Getting back to this- I did actually pick up a Surface Dock 2 locally off FB marketplace, and now have it hooked up to my TV, so I’ve been kicking back on the couch with this the last few days. As mentioned earlier, gamepad support is excellent, so that helps.
Picking it up where I left off, I was initially a bit disappointed- Fights were repetitive and frustrating. Then a few things changed- first, I started evolving my dudes into higher classes- I was wary of doing that for a while since that basically resets them, but damn, their added abilities really change the flow of battle. And then I started to pay more attention to what was actually happening, and the way the mechanics worked, and it all clicked. Why are these Bog Trolls so frustrating to fight? Oh, every time you hit them, they are promoted in turn order. and every time they hit you, you’re demoted. And now I’m playing with abilities that just manipulate all that stuff, and things get interesting.
Cool game. I also recently grabbed Wildermyth, which seems like the mirror image of design- a rpg/tactics game that is light on the combat systems, but has a neat narrative system. I really want to dig into that, but the siren song of just one more fight keeps me in this one.
I remember not evolving my goblins for a while too because the standard ones can be so versatile but, yeah, the new classes and ability synergies totally transform the game (and the battlefield, haha). Wait till you see some of the later ones! Man, what they bring to the table is exciting.
I think I also went through that ‘repetitive’ stage early on as well, mostly because I went exploring instead of doing the main quest (so lots of fighting with your bog standard gobbos) and, really, the game builds exploration/getting lost into the main loop so I was just kind of disrupting the natural flow of the game unnecessarily.
Yeah, the whole promote/demote thing is a vital part of combat and it’s remarkable how much depth it adds to each encounter. Like, if I hit this guy as hard as I can, can I kill him before it’s his turn? Can I keep these enemies demoted until my entire party has taken their turns? When you start folding all the elemental stuff in there it’s such a great tactical sandbox.
Arise Thread! This is no longer true! Or, at least it won’t be in a few days. It turns out, after several years, this is getting a Switch/XSeries release (no Playstation) on Feb 21. I played through it on my ancient laptop with seriously degraded visuals/performance a couple years ago. Now I’m thinking of double-dipping. It was such a cool little game, with really neat mechanics and visuals.
Now if only Wildermyth would finally make it to the Xbox, I’d have two of my favorite indie PC games in the last several years available.
