could be for you.

There also seems to be some reactivity in the game, dependant on choices you make during battle, like recruiting NPC's to your party if you talk to them during the fight with your main PC's.

I can't verify this myself, since the game only makes an autosaves after a battle in a single slot(I guess you could copy the savegame manually and retry)

This seems to be a game with good mechanics, and horrible presentation.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about graphics when I say presentation. The graphics are acceptable.
I'm talking about Bad UI Layout, Bad Hotkeys, Bad fonts, and excessive re-terminology.
(The campaign tries to rename humans, swords, and 3-5 others things before you even get to move your first dude.)

Granted this is all just from my first five minutes with the game.
I plan to write a more detailed review after some more time with the game, so I can hopefully say some nice things about the mechanics.

I'm tough enough to deal with the poor presentation, but only because it looks like it has descent mechanics, and I love Turn based strategy. But if this was any other type of game I couldn't be bothered. The good thing is that it is much easier to fix Bad presentation than it is to fix Bad mechanics.

Hi!
Care to elaborate a little more on the issue? I'm interested in this one althought it's been a little panned in here.
Is it somehow similar to the Braveland series? (what a noob question, I know, I'm not into this whole tactics deal but this one surely caught my attention).

Thanks!

The gameplay is highly entertaining. The AI is very smart. Though I kind of glitched the AI sometimes and I exploited it heavily. There are bugs and glitches in the game, but the most breaking ones, have been fixed today.

That said, if you like an rpg game where you have to move your units tactically across the map, it's amazing at what it does. I like the mechanics and different skills for all the characters. I haven't been fully gripped by the story thus far, but it's easy to get into. The thing that holds up the game for me is the gameplay which is awesome. I feel the game could have been so much more.

It has been developed mostly by one developer for years, so I have to cut him some slack but I dislike not being able to sell your items to get some money back. The UI is a bit simplistic, but works. However it's not transparant so often you are dragging the bar around if you need to see something behind it. Luckily there is a mod out there that fixes it, which I'm probably going to install very soon.

The game does not let you free roam much at all. It's literally going from one battle to the next. Sometimes you get a window so you can talk to your companions and sometimes a shopkeeper passes by. So you'll have to buy things right there and then. It's unfortunate because it would have been cool to walk around in a village and talk to npcs. Perhaps that'll come later in the game. The weapon breaking is also pretty annoying. It prevents you from purchasing armor and other items because you need to rebuy weapons. If your weapon breaks that character becomes useless.

I also believe hitting obstacles heavily damages your weapons.

It feels very rewarding when you make the right decissions and win against almost impossible odds. It's cool if you can hold on for as long as you possibly can in events where you have to escape or run away just to see what will happen.

I'm enjoying the game a lot, though I feel like it could have been so much more with a bigger budget and more developers working on it. The developer nailed down the core mechanics and made the game fun which is what matters most. I heard the game can take up to 40 hours.

It's so rewarding reading what you just wrote. So helpful. It has convinced me to purchase the game asap!
Thanks a LOT, a lot! :)

Awesome! The developer has already planned out another two patches for the future to fix things up. It's awesome to mind control an enemy, let that enemy give his items, then push his friend off a bridge into the water. Then you push the one you mind controlled in the water on him. It's hilarious.

Duuude it's useless: ya already sold me on this one! :)
Just saw that TT will have a linux port soon, so I'm way more in than ever.
Thank you so much for those bro tips :P

I couldn't make myself finish Fire Emblem, and I won't get far with this game.

I disagree with using perma-death mechanics. A fun tactical game is one where you can barely win against a strong enemy. Fire Emblem is the kind of game where you play with AI derps and feel like you have to reload every time a single unit dies. Telepath has a ton of AI derps, including "lolol, I'll just walk onto that stun trap now."

Even Casual Mode has permanent penalties associated with deaths, which for me sends the message that yeah, you still have to reload every time someone dies. Not helping at all. The battles lull you to sleep until you slip up and someone finally takes three hits in one turn and goes from 100 to 0 and then you start swearing.

