I watched some gameplay footage, and, frankly, those animals are stupid. Is there an option to get rid of them, because that seriously turns me off and keeps me from purchasing.
There was a political strategy game a couple of years ago centered on animals, but it wasn’t supposed to be set in the real world. Make one or the other, but combining the two just doesn’t work, in my opinion.
Yep, that was Political Animals. A pretty good game.
Apparently that’s been addressed.
"1.10 (Khrushchev Update)
AI
Dang, good on them.
Godot is awesome, no doubt. ;)
I’ve been waiting for more developers to start using it.
Well done.
Found this one-
Puzzle matching tetris style plus dungeon keeper? Lots of great user reviews. I’m this close to buying…
I liked Tomb of Tyrants, but what I realized after I was done with it (~6 hours) was that my unlocking progress had stopped because I never restarted from scratch to build fresh configurations. I don’t know if that was a failure of the game design or tutorials or my misunderstanding leading to a dead-end strategy. I enjoyed the puzzle play but would end up spamming combos and items without making progress on the strategy layer. It was accessible to pick up and play, but also opaque. Knowing that now, TOT may be a more interesting game than I initially grasped.
I picked this up and have been playing it a bit. Playing on Veteran (which is what it called the level encounters were designed for), there is a lot of customization on difficulty.
The game is okay. The difficulty has ramped up quite a bit, and it seems like they expect you to grind or … something. I’ve looked at the steam boards and haven’t quite come to grips with what the suggestions are yet, though I haven’t spent much time trying to figure it out.
There are over 20 classes. A class consists of several skills, 2 passives and 1 counter. Each character has a primary class, which uses the skills and passives of that class, a secondary skill set, 2 secondary passives and a counter which can be from any class that you’ve leveled for that character. “Mastering” a class, meaning you unlock all the skills, provides some permanent stat bonuses. Each mission you can take 6 or 7 characters, but you can have many benched characters. There is also two different experience systems, one for your character level and one for skill acquisition.
Only a couple classes are available at start, and then others unlock for the character as it levels. For example, the Knight class unlocks when you reach Mercenary level 3. So, the way I’ve been playing is to master a class and then switch to another to master that one in order to open up more options.
I’m not particularly enjoying this aspect though. Partly because it doesn’t feel like I know what I’m doing, so maybe this is on me… Each arena has a minimum and maximum level range, and for the first 5 or 6 battles, I was keeping up with the minimum. But now I’ve fallen behind, and I’m only using 7 total characters, so it isn’t because I’m spreading too thin. This is why it feels like I’m expected to grind (you can replay or “patrol” arenas for additional battles).
The battles and tactical options are interesting, but I feel like I need to sit down and actually plan the character builds out before I start playing. I’m not sure I’ve got the patience to do that though. I suppose I could just drop the difficulty, but…
I’ve never played FF Tactics, so can’t provide any type of comparison there.
I also spent several hours with Fell Seal over the weekend. If you do have prior experience with FF Tactics or Tactics Ogre, and come in expecting something very similar to those mechanically that misses a good chunk of the magic but is overall pretty decent, well, you’ll be getting what you expect!
A few notes in addition to what @Effidian mentioned:
If a character dies during combat, they get injured, which is a stat penalty until they sit out a combat. It’s a decent compromise mechanic that takes away the risk of permanently losing a character, and also encourages you to rotate your team at least a bit.
As far as the battle mechanics go generally, it’s very FFT, but it does have a few differences; whether those were design decisions or just left out, I’m not really sure. There don’t appear to be LoS restrictions on ranged weapons, is the most immediately obvious, and height isn’t as much of an advantage as I expected.
The stat system seems pretty opaque and I’m not sure if I’m really leveling up my characters optimally. I mean, I’m doing what’s intuitive, so I might be? It’s just harder to tell than I’d like. Not a big issue so far as the difficulty (on Veteran) has been pretty well paced (for me).
