Gem Wizards Tactics

Brilliant Evergreen Design! First and foremost, *learn the rules*. there is a slight learning curve to this. Because it looks and smells like most tactics games, you might think that your primary action will be whacking enemies until their hitpoints hit zero and they disappear. While you technically can do this, you will almost certainly lose! That's not what this game is about. If you take the time to learn the abilities, learn about positioning and flanking, terrain effects, and the "stack pushing" mechanisms, you will quickly become invigorated by the possibility space. Also, the objective isn't to just wipe out the enemy. The objective is to capture flags and satisfy the win condition. Enemies are only a *part* of the tactical/strategic arc. Once you factor all of this in, the brilliance of this tactics system will reveal itself. It's been reported that this game is a bit thin on the content and the story campaign. I don't personally mind this, and what content is there is hilarious and charming. Besides, as I said, once you learn the rules, playing a match of this game is like a game of solitaire or chess. it never gets old. The game is obviously being supported and patched constantly. I'm sure it'll only get better with time. Truly. Pay once, play forever. A must-buy for those who love tactics games!

Not "great on Deck!" It should not be marked as such. This game doesn't have controller support. The devs last year said they were trying to add controller support, which is a "huge task." But the task is done! The game has been ported to consoles, where presumably it has controller support. The fact that controller support was created, but never backported to the PC version is disappointing. Why do devs do this? No cloud saves, either, apparently. This is to encourage players to replay the awful unskippable tutorial. Why? Why make a tutorial you can't skip?

A step back from into the breach, a step forwards from advance wars/wargroove.

Do NOT buy this game to play it on Steam Deck. There is no controller support. It should not have the verified badge. I'm sure it's a fun game if you have a mouse and keyboard. The designer has a lot of great ideas!

A real good effort that'll get there with time and with enough updates. The campaign mode has just the right length (9 missions gives you ample time to build up your units, but it's short enough that you can complete a run in an hour), but there being only one mission type (capture X amount of flags), coupled with the infinite reinforcements mechanic (which itself is not a problem since the game gives you warnings and time to prepare) means that the ways you tackle the maps are similar. Derby's story (which was added after release, from my understanding) added "Kill all enemies" objectives, which could be cool to include in the campaign somehow! That and different mission types (Defend your flags for X amount of turns maybe, or engage in a property race with the AI à la Advance Wars) would greatly reduce the repetitiveness. Each faction has unique units, and the campaign is all about mixing and matching different combinations together to make the best force possible. And this is fun! There's something very satisfying about getting a convoy of trucks and bulldozers together to push three enemies off the map at the same time. Or setting half the map on fire with the Business Demons. Or just something as simple as using the ice cream truck unit to refill a unit's action points to capture a flag in one turn. There's lots of combinations to mess around with, which is good, because your squad of 5 to 8 is almost always outnumbered. This, again, is good! I was pleasantly surprised by the difficulty curve here (ranges from ranks 1 to 20). I do think most of the difficulty (at least early on in campaigns) can be a bit RNG-based (if your first map has the neutral units tucked in a corner somewhere, or if mountains prevent you from pushing people off, etc), but for the most part this is a challenging but fair experience. With that said, after 6 hours and numerous campaign runs with every faction, I feel like I've seen most of what the game has to offer. The samey maps, the same objectives, the unit roster, all of it is a bit limited -- considering the fact that this is a one-man dev team, this is very impressive. I also encountered some bugs that hampered the experience; sometimes a bulldozer unit would get bumped and appear on one spot on the map visually, but be located elsewhere; and by the end I couldn't complete a campaign without having units from a previous campaign show up and trigger the game's cheat detector, preventing any progress towards my achievements. I would recommend the game but there's probably not enough stuff in there for 50 hours of content. Grab it on sale, or if there's a big content update (which will assuredly come).

A very fun and charming game that's fit for anyone who's a fan of tactics games. I especially love the environmental mechanics (e.g. casting lightning to a river to electrocute anyone in the water). The only real flaw I can think of is that the game is a bit buggy and likes to softlock. At the time of this review there's a bug where the game can just randomly lock up after an enemy attacks. Thankfully it seems the developer is actively working on this game and bugs seem to be quickly fixed after cropping up, so don't let that deter you from playing this game! Edit: It seems Steam is saying product refunded still, despite me repurchasing this game so don't let that confuse you any. Edit 2: Looks like that bug I mentioned was just patched! Goes to show how dedicated this dev is.

Deep interactions among unit abilities and terrain types. I'm having a good time discovering more of the "broken" combos. Great tactics game - very creative!

Excellent tactics game that has a lot going on below the surface. It's fast paced, requires lots of adaptation and improvisation without compromising your plan and all the missions have sense of urgency without feeling unfair. The game keeps throwing you into surprising and seemingly overwhelming but entirely survivable situations, which is my favorite aspect of tactical games.

Gem of a game. Not sure what any negative reviews are moaning about, this game is great value in terms of content. A great side story and 4 unique campaigns should satisfy anyone's tactics itch. Wears its influences from the creator's previous game, Auro, on its sleeve, and that's a good thing. The gameplay is just plain good and extremely varied. Every single unit (and there's quite a lot of them) has a unique set of skills and passives and the bumping mechanic is great for comebacks. Also, the music is great. I would play the business demons for their jammin' tunes if they weren't capitalist pigs.

A charming, light-hearted tactics game with a ridiculous amount of complexity in how units interact. The tutorial and first campaign starts you off with the basics, but nearly every match you're learning new and interesting ways to combine your units powers and positioning. It can be a little frustrating if you're not able to capture the flags as quickly as possible, with the game dragging on but you're in a losing position. Overall though, a refreshingly fun and deep tactics game.