Overview:
Voidspire Tactics is a fantasy strategy game in which you control a party of 4 adventurers who get mysteriously teleported into a strange place. You have to figure out why and how you got teleported there, what's going on, and how to escape.
Mechanically, each of your characters has a main class and a secondary class. At the start of the game you have only three classes unlocked--warrior, scout, and scholar. As you gain experience in these classes you unlock new classes. Your characters can switch their main and secondary class any time they are outside of combat.
Characters can use the abilities of both their main and secondary class but only gain experience in the main class. The main class also provides certain static bonuses, such as a bonus to casting spells of certain elements or a bonus to fighting with certain weapons, a movement speed bonus, a dodge bonus, etc. Experience is used to buy new abilities in the class it is earned in. In addition to active abilities, you can also buy passive abilities, and characters can equip up to 3 passive abilities at a time from any classes where they have purchased the passive ability (even if that class is not currently a primary or secondary class for them). Finally, you earn *s, which can be used to raise the base stats of your character (skill with weapons, movement speed, skill with magic, etc), and these bonuses stick with you regardless of your class as well.
The heart of the game is fighting and exploring, though there are some light elements of puzzle solving as well.
The Good:
The central mechanics here are fun and reasonably difficult even on the normal level, with a bunch of harder difficulties available for those who like a real challenge (and some easier difficulties as well, though I don't know that this game will appeal to people who just want to play through on easy for the story). The AI is pretty good, and discovering and unlocking new classes and abilities happens at a fair rate throughout the game. Later enemies have a decent array of abilities, will use healing items, will spread out to avoid AoE, and will just generally play like pretty smart opponents, even on the normal AI level (and the AI level can also be adjusted independently from the difficulty level).
By the time you've unlocked everything, the game is nearly over and you have just enough time to pick an end game build for your party and start working on it a little before you're fighting the last boss. As a result, the game feels long enough without overstaying its welcome.
There is also a lot to discover in this game. Items can be combined with each other to create new items, the environment can be interacted with in various ways, there is a good variety of different possible class builds (though some classes seemed pretty weak to me), and there are quite a few ways to mold the terrain so you can, in some cases, avoid battle or skip over parts of the game through clever use of rope, pickaxes, and other environment traversal objects. There is also some basic crafting in the game, and a nice variety of weapons that feel meaningfully different from each other, as well as quite a few secrets for those who explore carefully.
The Bad:
The UI is pretty barren and lacks helpful elements to organize your item stash, and the graphics and sound are both very basic. There is a story, but there isn't much to it. The balance feels a little off, with some classes not being especially useful compared to others. The flip side of there being a lot to discover is that the game does not always explain its mechanics very well, which may be frustrating for some players.
The Bottom Line:
This game won't be for everyone, but if you enjoy old school pixel graphics games and are a fan of tactical combat, it's worth the time and money.
