Wow, I am surprised by the praise for Battle of Norghan.
I loved almost all of it, except for one thing, which killed it completely - for me - as a management game. My experience was that it was essential to win every single battle in order to have any chance of continuing rather than death spiralling. If you lost a unit during a battle you could maybe recover thanks to income from the battle and surviving units. Lose a battle though, combined with losing units, bang, dead, game over. You could maybe limp into the next battle but with minimal chance of success.
Was your experience very different from this? Or perhaps you could accept this and just play it as a form of linear SRPG with a standard requirement to win every battle?
I would leap at a Battle of Norghan 2 kickstarter. Any chance to take the great parts of this game and adjust the one part, albeit a core part, that I felt missed the mark. Would love to hear different takes on it though!
Your criticisms are valid. It was almost more of a linear run each time and it would quickly devolve into getting wiped once your crew had a loss or two. Some of my praise is certainly nostalgia. The whole competitive battle/level/upgrade train was kinda pure. At the time, it was exactly what I wanted and no other game did that and I still believe few have since. I do think Battle Brothers has sort of the same feel with more of a strategic layer, but you are still basically putting together a team and slowly improving it and fighting increasingly more difficult other “teams”. The Battle of Norghan fights simply ramped up far more quickly. Many games are variations on this in the team management subgenre (XCom, of course), but few strip it down to the core of fighting in the same way.
I tried to put a caveat that it suffered from age, but I wasn’t clear at all as to why. It is not very dynamic and is very basic in its mechanics and purpose. Some games just hit me in the right way and BoN certainly did. I haven’t revisited it in a couple years. I should do that.
Strike Team Gladius thoughts? Might be a good game here, ok …a ‘ok’ game here EXCEPT the font they choose for high resolution monitors is utterly unreadable, i missed around with monitor and game settings for about it for about 20 min before i gave up. Reading anything about the story or tutorial is a no go. Recommendation: Hard pass if you have a high end monitor
For the firs time ever, i requested a Steam refund. Fingers crossed
Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift is a interesting tactical puzzle, as your arsenal grows and your squad grows it gets more complicated, first thing you encounter are mines that do not give you a good idea on the radius you will trigger them. The top down gridless combat is a breath of fresh air, buuuut it doesn’t have tactical depth of building your squad skills or much else of offer than puzzle combat, kind of eh on it. Was hoping for more
Every time someone mentions Solasta I get excited. Then I read comments about how linear it is and my interest wanes again. Linear games walk such a fine line between too easy and min/max hell that I find it hard to shell out any money for them.
I finally got around to this and it’s pretty good! The translation is definitely rough (machine translated from Korean)—but the roughness is mostly clumsy dialogue; it’s still clear what’s going on and honestly probably not as bad as you’d expect—and some aspects of the game are arcane and poorly documented with very little online about it in a language I can read. However, I’ve played about 25 hours the past few weeks and mostly enjoy it. It sort of reminds me of Disgaea in that it could be super grindy if you wanted it to be, but grinding would seriously through off the balance. Like Disgaea, I’ve mostly focused on doing the story missions and character side quests and found no real need to grind, but it’s certainly there if that’s something you’re keen on.
With Phoenix Point new expansion Ive been itching to try coming out at the end of the month, this is turning to be a awesome but crowded month for me for party based rpgs.
I did just get my notice of layoff, so yay? time I guess
Did a search and this is kinda the only thread where I got a solid hit on this and thought I’d resurrect the thread to call out that Cyber Knights is out in three weeks:
This wasn’t on my radar, thanks for posting. The execution needs to be seen but I like the theme and heist aspects. That this is a sequel means hopefully they have already made the easy to make mistakes and this will be solid.
