Massive Chalice

Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PS69ozGcRs Massive Chalice is a turn based strategy game that’s really honestly very unique, but not nearly as complex as its official description might lead you to believe. So in this game you play as an immortal strategist essentially. You and your talking chalice work together to run a kingdom that’s under invasion by the cadence which is essentially a mist that spawns enemies and consumes territory if it manages to corrupt it enough. You can create keeps and assign your heroes there to rule it. They will produce new heroes, the class and traits of which being influenced by the regent’s traits and class along with that of his or her spouse. You can research technologies except not really. Research is used to build and craft new items and buildings like keeps, guilds that increase research speed, and crucibles that help train your heroes to higher levels. Higher level parents also create higher level heroes, but if you assign all your high levels to rule then you won’t be able to fight with them. As awesome as that entire strategic layer sounds you have to realize that’s all there is to it. You have a very limited space to build and engineering your bloodlines turns into more of a chore with the more keeps you get. Your time out of battles will be almost entirely spent replacing dead heroes in non combat roles and just repeating the same drudgerous tasks over and over again. And that gets old fast. There are special events that pop up as well on that strategic layer that allows you to make a choice of how to handle situations. These situations can either lead to you gaining or losing a hero or maybe even suffering an invasion in a critical location in your kingdom because you thought opening what was essentially pandora’s box was a good idea. Full Text review (since GoG's text limits are very small): http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/246110/

I completely agree with Stetzwebs (very good but narrow focus) so I will only add a few thoughts that could be complementary. I bought the game at a very low price so the value for money is just unbelievable. But I guess I have to view it on the normal price basis and that's a different story. On the bright side, MC (Massive Chalice) is really an invention from my point of view. It's a story, an ambiance, a specific graphic design... I personally love the sound and music atmosphere, the combat FX. It's really neat. The first encounters with Cradles, Ruptures and Twitchers are quite striking ! There are a lot of tactical and strategic decisions that you learn to deal with. Because you plan across generations, you learn with very few hints at the beginning how to build strong and complementary bloodlines, place the right key people as scientists and trainer (they cannot be in your vanguard after that), bet on the best research (it will be long so choose wisely). However, yes, there is some frustration in the gaming process because it can become repetitive : make time go on, deal with the death of aging key people and choose new ones, deal with the few random events (not very convincing but some time funny) and wait for the next invasion for combat. I personally enjoyed understanding the long-term and short-term balance. It is impressive to see how your heroes become depleted 20 or 30 years later because of bad choices. And I stay focused probably until the fifth repetition of the game. Then comes a slight boredom because of the narrow focus mentioned by Stetzwebs. Frustating because I would see easily a richer magic research system, a less restrictive gaming environment (the world map which you have in front of you all the time) etc. Still, I would love to see more of this design team.

This game doesn't deserve all the negative reviews. Maybe it's not the next cult classic like X-COM, but nothing is X-COM except X-COM (not always). Massive Chalice is a minimalistic turn-based tactics game with a unique premise and very satisfying gameplay. If you like TBS/TBT games then I definitely recommend this one. If you are not sure because of all the negative reviews, the grab it when it's on sale.

Just a note: The Linux version needs a workaround to run on Ubuntu 17.04 64-bit. Even then, sound is missing. Otherwise, the game runs fine. The idea behind the game is certainly interesting but I feel there's a little too much left to luck. It would be nice if armor, not just weapons, could become bloodline relics as well but maybe time/budget constraints didn't allow that. Same applies to weapons/armor developed through researching the Cadence. The fact that traits/personalities are random/hidden makes a hard game even harder to play, but some gamers like that so it's not necessarily a bad thing. Same goes with chances of getting a relic, or having children (even with high fertility).

Not a bad game, Not great either. Not worth the full price but if its on sale you should pick it up..........its good enough