Equipment breakage is sort of annoying, but perma-death in a squad composed entirely of non-renewable characters with plot lines? Ewww, no. Life is too short for Fire Emblem nonsense.

There are no perma deaths on the easiest mode. In case you experienced it, it would be a bug.

The description of the mode is that you permanently lose stats on the character. So it's still an incentive to spam reloads every time you make a mistake, which is a feature I don't want in any form. I completely stand by my post, and I completely reject permadeath as a good mechanism for balancing difficulty in this kind of game for reasons already explained. A game this easy with no penalty for death would just be easy, but the "hard" mode isn't hard for a very good reason.

TT really isn't Fire Emblem. I don't even consider it similar. Fire Emblem weighed heavily on the rock-paper-scissors triangles it created. TT has a few units with weaknesses, instead. I appreciate both.

I choose to not look this gift horse in the mouth. Tactical games like this are becoming exceedingly rare, and a perfect one doesn't exist. While I agree that permadeath/permastatloss is a weak way to boost difficulty, death is very avoidable, as long as you're not asleep at the wheel.

If you're bored, just move on from this genre, like 99% of gamers already have. Personally, I'm hoping TT stays alive. If you know of any perfect tactical games, I'd love to hear back from you.

I hope the slow bug gets fixed soon... though I guess it could be my thrice-cursed PC.

It depends on how narrowly you define the genre. I would've loved a proper balance patch for Final Fantasy Tactics, for example. And permadeath was the main thing that turned me off from Fire Emblem - the "lolol, you can't level up unless you read a guide and know where some unique item is hidden" Easter egg hunt mechanic also was also hard to forgive, and I hope TT didn't copy that too...

Anyway, Battle for Wesnoth is pretty great. HoMM is a series that may or may not qualify for the genre, in your opinion - I never really got into that one. Disgaea went too far with shenanigans, power leveling, and one-man-wrecking-crew mechanics for my taste. Blackguards is sort of in the ballpark and a decent game, when they're not filling the maps to the brim with trap spam and RNG-overloaded challenges.

TT desperately needs an AI patch, and I would come back to it if they patched out permadeath *and* soft-permadeath. I simply don't want to be second-guessing whether I should be reload-spamming or not at every corner in either case. Maybe totally rebalancing the game would be so much work that it wouldn't even happen outside of a sequel. But as long as there are forums for the topic, I think adventure-party tactical RPGs with permadeath just ruins the taste of it just as reliably as a cup of lemon juice where it's not needed.

I've been learning Flash and I'd love to unleash my own FFT variant on the world, but it's rough going and could easily take years. :(

The only perfect SRPG for me is Shining Force.

FFT was good, but it wasn't my favorite. I wanted to field more characters than just 4 or 5, pitted up against greater numbers of more-skilled foes (preferably scaling) with larger maps. Given all of those things, FFT would probably be #1 for me. Tactics Ogre (PSX) remains my favorite due to the sheer number of characters I could field and the advanced maneuvers this allowed. Of course, it has your favorite permadeath mechanic, class imbalance, and is far from perfect. HoMM is a great series, though I think I'm done after #6 (should have called it quits on #5). Disgaea I appreciate mildly but have your same concerns, and I sure don't appreciate it enough to get PS3 or 4. Never played Blackguard.

The important thing I try to keep in mind is that TT isn't a finished product. The possibility of user-created campaigns combined with the manual shutoff of death (this can be done per the manual) can answer some of your concerns. AI could use some help. The AI walks right into traps and has little regard for pits and nearby bodies of water. It's also always aggressive when possible, which is easy to exploit. If the AI isn't fixed, future campaigns can make up for it by increasing enemy numbers, level and skill, decreasing the number of experience points given for actions (I strongly suspect skills are giving me more experience points than the manual indicates). I have ideas on what I'd do for a TT campaign... but it's a huge undertaking and I want the slow bug fixed first, because if it isn't, TT is going pretty much nowhere (again, assuming my PC isn't the culprit).