Othercide

Played this on another platform. This is a turn based tactical squad like XCOM: Chimera Squad (CS), not XCOM 2. The turn base take the form of initiative, but unlike CS, their initiative mechanic actually works and fun. The aesthetic is really well done despite the budget, and the OST really bangs. I won't bore you with too much technical details, in short, the combat is great, the settings and feel are also great. If you are itching for more turn based squad, give this a try. Warning: it's bloody hard. That said, here is where the major problem lies: "IT'S LOW BUDGET" I recommend it, but I DON'T RECOMMEND PAYING FULL PRICE for this. Below 20 it's a good deal. While the gameplay is good, it's very bare bones in content. Everything is just combat with very few maps variety and no map interactivity, everything is very little in variety. There is 5 chapter in total with multiple days in between and each chapter ending in a boss. Everyday you do s few mission, and each mission is the same with very little variety. Survival, Rescue, Slaughter, Ritual, everything feels almost the same, just kill whatever you see, period. And the roguelite feature certainly doesn't help. When the game is so difficult, every bug that causes damage can be catastrophic. I understand the number of developers working on this is very few, but so do Hades, and Hades provide much more content for a cheaper price. Even accounting budget, they could have placed more storylines when the story bits is presented in slide format. It's cheap to do slide format, but it's still minimal story bits. There is certainly potential in this title, but they need to provide more content for the asking price.

Style 10/10 - If you can live with B&W graphics, it is very stylish. Soundtrack 11/10 - The music is exceptional, and also used very effectively. Surgeon Final Phase. Gameplay good/10 - Coming from XCOM the style of gameplay is familiar but shallow. Story cool/10 Now the bad. Rougelites, games where you reset to the start when you lose but gain meta-progession, are grinding games by definition. You win by unlocking things, not by getting good. This does not mesh well with a strategy game. The image of this game you might have is battling your way through a long campaign, and each time you lose you get a bit more powerful but start from scratch. Wrong. Once you reach an era (by defeating the boss of the previous era), you get unlocks to skip to that era, and to start your daughters at a level appropriate to that era. So you can always skip right back to the furthest point you've reached. In theory you need to battle to unlock upgrades that don't persist between runs. In reality, starting with higher level daughters unlocked is so powerful you generally don't have to bother. Once you lose to a boss, you can just skip straight back to it on the next run. The final boss is an exception, it represents a massive power spike, but this just means you'll have to do some grinding with daughters who quickly become so powerful they trivialise the entire game. Ignore the "complex setups using the dynamic timeline" the marketing pushes - the most powerful combo abilities have huge AOE and are automatic reactions. "You have to sacrifice daughters to heal" - they can just be resurrected. You have to collect tokens in missions to do this. Except you don't - there's unlocks for those too. The UI is glitchy. What could have been a good strategy game turned into a grinding game thanks to the roguelite fad. It's rarely difficult and the grind is there to hold your hand. Worth playing if you like the look of it. Get it on sale.

I have been quite disappointed by the difference between what the game adertises and what it truly delivers. Which is a problem, considering it's a "tactical strategy" game as there are A LOT of them, and quite a number of them much better. The art style is okay, a black and white colored game which makes the few colors contrast quite a lot when they do appear. The unit's creation and customisation is decent (though nothing truly special). The game revolves around the theme of "sacrifice" and this is the first part where it kinda breaks itself : First of, the game is hard, as it borrows element of the "Roguelite" style, and thus you will fail to try again several times. The enemies hit hard and will often just OS your units, and even if they survive you can't heal them unless you sacrifice one of your own units. That in itsef isn't a big deal, the issue is : it needs to have the same level as the unit you want to heal, and THAT is a big issue. The whole game revolves around improving your own units mission after mission to try and beat the Bosses, and yet you can't do that since you have to kill half of them to keep the other half alive. Of course you can revive some of them, but it uses a very limited ressource so you can't rely on it. But that's not the worst part of the game, at least for me, and this is where I got disappointed : Combat relies a lot on "pre-planning" your turn, setting up combos between your units so you can beat the monsters without taking too much damage, the game combat is entirely designed around this, similar to playing chess... And yet you can't, and for two reasons: 1 : enemies can DODGE attacks and you cannot. 2 : enemies spawn in waves during missions, and said waves appear RANDOMLY on the map and act immediately as they spawn. You're supposed to constantly calculate and plan your moves... And yet you can't do that because of all the RNG elements ruining what could've been a very interesting playstyle.

Initially, the visuals are the most striking part: Black and white, small blotches of colour (mostly red); some great monster and area designs, extremely fluid animations. The game likes to tell its story not just through dialogue, but also with the arenas you fight in. However, repetition of layouts becomes quite noticeable after a while; especially considering you'll be re-running some sections, as it's a Roguelite. Speaking of which, despite the blurb, this game is actually surprisingly forgiving when it comes to those mechanics: Yes, your Daughters can't be healed unless you sacrifice another one. Yes, they will eventually die. But not only can you resurrect them during your current run, the graveyard is persistent! This means that not only will you benefit from unlockable boosts on subsequent runs, you can also train up a cadre of powerful Daughters over time. This makes growing stronger much easier than I was expecting, but is also a source of some grinding. Speaking of Daughters: There are up to four different classes you can have, each with a number of mutually exclusive skills to choose from. Every skill can be equipped with looted upgrades (which are not persistent beyond death), if you have the currency for it. Additional variety comes from individually unlocked traits, which can be extremely powerful. So there's a lot of individuality to your Daughters (including names/looks, if you care to customize). The monsters come in a few categories, with dedicated melee, ranged, entangling, supporting, bruiser etc. types. Their variety and abilities are nice, although you will come across slightly modified, stronger variants of initial designs as you go deeper. A special mention must go to the great soundtrack, containing anything from haunting, strange melodies to power ballads, dynamically applied during gameplay. Overall a great experience, albeit a bit repetitive: It's a very nice game to pick up, do a few fights to progress, and put down again for a while.

This game is a turn-based tactic game and team-based rogue-lite where you get progressively stronger with unlocks. The general style of combat is "never get hit" (you will get hit, but think Xcom 2 style of combat, except more melee and fantasy setting). I love the dark fantasy asthetics and atmosphere but the game mechanics are less than great. The tactical combat is 'good enough' and the timeline system is fun and fairly unique (there are no conventional "turns," every unit takes their turn based on a dynamic timeline). My main problem is with the "resource" system for healing characters. This feels fundamentally wrong and unnecessarily grindy. Specifically, you must sacrifice a character of equal level to heal another character, which makes HP a non-renewable resource except by grinding new characters to sacrifice. If this sounds strange, it feels strange too... To make matters worse, many character skills require sacrificing HP in order to use the skill. So the fundamental goal to optimize combat is to 'spend' as little health as possible. To be clear, difficulty is not the issue (you are expected to lose and get stronger in subsequent runs). The problem is that the system feels tedious and playing correctly still feels 'wrong' as you spend HP. Additionally, there is very little stat customization and almost no variety in character builds. So you won't get much from replaying the game. As others noted, the UI is also clunky and lacks a lot of information that should be common sense. For instance on the character selection screen before starting a mission, you can't see anything about the characters and instead have to cancel that and go back to a different menu to make sure you're remembering what skills/stats/etc... are on the characters you are planning to pick. 3/5. Definitely not a bad game, difficulty is on-point, but the fundamental mechanics feel flawed and unfun.