Children of Zodiarcs

I liked this game a lot (despite the card as skills mechanic, personal prejudice) and the dice rolling mechanic worked well. The adoration the devs had for older isometric RPGs shows in every aspect of the game from the art, UI and level design and yet it still felt new when it could have gone lame and barely distinguished itself. I have two gripes: needs a longer story (after 20 levels I could have easily enjoyed 20 more) and the plot twist that screwed over my roster either doesn't need to be there or needs more satisfying resolution and/or revisiting later on.

Children of the Zodiarcs is one of those tactical RPG's where you play a small group of impoverished people trying to fight against an oppressive government. As someone whose favorite board game is Dominion, I was quite looking forward to the deck based skill system. Just like any deck building game, you want to make your decks lean and contain only the most vital cards to your strategy; hence why having a deck of 20 tends to be ideal as it allows you to consistently draw your best cards. Unfortunately, this gets old fast as you find yourself in situations where you wish you had a particular ability and RNG has screwed you over. In a normal RPG, you are given access to all your skills (after you learn them from leveling of course) with your only limiting factor being your mana pool. This allows you to strategically choose abilities to use based on your situation. In this game, you spend all of it tailoring your deck trying to reduce RNG so that you can hopefully get the cards you want. Even worse is the dice system. You can manually roll dice and pray to the RNG gods that the dice give you something favorable to whatever situation you're in. I set mine to automatic rolls since re-rolling can cause you to accidentally change dice that have already been rolled. You can customize your dice by destroying other dice, but the dice is not as customizable as they seem; generally your worst outcomes can't be overwritten by something better. The more I played, the more I realized that I'd rather have dice that all have the same result. In most RPG's, you're given a character and and then there's some sort of growth tree where you tailor your characters to get stronger. Here, you're given bad RNG and you spend the whole game trying to remove as much RNG as possible from these poorly made characters. And finally, their official description says this is "story-driven" which is a lie. There isn't much story development in this game at all. It's more gameplay focused.

Not much to say about it really, but more importantly not much to complain about either. It's a turn based game, on a grid, in which you position your characters and use skills (that work like cards in a card-game) and then you roll dice to get extra effects( anything from more damage all the way to extra turns). The game is well made and fun to play and doesn't overstay its welcome and I personally found it to be very well balanced, considering it relies on RNG quite a bit, and that’s no easy task. The game also tells a short story about kids living in a hellhole of a city and need to escape, a story that is very dark considering its main protagonists are kids. Overall if you enjoy TBS and you’re not one of those dummies in the reviews that ALWAYS have to complain about anything to do with RNG and how it’s the work of the devil, this will be a very enjoyable 10-20 hour experience.

Well made game elements, better look and more fun from its trailer and posters. No too much requirements, the operations are smooth, recommended.

TActical RPG with a heavy dose of RNG, The fame setting is some kind of anachronistic dustopia with fututirstic tech sprinkled in a preindustrial era, maybe, we never see the world at large so we can only assume. The story is not remarkable, mostly beacuse it feels like the story missions are just the first arch in the classical hero's journey, and the characters are not likable, sometimes annoyingly aggresive / if you are fighting alongside someone to save your lifes the very least you could do is show some respect). The presentation is nice, the art style doies a good job on depicting the slums and the music is fitting for the setting. The real powerhouse of the game is the combat, good old tacticcal combat , but your available skills are determinesd by cards you can equip, and each attack has a dice roll too that can modify the various effects of the cards, as you progress in levels you get fixed strat increments with card level ups and additional dice to roll, the system is good , but it suffers from randomitis, yuo can reroll some dice and is very of ten your rerolls land on the same side it already was (more like 3/4 instead of 1/6).. The game also requires a fair amount of grind, you may think autoleveling mobs tto your lñevel would be a good thing to not be underleveled, but for boss fights you wanna be outleveling the characters, because 9 vs 3 is not gonna end well when RBG is the driving force behind the combat. Overall, the game has interesting combat systems, with some bs baked in, but nothing that wwill frustrate you much , and you will probably find the half baked story and unlikable characters to be the worst parts of the game. I'd gladly welcome a second entry tto continue the story, open the world to include new vista and give the characters some actual development.