Tactics V: "Obsidian Brigade"

This game is definitely a FFT-like. Other games I consider to be in this genre are Final Fantasy Tactics (of course), Voidspire Tactics, Fell Seal, Alvora Tactics, and God's War (which I have not played but probably will). Pluses: 1) The graphical style is crisp and evocative. I know it will rub some people the wrong way, but I appreciated the artistry of it. 2) They do a better job of presenting character's status effects and changing gear on their model than a lot of games of this genre do, where the weapons sometimes shift around on the character model but that is about it. 3) I think the underlying structure of mixing and matching components of the different classes is a really good idea. While I think there are things that make it fail to reach its full potential, it seems like it would be worth investigating in a more job system. 4) The main story is solid enough, though it feels like it is taking a few story points from FFT, I don't see that as a problem at all. 5) It has mounts! Though these mostly just seem to extend movement range 6) I like the time/turn order system they use, though I admit it is not particularly novel. Minuses: 1) There is a limited number of classes with a deep ability pool. This in of itself is not that big of a deal, but one of the appeals of the FFT-style RPGs is having a variety of builds to put together, and this kind of limits the breadth of that tinkering. This would also not be that big of a deal if it was not for .... 2) The class abilities really aren't that interesting. They are mostly just variations of do damage and apply status effects to the enemies and higher-level versions are basically just the same spell with slightly different damage or aoe or time usage. You don't have any of the creative abilities or ones that really take advantage of the tactical space like you see in Fell Seal (to a lesser extent) and Voidscape 3) It feels like one of the elements is generally more powerful than the other, because of higher base damage, and that the most common enemy type in the game seem to lack any elemental immunities so it just makes the other elements weak outside of specific battles. 4) The game is lacking a certain level of polish. This is not me saying the graphics are bad. I think they are perfectly acceptable and consider them to be a plus (as noted above), but there are things that make me wonder how much proofreading they did or if they had anyone who came in and look at it from a design perspective. There are also a lot of things that are very not clear. I was able to meander my way through it by watching someone else play it on YouTube and just knowing how to play FFT-style games. 5) The environments of the battle maps aren't that interesting. There is some variation, but there was no real reason to take advantage of the terrain. The game just ended up being about positioning in relation to enemy’s threat range and managing timing. 6) Gear is not that interesting either. There are very few choices, and the limited number of stats that they use for gear leaves them just being kind of dull. Now I am "only" 11 hours in. It is possible some of these things become more interesting over time, but up to this point I am disappointed and probably won't play it much longer if it at all. It is especially painful because there was a lot of potential in the system, and that drove me well past the two hour return time that Steam offers. I feel like the game could have been a lot better with sharper jobs, but unfortunately that is not the game we got.

The 1990's are back! Old school tactical rpg like they used to be, with a few modern twists! Follow the story through a series of nodes (24+ hours), travel freely on the world map (with random encounters) or even get back to locations you already cleared for some extra xp and loot. During battles you can rotate the camera and even switch to a top down view (my favorite), you can also speed up animations to play at your own pace. Multiclassing to learn complementary skills (either active or passive) and weapon masteries allow for multiple unit builds. Training allows your units to fight against each other to gain xp (Training can also be AI controlled so you can learn how the AI proceed with x unit type). A fun ride!

I thought this may be fun but it is extremely annoying having to double confirm everything. Move your guy, confirm. Attack, confirm. Face end direction, confirm. Half the game is spent confirming, very, very annoying.

