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If there are no signs of that "ancient heritage" in game while this setting part was clearly noted it bad direction/directing, they could gave something - ancient weapon, part of mechanism, sealed cave full of machines etc.
Yeah, dialogues from those videos are bad... really bad. There is one other thing, one that is a bit on the subjective side, but that plain modern English doesn't blend in with game's art style and setting. This called for something more archaic and elaborate, think PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics for example.
Tried this, and my impressions are in line with everyone else here's. Writing is notably awful; antagonists are faceless, racist, sadistic, murdering rapemonsters, so we all probably identify with them pretty well. There's only one that's given any sort of characterization at all, and his motives are touched on but not really explored. Protagonists don't really have depth. I get the feeling that they were written as being impossibly screwed over by the world partially because the writer had no idea how to make a character likeable, instead settling for making them justified.
Setting seems cartoonishly militarized, and everything revolves around war; that's not inherently terrible in fiction, but it isn't done well here. I had an eyeroll when they described how Glorious Destroyed City Oran was a modern day liberal democracy with third generation human rights. (There was a line saying (near-paraphrase) that it was a republic where everyone was equal, and no one is treated differently based on race. Subtle.) Apparently the lead writer / creative director is a published travel writer, which is a little surprising given that this is multiple cuts worse than what a lot of Aspergian indie programmers seem to churn out, but I guess travel writing's more about one's ability to generate experiences to write about.
Gameplay is surprisingly deep, given that you have a grand total of three non-hero unit types, with 2 active abilities each. I was playing on the hardest difficulty, and the first real fight was legitimately challenging. Here's a recounting of my thoughts during it:
- So it's six against twenty, hm, that's rough. Enemy's weaker than my guys, but not that much weaker--4attack, 22HP vs 5 attack, 36 HP.
- Well, eight of them are going after 6 neutral units you're supposed to rescue; I can split off one guy to start the rescue portion, using recruited forces to carry it forward while engaging the enemy 5v12.
- I can line up the protagonist's AOE nuke to hit 6 of the 12. That's pretty good. My other 4 fighters take out 3 of them, making it 5v9.
- Oh, hm, the enemy is using their abilities pretty intelligently to damage my guys. They maximize flanking bonuses and use AOE special attacks to hit two units where possible.
- Lost a guy, but rescued most of the troops, main body of enemies is done, almost all my objectives are met--wait, enemy reinforcements are arriving? I guess the blurb at the beginning did warn of this.
- Rescued the last guy. More reinforcements, and now my objective has become "rout the enemy." This is looking grim. Maybe if I kill the leader, they'll flee, and the scenario will end?
- ...No. Got him, but had to throw everything at it. One of my heroes to fall. Restart.
- Start the fight the same way, until initial 5v12 clash. Focus on keeping units alive rather than quickly killing enemies; tank with heroes. It seems to work. I split off the princess twhile my other 4 are mopping up the initial main enemy body, so that she can rescue two comp-controlled soldiers to the right before they're killed.
- Timed reinforcements arrive. Princess and two rescued soldiers are battered, four original soldiers bruised. My sole rescue soldier on the left has manage to recruit four more and kill the soldiers around him, but the squad of 12 reinforcements is now bearing down on this new B team. Meanwhile, since I rescued the last soldier, the captain's reinforcments are triggered. Looking at an influx of ~20 more enemy onto the field. Not good.
- I probably can't fight without taking significant losses, so I don't--disengage on the right flank, healing as I go. These units' disengagement abilities seem pretty good, unless they're against ranged units. Disengage on the left flank, too, snagging a few kills on my way out. I get intercepted by a squad of archers, so I surround and kill them, then continue to fall back until I'm healed up.
- One I've recovered, I bring the two groups together and smash the captain's group + remnants of lieutenant's reinforcements. 0 losses, 2-3 units near death.
This is easily the most challenging and satisfying first battle in a tactical game I can remember. There are some very gamey mechanics to exploit, mostly based on things you can do with flanking. It resembles Go more than a battle simulation at times, but if that doesn't bother you, it's pretty great.
