Tactics V: "Obsidian Brigade"

recommended for fans of the genre only, otherwise it's rather bland

I'm finding it difficult to get into this game. It looks worse than the 90's games it pays homage too running on a modern emulator, owing to a rendering resolution that is much too low. This is made all the worst by maps that are too busy. It fails to utilize any of lessons learned in UIX in the 30 years since the 90s. On the other hand, the music is great and the sound effects are appropriate. I recommend giving it a try--as my complains are subjective.

One big bummer to me for this game was the class system. There are 13 classes in all and 6 of them are wizards, 8 if you include druid and healer. I kept leveling my soldier expecting to find a cool class and behold there is 1 class past soldier and it's legionnaire, nice job man now you can ride horses. Wow neat. I experienced the same thing with the rogue and archer classes expecting to find something cool, nope. There are no classes that further specialize them like final fantasy tactics/ogre battle/final fantasy tactics advance. That ninja that you saw in the cover art, guess what you can't spec into it, what a tease. With that being said the game mechanics are done decently and it was enjoyable for me to play in the meantime. After reading through the patch notes it's come to my understanding that they are still adding additional classes to the game, this is good. I would hold my money until they release more.

I would recommend to give it a try. The only bugger is the grass coloured purple which makes playing a bit uncomfortable.