Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

I'll be honest, the reason I paid this game any attention was its E3 trailer that dropped. You all know the one, with the big, voluptuous blonde beauty that caught everyone's eye so much that they now use the frame as a permanent promotional image on the store pages. (5th image on this store page by the way.) In a season of boring games with ugly female characters, one that focuses on beauty and conventional attractiveness, and yes, sex appeal, is something nice to see. Something that appeals to those of us who are more on the hot-blooded side and not afraid of seeing attractive women in our video games. The fact that it was an SRPG made the odds that much higher that I would play it. I've been an SRPG, TRPG, JRPG, and RTS fan for a loooong time now. On that note, the gameplay in SoW is fun. I quickly tore through this game. I will say the "normal"/rec'd difficulty is too easy for those who are experienced in TRPGs. I beat it on "TRPG autopilot" (when you play only vaguely thinking about tactics and go on instinct). Lots of customizability, solid map design, nice animations, and fun unit types. The story is ambitious and has a lot of heart and charm, even if its amateurish in execution. I enjoyed it all things considered, though it needs "more". You can see how much influence the game derives from Fire Emblem 4 in its storytelling + style. However, it has influences from all kinds of strategy and tactics games of old. The squad-based mechanics and building, the morale system, the individual units, even having a tech tree. Its honestly hard to tell where exactly they got it all from because there are so many places it could've taken them from. Sengoku Rance, XCOM, Yggdra Union, etc. Some of the obvious ones are Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre of course, which are decent reference point if you'll like the game. There's criticisms I can levy at the game, but its an indie game and they'll get polish over time. The game is worth supporting, check it out.

After 3rd or 4th mission the game wipes your entire army and swaps them out for some random troops. Imagine that happening in Final Fantasy Tactics, or Ogre Battle. At some point in the storyline, the game wipes your entire army and replaces them with random units, sending you into the next mission. What's to say, in another few levels, the army will get replaced and progress reset again? How do games significantly worse than Super Nintendo games that released 30 years ago get these kind of positive reviews, while none of them mention the game committing what is possibly the worst Faux Pas a strategy/tactics game could possibly commit? To counteract this swapping of your entire army for plot reason, the game gives you storyline characters that are practically invincible. This is an absurd mechanism to rely on in a strategy game. Rather than having balance and counterplay between units, and actual strategic decisions, this game instead provides massively overpowered individual characters. Squad size is determined by leadership so these OP storyline toons are not only individually more powerful, but are able to field larger squads with more units. Success in game relies solely on exploiting these overpowered characters to hard carry the rest of your units through victory. It's not a fine-tuned strategy game, more dressed up in the skin of one.

This game plays very much like the Fire Emblem games on the GBA. It has really nice graphics for the story segments that would make for a nice "normal" 2D JRPG. I actually wish the combat map used them. The portraits and music are also very nice. Works great with Keyboard/Mouse or gamepad. The writing is good, but maybe not quite as polished as Fire Emblem. The game is really great though and it's easy to recommend to any strategy game fans.

I really enjoyed this game overall, it has an awful lot going for it and is well worth a purchace. Just a shame that some units you don't really get to build around. There are a couple of negetives, but they are small enough that I am not sure they are worth singling out. I am not even sure it there is a "best" when it comes to building your army. I have completed this twice, with vastly different units, I was equaly as capable both times, with the only difference being I struggled a bit more with resources on the 1st run (though market luck could have played a small part there). If you are even semi interested in this game I think it's an auto buy.

What a wonderful surprise. I awaited since long a "simple console wargame" here, and it's far more than that. The core of the game is your crafting of the army, very complete where you build squads (conscript/mercenary, skills, upgrades, weapons&tools, etc). Sure, the UI takes from consoles, but you may become used to and learn to hurry the choices. Then you fight with in the campaign scenarios, with different secondary goals. It may give you learnings to choose in a strategical 'technology' tree. There is no Fog of War, but often in computer wargames it's not such a good feature, as it makes us fight the scenario several times to learn it. Here, you only fight once for good, no badly made surprise. Actually, you can buy this full price, it's an ironed gold wargame 5 stars value.