DR4X

It's a weird but fun game. You can personalize the settings a lot, and it gives you different objectives. Most games tend to be short if you know what are you doing. Edit: Ok the game got really weird I keep hearing whispers now

It's very interesting to play a full 4x game that doesn't take half a day to play. Lots of variation in the gameplay too.

A strategy game where anything can happen. DR4X isn't super tightly balanced, but there are a lot of different factions, and they are doing very different things mechanically. Personally, I love strategy games that are willing to go hands-off and let the experience get a little...weird. I'm also a big fan of the voice acting. It's cheesy, it's campy, and it's fun.

Refreshingly weird strategy game where you don't know what's going to happen. The game is a strange, and I mean that in a good way. It puts a lot of attention into creating an atmosphere that you’re playing a game within a game. There are graphical glitches happening all over the game, words become scrabbled and unreadable, and there’s a feeling that someone’s messing with you. The game also manages to crack a few jokes. You can begin with a skirmish or a campaign. Skirmish allows you to personalize many aspects of the game and play a single combat, although it's not that interesting. That is why you should just pick campaign. This consists of a world map and several symbols representing missions. Because the game follows a plot, most of the levels are locked and must be completed in order. Despite the fact that it borrows heavily from strategy games, the gameplay is extremely simple. Each mission is played out on a hexagonal grid that is generally obscured by fog of war. The grid is made up of numerous terrain tiles that can either slow you down or provide you with height that gives you an advantage in a fight. Each unit has a limited number of action points, so there is a limit to how far you may go in each round. Because unavailable hexagons turn grey, you always know your range. In keeping with the game's vision, there are secrets hidden within missions. It's even feasible to win a mission using an approach known as "unconventional victory." The difficulty, however, is fairly high. When the enemy spots your units, they will launch an all-out assault. It is quite easy to lose the main unit, which is not supposed to be lost. Units and special locations on tiles, such as towns and other structures, have various types of perks. For example, forest creatures ignore forest movement penalty, inns offer recuperation that heals units each turn, rogues have backstab that deals double damage what attacking from behind, etc. You can gain additional perks by searching for treasure chests. Missions are short, so you won't feel like you're wasting time by doing the same thing over and over. You can also save at any moment. While traditional saving works fine, quick save and load have a few issues. The first bug is when you press quick load; the "loading" screen remains over the main menu, preventing you from selecting any option. It can even break the game because I lost all units and the game didn’t want to end. The second bug isn't too severe because you can still play it by utilizing keyboard shortcuts. When you die and quick load, the icon for completing your turn disappears.

This game really sucks you in. I sat down to play for a short while and discovered that two hours had flown by as I was being utterly destroyed in the third scenario (optimistically labelled easy). There is a lot of tactical depth as you have to consider unit type, terrain, positioning and upgrades. You have multiple enemy factions to keep at bay so you need to make sure you're upgrading fast enough and securing your towns and towers before they get recaptured. The graphics are charming and the audio is very atmospheric. Strongly recommended for tactical 4X fans.

I don't get it. Buy it ir the Dev Will never give me My family back

It is really good. Very challenging, needs more missions, but it is in early access so I imagine more will be added.

Mir hat die Stunde keinen Spaß gebracht. Die Geschwindigkeit bei Kämpfen lässt sich nicht steigern, die Übersicht von Werten und Truppen ist für mich einfach schlecht. Es ist schon schwer zu erkennen, welche Mission man im Tutorial machen soll und es kommt einfach keine Lust auf, die Karte zu erforschen.

I wanted to like this game. I tried really hard. This is a poorly designed game (nice to call it weird?) , like an old civ 2 and just spam unit combat without any of the tech, building, diplomacy. UI is horrible and insistant pop ups in the main menu is infuriating with no option to turn any of that off.

So I discovered this game a year or two back. I was searching for something to play on Steam, and on a whim I put the tags of two of my favorite genres together, "4x" and "horror". Horror and 4x. What would that even look like? DR4X seems to be an answer to that question by putting a meta horror story layer over the 4x. [mild spoilers past this point because even I don't entirely know wtf is going on and I have over an hour in this game, but I still want to talk about it] Again, "layer" is an operative word here, because as far as I can tell there are sort of two games here. There's a DOS-esque command-line terminal simulator that seems to have a FNAF style thing going on with a monster, and then the 4X game that you access through this terminal. I'm assuming the two of these probably influence each other in some way, though I haven't figured out how exactly. I've found one clue hidden in a level of the 4X, following it took me to a spooky sequence. Good stuff so far. [end spoilers] The 4X is fun, you can use terrain advantages intuitively with punchy combat despite low fidelity graphics. The game does have an amateur look that will bother some, but I feel like it gets away with it by deliberately using a 90s software influence. Basically every game back then was "indie" and "amateur" because there was no rule book on how to make games. Even the best funded studios were pretty scrappy. The matches are designed to be very short for a 4x. I've only played with the red faction in the campaign so far, but their combat focused playstyle mixed with short play times reminds me of Advance Wars, in a good way. Anyway, I like this game. I read this dev's recent blog entry and I wish him the best, you've got a fan and I'm gonna watch out for whatever you make next. edit: (mild spoilers) I will say that ciphering half of the text is a bit tedious and feels like a bit of a cheap way to make puzzles. Maybe if it happened two or three times that this was necessary but you basically are constantly deciphering in the hopes of finding anything. Only bad thing I have to say so far.