My biggest issue is mostly that it plays a bit slow. Maybe just because I haven’t really been grinding, but the optimal way to handle recent battles has more and more been a very cautious approach with buffing and healing and inching forward to focus the team’s fire. That is probably tactically correct… but there was always something fun about building a character that just wrecked faces or shrugged off every hit, and having them run around aggressively.
I do like the class system well enough, though again, it’s basically the FFT setup with about 80% of the awesome. The story is also… functional.
Would definitely recommend if you’re thirsty for something new in this specific niche and don’t need it to be Perfect and Amazing (hi, that’s me!). Anyone who hasn’t played either FFT or Tactics Ogre should be spending the time on those first, for sure.
Everyone is saying stuff like “if you like FFT it’s okay” which is actually not sufficient for me to throw down my cash money and time, but I do appreciate your candor.
personally, as someone who’s liked FFT and played many related games both on consoles and handhelds I think it’s much more than okay, it’s one of my favorites.that said, especially harder difficulty levels this is not a game that you can win by simply nuking and one hitting everything, varies the bus encounters become very important. I actually think it’s less grindy than FFT and I like the fact that the story characters don’t obsolete the generic ones.
Since a few of you are playing Fell Seal. . .
Does it have some kind of level-scaling for the story encounters? I love FFT, but last time I played I found the majority of the story missions to be pushovers past a certain point, excluding those that had you defending some character that immediately ran into the fray (the one on the rooftop with the demon assassins or whatever). At the same time, I’m not really in the mood for something that requires tons of grinding with a brutal difficulty level. It sounds like maybe the difficulty settings might make this irrelevant though. Also, how novel is it compared FFT and Tactics Ogre? If it’s a near-complete retread, I’d probably just be more inclined to replay one of those.
Oh, and a related question: I think I have confused/conflated Fell Seal with some other in-development FFT-alike whose name I can’t recall, but I think it had something to do with blood and was maybe being developed by a team in Indonesia or Malaysia. Anyone have an idea what I’m talking about?
It is very much FFT, in fact, it’s so much like FFT, all the same things will piss you off.
Fell Seal is a really well made game, and it is very much FFT. I liked it quite a bit at the start, but now it’s starting to really wear on me. There is certainly some grinding to be done, but gear upgrades are locked behind location unlocks, and those require you to pass certain fights. The relative power of the classes isn’t as easy to cheese as it was in FFT, where you could turn a monk into a solo death machine basically at the start of the game if you wanted to power level long enough.
A good game that didn’t learn anything from the frustrations that FFT suffered from.
Maybe this?
Thanks for the effort, but that wasn’t it. It turns out there are several tactics games with “blood” in the title, but I remember this one’s title being particularly stupid. So, after sifting through Google results for a few minutes, rejecting games whose titles weren’t quite dumb enough, I finally found it! It was Forged of Blood. Still in development, but no blog update since January.
I got through my rough spot. I noticed that my characters were quite a bit different in levels (my healer was double the level that my wizards were for some reason), and that’s what (seemed) to be causing the problem. I went back to search for some treasure that I missed and micro managed the leveling to get everyone back in line.
Given I have no nostalgia for FF Tactics (no PC version), I’m finding the game okay, but not good. I just feel like I’m spending too much time managing leveling. A character levels up every few hits, after every battle I go into the troop menu and pick new skills for all my troops in classes that I’m going to abandon soon because I need to move on to open up the next class. It doesn’t seem to be my cup of tea.
Also the controls are designed for a controller (which I’m using), but this could be done so much easier with correct mouse/keyboard support. Controls feel a bit clunky as a result.
Yes, the difficulty settings let you adjust the level scaling for both story encounters and patrols. As to how it differs from fft, I don’t think the original let you take back moves though maybe some handheld follow ons did? It also feels smoother, with shorter animations. And I don’t think fft had such a range of counters, rebuffs, or movement types, but it’s been a few years since I replayed it so I’m quite hazy on many details.