Will you still be so eager to charge into battle if death means sitting on the sidelines watching your partner play alone? Will you work together to bring the enemy down, but then fall out when it comes to dividing up the magic weapons? When you only have control of one or two characters, it’s interesting to note how quickly your attitude to risk in the workplace changes. You just slip easily into the pages, letting the story carry you along.Īnd that’s before we get to the multiplayer mode, thoroughly road-tested by myself and Tifo’s Alex Stewart in the interests of professionalism. It’s all so intuitive that you don’t even notice yourself playing. It’s like being sucked into a fairy tale. At times it really doesn’t feel like a game at all. Oh god, why am I crying? It’s supposed to be just a game.īut it isn’t just a game. Later, the surviving team-mates will have the chance to bury them, saving their memory into the game. ![]() Or they might opt to die in a blaze of glory, dealing out extensive damage to the enemy that brought them down. They might lose a leg or an eye, they might take a permanent hit on their health. Each has one opportunity to fall back and live to fight another day. Every transformation made him more powerful, but I worried that if he became a full wolf he might run off into the forest forever or, worse still, maul one of us if we opened a packet of biscuits.īecause the characters feel so alive, it makes it so much worse when they die. In another game, one of my characters made a pact with an ancient god that saw him slowly turn into a wolf, limb by limb. In one game, the daughter of two of my original heroes joined up with the squad and I found myself feeling oddly paternal, sending her off with a senior hero to level up in relative safety while her parents took on the harder missions. Storylines stretch out for decades, allowing your characters to age (if they’re lucky enough to survive that long) pair up and have children. And after a handful of rounds, you’re sucked in emotionally invested in the fortunes of your characters. And what dialogue! It’s engaging and evocative, it’s funny and it’s poignant. You can play the same scenario multiple times and see different dialogue on every occasion. They all have individual traits that affect the storyline. But these characters are only two dimensional in a visual sense. Your heroes are two-dimensional cutouts with a hand-painted look, which might seem odd until you see the way they slot seamlessly into the unfolding comic book adventure that wraps itself around every battle. ![]() For starters, it’s as beautiful as a picture book. ![]() What marks this game out from any other XCOM-inspired offering is… well… everything. They can level up, find powerful weapons or be stricken with curses. Your characters can take different paths, becoming warriors or hunters, or even mystics granted the power to infuse everyday objects with magic and turn them into weapons. Move and hide? Move and fire? Move and move to cover more distance? Move and prepare an ambush? Over time, and for an emotional price, you’ll learn the right answers. You have some characters, you have a small arena, there are some baddies and each character has two “actions” a turn. The basics of the game are simple enough, indeed some of you may have played the XCOM games from which this draws inspiration. ![]() Not 4-4-2 tactics, but outflank the bastards, pin them down with arrows and infuse that tree with magic, turning it into a howling maelstrom of wood that tears their flesh asunder tactics.Īnd rightly so because this is a bit special. It’s a beautifully written, turn-based role-playing game (RPG), which essentially means it’s a bit like a board game that’s come to life. Because it’s like cultivating a golden generation of youth academy graduates, but then sending them off to save the world, watching anxiously as they fight monsters, fall in love with each other and invariably die horrible deaths.
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