Just saw this game was released this week, and they are running a special half off the first week of sales. Age of Fear is a fantasy turn-based strategy game with interesting scenario combat. I am thinking of picking it up, especially during this sale period and try it out. The combat kind of looks like Warmachine/Warhammer 40k with its movement rules and such.
I took a look at the trailer, I like the movement being more tabletop like, instead of the standard grids or hexes. The game itself looks a bit rough graphically. Do give us a follow up and let us know what you think.
I was in the beta for this. The straight-line-only movement is an interesting mechanic that leads to some tactical possibilities that feel distinct from anything else I’ve played, and it’s got two pretty hefty campaigns. There are a few design decisions I disagree with, and the presentation is fairly rough around the edges, but if you like turn-based tactics games to begin with, you should get your money’s worth out of it.
I got done playing through the demo, a couple of points:
The game is a turn based tactical game with movement somewhat akin to tabletop miniature games. However, movement and combat are combined, so if you target an enemy you move in the closest straight line to that enemy and attack, you can’t move to the flank, face and then attack which is annoying.
Your game is actually a campaign of battles, and your forces are brought forward from one battle to another with recruitment options between. However, there is no information to tell you how many missions there are, how tough anything will be going forward or even how many resources you will have between to rebuild your army. This makes it tough to know if you can just run through a scenario or if you must keep replaying it to minimize losses.
The graphics and sound are definitly lo-fi in quality, but more importantly, they do make it hard to distinguish easily what troops sometimes are which. Skeletons and Skeleton Warriors are drastically different in ability, but so close in appearance it is hard at a glance to see them and the tactical situation easily.
The magic situation is interesting, however your mage can either move and attack, or just cast magic. Not both. If your mage only moves, it can restore mana that turn, but the spells aren’t interesting enough so far. Also, attack spells can fail, but still cost the mana, this could mean that a failed attack could cost your mage a lot in time. Since they couldn’t move that turn, and then would need to hold off on an attack or magic at least one turn or more depending on the mana to recover.
Due to the game’s subject, it is appropriate the thread gets necro’ed.
I’ve had this for a while and finally decided to play it.I think I had it somewhere other than Steam, and then picked it up on Steam when it was on sale.
For an apparently low budget game it’s pretty good. On normal, the battles aren’t too difficult - but do require some thought to be successful. There was one fairly late that was rough. The thing I don’t like about it is that the difficulty is usually raised because of the amount of units that get thrown at you. While you do see progressively more powerful units, your own units are also getting more powerful. Due to the numbers, it starts to get tedious.
Also the long amount of text / spoken dialog is quite painful to get through if you want to keep up with the story. There are sometimes in-game text popups during battles that are very annoying because they aren’t interesting and sometimes it takes many clicks to get them to go away.
Finally, in the human campaign the last battle is BS.
Units have morale and when they get to 0 they flee. They can recover if they aren’t attacked again or you use the hero units battle cry ability. Except, during the last battle with the undead king all of your troops start with 1 morale instead of having a full amount. Also, the battlecry ability doesn’t work in this scenario. This is a royal pain in the butt. Your units flee when they get hit with 1 shot, which just cascades out of control.
I have no doubt there is a way to counter the conditions for the last battle, but I’m not going to bother trying to figure it out because it just isn’t fun. Up until that point it was a decent game (except fore the writing).