Update from 2021: So a bit seems improved since I last played but, ultimately, this game still falls short. It's a very, VERY luke-warm "yes" that is more of a "maybe". It's "Okay." WAY too few jobs to unlock/train with relatively little interesting. Item selection seems slim, with "magic and rare items" being nothing more than a mace that adds a fire DoT and a poison dagger type stuff, very boring. The "writing", and I use that term generously, is frankly horrible. It's like someone wrote the synopsis of the story/dialog and nobody bothered to.. do anything else with it. Example: Walk in on a lady about to be shanked by assassins, old guy named Gerald runs out from a house complaining that she isn't dead yet. Player's unit: "Are you sure you want to kill your wife, sir?" Gerald: "Hm. No, I've changed my mind." Gerald's wife: "Oh Gerald... we can wor-" *Assassins shank her anyways.* Gerald: "NO! I changed my mind! Oh, why!" .. compelling stuff. "Flavor" dialog that pops up occasionally when casting spells is supremely bland, literally stuff like "Soak you to the core", for EVERY water spell. And "I summon flames" for fire-based. Gold count-up at the end of battle is really slow and can't be skipped. Units that dual wield attack twice but their first attack triggers a counter.. as does their second. Causing them to be one-shot by stronger enemies, and also preventing a double-backstab against ANY foe with counter. Kinda silly. A lot of the game just feels a LITTLE clunky - if it had more spirit to it, more interesting classes, well written dialog, etc., it could easily outshine the clunk.. but without that, it's just a luke-warm "decent-ish." I'm gonna have to give this one a "Yes" but with a bit of a caveat. In short - this is the most Final Fantasy Tactics-y thing I've played in a while - frankly this beats out Fell Seal as well, in my opinion. The art style for this game is far more pleasing (though, frankly, the animations of both are a bit ehh, but not a deal breaker.) There's a good bit of clunkiness, to be sure. What's more, the writing/dialog is a definite "flat"-ness to it - sorry dev, I hate to say it, and I know it's a small team, but this is a bit of a killer. This game is clearly going for a pretty serious-ish FFT route, which is great, but a wizard saying "I summon fire at you" without any embellishment just makes the text for spells feel a bit wonky rather than add some neat flavor. This same issue crops up a lot pretty early in - the first couple exchanges between characters after the first few battles had a similar "eeuggh" feel to some of the dialog. BUT with that said.. I still recommend this game to anyone who is pretty keen on Tactics-style games. First off, there is none of that "all player units go and then all enemy units go" thing that drives me freaking nuts. Battles become frantic dogpiles, not tactical, and this game does that right. An hour or so in, which is early for this game to be sure, units don't hit too hard not too soft, no immediate annoyance of ridiculous sponges of HP, etc. This is a huge breath of fresh air after the recent Fire Emblem release of one-shot-everything-on-hard-or-be-one-shotted that is oddly well received, but that's just me I guess. Look at this game like Voidspire Tactics - could be better, hopefully the developer will do so after this one and improve!

I am not exaggerating when I say that this game is an ABSOLUTE MUST-HAVE for any Tactics fan. You are guaranteed to like/love this if you have ever played and enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Shining Force, Fire Emblem, Vandal Hearts, Front Mission, Disgaea, Jeanne D'Arc, etc. The visual style is obviously not for everyone, but it works out perfectly, given its bold intent: Old-school pixel graphics fused with great 3D cel shading; along with perfect, logical menus presented by simple, ancient-looking PC text, which only adds to the sweet style. To all Tactics fans on Steam, if you buy this AND Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, you're likely to be knee-deep in dopamine-inducing goodness.

I'll update the review once I've put more hours into this, but so far I can say the combat system is good, the UI a bit heavy and unnecessarily hard to navigate (double confirm is a drag, you won't move to the last item in the menu if you press "up", you need to go down all the list), but still worth playing. I hope to see more updates to Tactics V in the future. I appreciate this running native in Linux, my OS of choice.