Knocked this on the hardest difficulty. Additional thoughts:
- Game is pretty short. Starting at the map I talked about above, there are 9* discrete battles, grouped in 5 "levels." HP and willpower are replenished at the end of each level, not at the end of each battle. You generally don't know how many battles you have in a level, which is realistic but annoying. (There are several spots in some maps that provide partial healing, so shuttling all your wounded units over to them before finishing off the last enemy man is the kind of undignified behavior that you might engage in if you think there will be more battles after the current one.) Apparently most people finish the game in 10-15 hours.
* There's a 10th, but it's about as hard to lose as the tutorial levels.
- Of the 9 levels, I probably would've lost 4 of them if I hadn't been thinking hard, and there was a fifth that was tense. That's a lot more resistance than I usually see from turn-based tactical games, so kudos to the devs on making their hard mode actually hard.
- It ends abruptly and with a cliffhanger. The final battle feels like a chapter end, but there's no denouement; seems like the devs stopped where they ran out of money.
I thought after NWN2, everyone agreed that "rocks fall, everybody dies" was a joke ending for a reason.
Story is clearly meant to be continued in future episodes.
- There is *one* sign of what appears to be advanced technology, outside of Tahira's magic: the antagonists seem to have cannons that are substantially more powerful than actual early cannon technology.
The one time they're fired in your presence, you see a white light followed by a blast that obliterates most of a city. Are they firing nukes? Are they ion cannons? Lasers? This is never explained, by the way.
- I don't think the writing actually gets better, but exposition seems to be the writers' weakest suit. When they stop having to do it, they get more bearable. The dialogue before the final battle didn't annoy me in very many places and even had a few bits I liked.
- Tira (the village fight Whisper mentioned) is at what's roughly the game's midpoint is pretty quality and seems to be the high point of the game. I got through it near-optimally, but there was a lot of counting each square of enemy movement, positioning and repositioning to maximize flanking bonuses, and so on. It highlighted to me how rich the battle system is; ten minutes into one fight, I used the wrong ability on a non-hero grunt unit due to a misclick, and it led pretty directly to an entire front of the battle crumbling where it would otherwise have held. It's probably one of the best tactical set pieces I've seen in the last five years.
- The ambush mechanic is a ton of fun, and they throw sufficiently overwhelming numbers at you that it doesn't feel overpowered. It's not incredibly well-explained; I started off thinking that it was a way to hit the enemy from two sides, if you anticipate their movement, which is a balanced, niche sort of tactic that lets you prep against enemies you see coming. Not so! Its real strength is that it lets you move and attack twice per turn.
- There's not much in the way of filler gameplay.
- UI is quite bad. There seems to be some lingering stickiness between skill descriptions and selections thereof, so that you can have an ability selected and the wrong skill description visible. There aren't unique icons for active abilities, so this ends up being pretty irritating. I eventually looked up the hotkeys and started using those.
Some general TRPG thoughts:
- I'm not sure how feasible it is to keep determined players from snowballing into being unstoppable in any game that lets you upgrade your units and carry them between missions. Tahira's leveling for veteran units is about as weak as it can be, and you can still carve out a substantial advantage with it.
- Like most games that are actually hard, the number of viable strategies ends up being pretty small, and the skill window between how well you need to play to survive and optimal play narrows. In Tira 1, you are against something like 1 to 10 odds. Which seems pretty rough, until you figure out how to exploit ambushes and can breeze through it while barely taking a scratch. This is interesting here, since the devs keep adding new mechanics through the final battle, but it never really gets to the point where full exploitation will trivialize encounters. I'm not sure how sustainable this will be in future chapters, since what usually happens is that mechanics get combined in ways the system designers didn't anticipate, and the aforementioned window between passable and optimal shoots open.
Then again, I somehow managed to miss this news item when it was first released so it's the first time I hear about this game. And most people care much less about supporting indie releases than me, lol. I'd probably gave them a spin, but uh, it's too late - too much other releases ahead.
