Othercide

In short: A bit of a form over function, but nonetheless good turn-based tactics game marred by a lack of content and obtuse presentation. I feel like the recommendation on this could go either way, but I'm saying yes mainly because of the interesting turn-based tactical system. This is basically the system as found in Final Fantasy Tactics or Final Fantasy X, for example. An initiative based fluid turn structure with delayed actions and "casting times". Personally I've always felt this kind of a system is way superior to the usual player-goes-then-enemy-goes system found in most western games. Also just putting this out there: The game is nothing like XCOM, don't be fooled by other reviews. The feel of the game is a bit like a dungeon crawling or boss battler board game. You get a codex outlining the basic AI of the enemies and your main job in a combat is taking advantage of the enemy AI to minimize damage to your units, because healing your units is very difficult and damage is permanent (unless you play on the "dream" mode which gives you autohealing after missions, basically invalidating the point of even playing). So it's kind of like perfect information, and you will learn quite quickly what each enemy does in which situation. I like this a lot. Usually in computer games the enemy AI is just some random opaque ruleset. The only way to heal friendly units is to kill a friendly unit of same or higher level. The unit is not lost forever, however, as you can resurrect them with special tokens. I think the mechanic is okay in itself, but starts feeling a bit dumb when the game also gives you other resources that you basically just hoard because there's no use for them. It does however at least prevent you from leveling one killer squad, because not taking damage is extremely difficult later on, and so the only way to heal them would be with resurrection tokens, which are limited in a run. Without going into too much detail, overall the system can result in quite a grind. Honestly though, if you just play a bit and then restart from the beginning hoarding resurrection tokens, you should be fine. However, if you fail on a boss, it's just game over so... The game's kind of anti-player. But also... You do get to start units on higher levels and after beating enough missions in a chapter, you can simply go straight for the boss after restart. You can even get enough resurrection tokens to bring back most of your best team, so really it's not THAT bad. Where the game kind of falls apart is in content. The game has five "chapters". In each chapter you basically meet enemies from the current and the previous chapter. But already in chapter 3 the chapter 1 enemies will be replaced by simple reskins with better stats. In chapter 3 you already see the enemies from the final chapter. So... Assuming you have to be able to handle them in chapter 3, guess what happens in chapters 4 and 5? Yep, nothing new, you walk over everyone. And that is unfortunately all there is to the game. It's kind of like taking Persona and removing all the plot and social aspects leaving only the dungeons. There's a lot more to say, but... If you want a good tactics game then this is one of those. But be warned, it's intentionally obtuse, you get the bare minimum of information and it feels more like a mobile game than a PC one. Get it perhaps with the intention of playing one or two of the 5-20 minute missions a day, and it should work. As the main game, perhaps not. Bonus points for good boss musics. Oh and also, is it not possible to have grimdark without someone spouting sexual innuendo at me every 30 seconds? At least you can put voice volume to 0.

This is one of the bleakest, most punishing tactics games I've played in years, and I mean that as a genuine compliment, because it commits to that bleakness so completely that it ends up feeling almost beautiful. Every cutscene looks like a woodcut illustration having a nightmare. And regret is kind of the operative word here, because this game is hard. Permadeath is real, missions can spiral out of control fast, and the game has no interest in babying you through a bad decision. I lost entire squads I'd invested hours into and had to rebuild from scratch more than once, and while that stings in the moment, it fits the game's whole philosophy about sacrifice being the price of survival. This isn't a game that wants you to feel powerful. It wants you to feel like you're barely holding the line.

Score: 2/5 I’d rather play Fire Emblem, Suikoden, Final Fantasy Tactics, or Darkest Dungeon. The first three have better solutions for the strong inherent flaws of the grid-based, turn-based combat system than Othercide came up with, with the forth being an example of how I wish this game's combat system had been designed: gridless. Note that some of these titles are more than 25 years old, and that the issues are difficult to address. 1. Audio/sfx/music are all good to great, excluding the VAs. 2. Art style/direction is solid, right up my alley. It’s stylized, and uses a fairly unique color pallete of white/black/red, so it should hold up over time. 3. Writing is very hit and miss. The setting/worldbuilding is good. It’s a few analogies/metaphors mixed together to form an ambiguous but tragic tale about loss, sacrifice, hope, and perseverance. But then it tries forcefully hard to be emotionally engaging with its ungrounded, overly emotional and poetic writing. The voice actors do a good job selling it with the character monologues, but the writing doesn’t hold water. I was mentally engaged for about 15 minutes, and then it was gone, never to return. This was partially due to the bad combat system that is a core part of the introduction of the story/characters, which may have needed to be pushed back further for the atmosphere/tone of the story to be better established first. Not that the writers could have pulled it off with the better setup. 4. Combat is the core gameplay system/activity and it’s a poorly designed version of the system. a. It is too punishing to not be optimization-/meta-focused on the player side, and too artificially sub-optimal on the enemy side to be taken seriously. b. It’s a grid-based, turn-based strategy game with no objectives to capture or bonuses to grab before the enemy, no verticality or high ground advantage, no water or low-ground advantage, no tiles with special effects, no units with very long range or very high movement speed, and few time limits. It rewards turtling/extremely passive play. If both sides played optimally within this system, neither would ever engage first, creating permanent stalemates in all encounters without a time limit (in which case the player’s units would take permanent damage almost every time based on RNG). Playing sub-optimally will result in permanent unit damage or the permanent death of the unit. c. But there’s three twists in Othercide: some encounters have time limits, some encounters have infinitely respawning units that punish passivity, and all the player’s units have the option take two turns at once, unlimited times per encounter, allowing for significantly more opportunities to get an OTK, but with the downside of being vulnerable for a turn by having to skip their next one. Interesting, but the core of the gameplay is a broken foundation to build upon. d. In practice, if you’re trying to optimize, even if you’re not perfect, melee enemies will walk right up to your melee units and end their turn without attacking. And ranged enemies will almost always either move without attacking, or will set up a delayed attack that is easily interrupted/cancelled. 5. Story/Character progression requires too much grinding/repetitive content, including multiple story restarts to unlock meta character upgrades each time. This system is very well integrated into the story/setting.

Какой-то театр имени феечек Вингс для депресушных нетакусиков. Пытаются выдавливить драму из каждого хода. В целом обычная TBS, просто откровенно недоделанный дизайн попытались обратить в "это типа стиль". Получилось НЕОЧЕНЬ. На протяжении часа было ощущение, что вошёл не в ту дверь.

Movement and Attack menu is a bit clunky and the preview of the moving units when comparing with the enemies movement range needs some improvement but the game is really cool, aesthetics is appealing and the daughters management its a nice change. Really good but starting this game will be rough if not costumed to this genre.

very fun and creepy. love the settings and visuals and music.

蛮小众的游戏 但是可玩性还是不错的

Game does not work because of language settings and the didn`t fix it. Do not buy this game if you don`t use english.

50/50, скорее понравится любителям пошаговых стратегий, а для меня это была первая такая игра, да еще и в перемешку с типа рогаликом куча грайнда есть, и это не так легко как в хейдес к примеру и игра в правду душная после третьей эры но нормас, на крепкую 7