Tooth and Tail

Bought after watching 3-4 hours of Total Biscuit reviewing/streaming/enjoying the game. I thought "this looks like real fun, and I have a good idea what I'm buying so this is a done deal!". I also thought: lets buy it on gog. Thinking the online would be like my new favourite multiplayer game....like i'd be playing it alot...and i wanted to avoid steam so i paid more on gog. NOTHING above happened upon buying and loading this game though. It ran horrid, under 10fps. I now have to specify my graphics card upon booting it each time..requiring a roundabout method when using gog galaxy. But once I get that fixed.....its still only running 30-60fps! Any nvidia graphics card should run something this low spec at 60fps EEEEZ. My card runs modern 3d triple A games fine yet it can't run this smoothly!?!?? It jumps back from 60fps straight to 30fps all the time. Its playable but its annoying to say the least that it isn't super smooth. Story is 3-5 hours. Completed it in 2 nights. There is only 1 difficulty, and nothing to do once its completed other than "heroics". And there is no reason to do the heroics (basically extra challenge in each mission) since it offers only a trophy.....doesn't give any actual game content. Story was interesting but it was so poorly presented that you will skip alot of the reading and not really care. Nor should you care, if you miss any plot points its really irrelevant since the game is so all over the place and doesn't really care about any individual characters, not even the 4 main chars. Prepare for very unfair missions where the map you get determines whether you win or lose. I'm not even joking. This is one of the criticisms I saw about the game but I always thought "well you just have to play a little harder/better if you get a bad map". This is WRONG! The game is setup so that any little unfair thing can cost you the game no matter how well you play. Alot of missions are aggravating beyond belief....it feels like you are playing a normal rts with infinite resources turned on, but you start without a base while your computer enemy does start with a base. Once you do story, jump into the real reason you bought it....Multiplayer! Oh wait....you can't get a match cause Crossplay which they promised at launch....STILLL ISN'T HERE! I got to play 1 game of ranked which i enjoyed and won, then no other games were available...... I looked at custom and lan games and....there is no way to communicate between players in this game!!! There is no text function, not even in custom games. Its just so archaic....add a chat box to custom and lan games....why wouldn't you?!!?? You can't communicate to anyone at all, not in any way at all. ANd you aren't running steam so you can't contact them via steam or anything like that. The ui and title menu and what not is also pretty obviously designed for consoles...making for quite a few annoyances when using a mouse/keyboard. And very few options to fiddle with to fix the performance problems. For 50% more content for the price tag I'd give it another star. For crossplay, AS PROMISED, I'd give it another star. So basically if you buy this game in the future on sale....you will mbe have a 4/5 star game. Right now its barely a 2. And 2 is being quite generous right now, and giving it a 4 in the future is also being extremely generous. There is only a ladder in multiplayer there aren't any rewards or anything really to keep you playing outside of the matches you get. I don't see this game getting any real content updates or any real balance updates or...anything really in the future. Why? Cause there aren't the tools you need to build communities. A premium priced multiplayer online RTS on pc where you can't communicate with anyone....just.....wut? If you want single player story driven rts with console controls.....valkyria chronicles is your best friend you never knew you had. Its dark, its half the price, its many many many times the single player content and presentation values, and it doesn't grind your eyes and run like a toaster. And there are countless others as well....its a crowded genre, this game is not deserving of a place in it yet. Unfinished product.

In terms of story mode - there were some pretty fun missions, a lot of average ones, and then a few really tough ones that really soured the experience. I normally don't mind a challenge but those few tough missions just feel unfair in a way that isn't fun to grind out. The best way I can put it is it feels like the winning strategy is sometimes very specific, there's very little room for personal preference or pace. Overall, for the heavily discounted price I got it for I'd say I got my money's worth. I did enjoy the artwork and music (I bought the soundtrack as well).

First of all the game is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea since it’s very different from your typical RTS where you are required build structures instead you have burrows that spawn your infantry and you have farms to capture for resources and can setup defenses. At the same time you don't point and click when issuing an order instead you directly control a character that does but is un-enable to attack enemies. The game has story mode, an offline mode with splitscreen you will need to connect two controllers, with two online modes ranked and unranked. It is fun playing with AI although I would recommend playing with a friend. Once you have played some story missions to get the hang of the game start either skirmish with AI or online although I haven’t seen many lobbies did played a few games though. My only complaint was but I found a fix when offline the game crashes when trying to load leaderboards if you are not connected to the internet it will crash but offline skirmish still works. In order to fix this just log out of GOG Galaxy the game will run fine without the internet.

I'll give the developers props for trying something new in the RTS genre, but it wasn't exactly executed all that well. You have a hero (think Age of Empires III, where the hero is autorevived a short while after dying), but it can't attack, period. Just issue orders, it is essentially the cusor, meaning you can't scroll the screen anywhere like in just about every other RTS, but you have to move your character to the general location of where you want to attack, while using your hero to scout, aggressively, frequent, and early I might add. Your hero only has a few commands outside of placing buildings, etc. Attack with all units, attack with selected unit type, focus attack, and retreat, and a instant retreat/fast travel for the hero themself. Your units only have their standard attack, no special abilities. I've heard that the levels were randomly generated, or at least to some extent. I really didn't notice much of that, probably cause I was focusing on all the other nonsense. So I played about 2 or 3 levels on normal, then the next level the difficulty spike was like a 90 degree angle wall compared to the previous ones. So I lower the difficulty to braindead levels (20%) and even then, some levels were still stubborn, probably due to some infuriating objective type, or some bs unfair advantage the enemy had, whether it was random or not. You know somethings f***ed if you can't even beat something on what's basically casual difficulty. The full portrait character artwork is probably the best thing about this game. I've always had a fondness for pseudo-realisticly proportioned anthros, reminds me of Redwall. You also have a hub in the campaign where you select levels by talking to people, which is cool and immersive, there's even optional dialogue with random characters sprinkled throughout the hubs. Although I would like an option for a level select screen, as it takes a while to get around the hub, and there isn't exactly a sprint feature.

Loved the writing and enjoyed the world, but the gameplay fell flat. Removing free pointer movement from an RTS is a boneheaded handicap: every game boils down to singular suicide rushes, as movement and staggering strategies are impossible mid-encounter due to the extremely slow pointer mechanic. The Advance and Retreat commands are not coded versatile enough to execute even basic tactics - Overlord did this better in 2007, and it even had to deal with a 3D playing field. I would not recommend Tooth and Tail as a game, but it makes for an okay watching experience.