Wizabeasts

Short Version: If you like creature collector games with fun worldbuilding and novel creature designs you can build into a team and grow to overcome all enemies, you'll enjoy this. Varied original designs with characters that you can tell were crafted with care. If you're looking for pokemon fire emblem, you will likely be disappointed by the "tactics" part of this. Wizabeasts sets out to be a creature-collector/tactics hybrid, and while it succeeds pretty strongly at the former, it leaves something to be desired in the latter. As far as being a creature collector is concerned, you have a pretty strong variety of creatures (I wanna say it's at least 50, with 3 stages each + like 10 legendaries?), with no real generic throwaways (e.g. this is a bird, this is a rat, this is a slightly different bird). Pretty early on I saw creatures I wanted on my team, and there aren't any that seem just useless. Unfortunately a lot of the balance is due to movesets being very "samey". It's basically 3 tiers of physical and special attacks of each type. You can mix and match them on the creatures (you get a default set of 4 different elemental attacks each evolution also) but in the end it's pretty simply just "get coverage, use the right stat type". Most creature collectors end up in a similar spot, but this game is on the low end for interesting movesets. The story is fun and the characters are distinct. It has some QoL features that I really enjoy, for example the game has autoheal after each fight. Normally this would make the game very easy, but the trainer battles in this game are balanced around you having a fully healed team each time, so rather than spending a bunch of time running back to the pokemon center every X fights, every fight requires a fair amount of team depth and back and forth. It's nice to have the fights all be engaging, rather than just frustrating when you catch a stray move and have to run back to heal. If you do want that "fight and get worn down experience" then you do have the option to scale how much, if any, you heal back after fighting, and you get bonus money for taking more risk. The tactics portion of this game had a lot of potential. Very little of it is realized. The grand majority of fights come down to wait until enemy team comes in range -> get first attack -> trade blows until someone runs out of creatures. All the arenas are just blank grids (no obstacles), there are no AoE skills (there are a couple skills that "splash" but no real AoE), no positioning skills, no ground targetting or zoning, there's an energy system for allowing you to manipulate turn order but the effects are so minimal that you can't really build around them, you can't kite because you attack after moving, diagonal is 1 move so you can move in a giant square meaning you can't really disengage, you can move freely through enemies and allies so there's no body blocking, every attack is ranged just loses accuracy at range, overall it just feels extremely basic. Artistically the game hits the GBA aesthetic pretty strongly. The pixel animations on the attacks are all well done and distinct, although I do have to say the sprites themselves are just a bit too low res for my taste. The creatures seem so cool and when you encounter their portraits the designs show, but the sprites are so tiny that it's hard to really make out anything a lot of the time. It gets better once your creatures all reach their final stage, but most of the game you're looking at fairly low res and simple sprites. Final pet peeves: There's no combat speed setting, and animations aren't skippable or able to be accelerated. Also the creature cries are quite loud compared to the other sounds in the game, and many of them are harsh on the ears. Overall, if you like creature collectors because of flavor and don't mind mechanics that are pretty straight forward, this is worth picking up. If they make a sequel and flesh out the tactics system (i.e. make it actually tactics combat) it could be something pretty spectacular. The developer said this game was a labor of love and it definitely shows.