I played very little, but I will say that it works...meaning that it functions as a 3D strategy role playing game. Anything that comes close to Final Fantasy Tactics is a good thing, and this one comes pretty close. The battles play out on a 3D battlefield. Attacking from behind or to the side of enemies causes more damage. Elevation makes a difference in attacking. Enemies know when to run and heal and when to stay and attack. Strategy is definitely required to beat battles. The game runs pretty smooth. Graphics aren't great, but the animations look nice. If I had to rate this, I'd give it a solid 85 out of 100.

wonderful tactic game, if i could make a video-game i think it's what i would have done

A very solid FFT-like with a slight case of indie game syndrome when it comes to the polishing. I enjoyed the heck out of it and the dev is *impressively* responsive on the steam discussion forums (they improved keyboard controls within 15 minutes of me requesting it) so this is definitely something that deserves your money. Two thumbs up for this dev! That said, there is still some polishing that could be done. I would argue this also held true for all the official FFT games, which had balance problems way worse than this game has, but I'll list my gripes below: There are a few typos and some just plain weird dialogue at times. Some dialogue choices (like the ones about your character's faith) were so random that I have no idea whether the answers affected the story in the end. UI animation pacing and sound effect levels are a bit weird at times (especially the fade-in to the battlescape takes too long, and the sound of footsteps is too high), but animations can be turbo'd and sound effects can be muted, which is very welcome. The last boss is susceptible to crowd control effects, so a team of level 15s who couldn't hit the boss with physical weapons instead just sat waiting for the mages to finish off the level 30 paralyzed boss. Made even more hilarious by Auto-Meditate and Auto-Concentration, but in fairness it takes a lot of investment to get that combo up and running so it's understandable that it's a bit broken. It'd be nice if there was something like the Darkest Dungeon solution to stuns; applying a paralysis effect could also apply a buff that increases resistance to paralysis, so that chaining paralysis doesn't solve all your problems. Sometimes the keyboard controls act weirdly, and I once had to reboot the game when the mouse and keyboard controls on the deployment screen just flat out refused to do anything. The game was clearly designed with a controller in mind. I could never figure out how to actually *use* the mounts I bought, despite loading screen tips warning me that I might not always want to.

[h1] <-- Review written for [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35180752/] 3 Point Play [/url] --> [/h1] First of all, forgive my playtime. I was playing like a madman, then got called to do something, had to close the game, ended up bugging it and now I can't play anymore. I have a 1440x900 monitor screen, and while I was trying to click the Fullscreen/Windowed button in the Main Menu, I bugged it out, and now I can't play any longer heh. So, review will have to be about my first impressions, experience I had with the game. Now, when it comes to tactics games, the only one I played was pretty much Fallout: Tactics, and to some extent, some more modern ones with a different approach, like Xcom and Valkyria Chronicles. I also played some Fire Emblem on a GBA emulator, one of the old ones. Other than that, I've never played FFT or other essentials from the TRPG world. We received this one on the curator, and I got around to playing and getting info for a review. While the presentation might not be as appealing, even if it's really good quality pixel-art, the gameplay itself is really solid, and I had a lot of fun with how much I've played. The mechanics, specially when it comes to casting, were really nice as well, I like the fact that a Mage has to "Concentrate" for a turn before he's able to cast spells, and in order to do this, you can either, choose the spell you're gonna be casting and the game will proc it in 2 turns (1 concentrating turn, and 1 cast turn) or you can actually Concentrate yourself on 1 turn, and then instacast the spell the next turn. Really good stuff. When it comes to the core aspects of the game, I feel as they were not properly explained enough, and they can be really confussing if you don't come from a heavy TRPG background, I found myself wondering where did all the experience points I'm supposedly getting were actually going to. Another thing I liked a lot was how the characters change depending on what things they have equipped. This is usually a staple on most tactical RPGs I've played, and I'm really glad they added it here as well. When it comes to customization, this game really shines: you can customize your characters' classes, equipment, techniques and skills, in order to do something that fits your playstyle. The story itself seemed interesting as well, but sadly, since I bugged the game, I might not be able to experience it for the time being. If you have a monitor with 1440x900 resolution, you might want to wait for a patch or a fix. While this is a pretty rare resolution, I'm surprised a lot of games do have issues with it. In fact, I don't even know what happened, since I was playing Fullscreen before I click that Full Screen/Windowed button on the main menu. Well, that's basically it. I'll update if the game receives a fix for this issue, and will surely add more information as well. Stay tuned!