Shattered Throne is a game with great core mechanics but sometimes questionable design choices. It's largely inspired by Advance Wars, and it does a good job of capturing a lot of the great fun in those games, but it's also quite ambitious and does a lot of new things to make it stand out.
One of the greatest things about this game is all the different units. First of all, there are three factions that you can play as and they all have their own units. The factions are well balanced, and it's a lot of fun to strategize around their different playstyles. Each of the individual units also has a lot of personality, because they all have unique skills that can give them the edge in certain situations.
The skill system is a great addition to the game, but one problem that can come up here is a lack of clarity. Almost all the skills in the game only take effect on either your phase or your enemy's phase, but there's no indication telling you this! It would be so easy to just put a little icon by all of the skills to signify when it's active, but for some reason it just doesn't tell you at all. There's a similar problem with effects like buffs and debuffs, where you're left wondering exactly how much an effect increased a stat or how long it's going to last or when the effect even takes place.
The campaign in this game is a good length, and it continues to provide new content throughout the whole thing, so I think it's pretty good overall. One ugly flaw to rear it's head here, though, is the difficulty modes. First of all, there are three difficulties: Normal, Hard, and Challenge. However to even play a map on Hard you first have to beat it on Normal, and in order to play a map on Challenge you first have to beat it on hard. I hate this sort of design because it completely ruins the point of having difficulty modes in the first place. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Normal mode is ludicrously easy. Many of the maps provide you with so many resources that you can flat out skip the main mechanic of the map and go straight for a win. I would love to just play Hard to start with, since it's a lot more fun for me, but instead I have to play baby mode first. Ugh.
Challenge mode is even harder than Hard mode (often frustratingly so) and usually adds on an extra condition, like "you can't lose more than x units" or "your units take gradually more damage after x days". I think these extra conditions are really interesting, but I would love to experience them without having to play the same map three times.
As you may have guessed, I really dislike the difficulty modes in this game. Normal mode is balanced terribly, and the other two aren't a whole lot better. Instead of having a bunch of redundant and poorly balanced difficulties, I would have liked to see just one or two really well balanced ones.
Another big feature of this game is the map editor. Just like in Advance Wars you can make your own maps. The editor in this game is obviously very ambitious, since it allows you to set lots of different rules and conditions, and even lets you put in reinforcements like in Fire Emblem. However, there are also several problems with it. One simple one is that you can't drag your mouse to paint multiple tiles, so you'll have to click each and every individual tile if you want to make a big ocean area, for example. The max map size is also only 29x29, which would be too small to fit many of the basic maps of other similar games. Another problem is that you have to set all the win objectives yourself. In Advance Wars' map editor, if you put down an HQ it's automatically a win objective. But in this game even if there's an HQ on the map, you have to manually go into a little window and put in the objective, and on top of that you have to type in a description telling the player what the objective is for some reason. You have to do this for both armies. And even though it might seem obvious that defeating all enemy units would also count as a win, it isn't by default! Just like before, you have to manually add in the win objective AND description, for both armies. And you have to do this every single time you make a map. I think the map editor in this game totally misses what made map creation in Advance Wars so snappy and fun. It's obvious the developer focused on minute customization without giving a thought about the quality of life features that it more desperately needed.
So I've complained about quite a few things here, and rightfully so. Shattered Throne is far from a perfect game. It has this problem where it's just over-designed in a lot of areas. I think if the developer would have just cut back a little and focused more on quality rather than quantity, the game could have been better. But I only complain so much because it's a game worth complaining about. This game has so many unique features like the factions and skills, and others I haven't had time to talk about like upgrading bases and the combo system. It's a game that doesn't shy away from it's roots, but at the same time it's willing to try lots of new things. No matter how many other similar games come out Shattered Throne will always have it's own place and it's own personality. If you're a fan of Advance Wars or Fire Emblem, or strategy games in general, you should pick this up. You'll get lots of great hours out of it.
