It Stares Back

I randomly found this little gem while browsing but boy am I glad that I did. Let me start with the gameplay. It Stares Back is a rather streamlined strategy experience, providing you four types and two types of buildings. Tactics wise there is not much to write home about as it usually consists out of mashing your ball of units into the enemy blobs of (actual blob) units. The units themselves cost nothing but instead become available again once they die after a short 'cooldown'. The maps are designed quite well and enviromental hazards force you to make smart movements otherwise your poor grunts get eaten up by terrain before you get a chance to smash them into some blobs. Now for the rest. The very first thing the game will do is throw some absolutely amazing cutscenes at you. The voice acting is stellar and the music is goddamn spot on. While the experience is rather short, I played through the prologue in about 2 hours which included several retries on that one goddamn level, ...

It's hard to review a $6 RTS because I don't want to use expensive classics for comparison, that being said, I think the game is very creative and shows some promise. According to the EA notes, the game is going to have some degree of RPG elements for the hero, which as far as I can tell is still missing from the game. Right now the biggest problem is the lack of decision making, the game simply does not provide enough variety to make tactical choices - mostly you just spam your way to victory. Even if I completely hated the gameplay and its mechanics, the story in this game is very captivating and could potentially justify a full playthrough. All of the characters are very interesting, and the voice acting is much better than you would expect from such a cheap title. Not to mention that I have never seen a game with this kind of art style, I think it looks very cool, and its weird soundtrack does a good job complementing the world. The gameplay does not compare to a traditional RTS...

This game is the definition of a hidden gem. I mean, how dares it be this good and this cheap? It's got the absolute best sound design, it's tremendously immersive and the guy with the funny head has some great voice acting. It really gets going when the music changes for the last parts of missions. The gameplay itself is great fun, combining the most relevant aspects of macromanagement from RTS with the larger-scale map. Unlike most strategy games, it features assymetric factions. Yours has buildings, resource collecting, training troops, etc, while the enemies are tons of little slimes scattered around the map, with some conditions to attack your base. Your "hero" unit is the only one that can attack their "buildings" to stop enemies from spawning. Unit combat is simplified and works very well. Attack move is always on, units kill and die very quickly and it's very easy to control different unit types and move them around, often to protect your hero guy while he deactivates the e...

Truly a haunting and awesome experience. This game offers beautiful, haunting, and dramatic music that sends chills down your spine, and features amazing visuals to match it. The characters are all unique and full of life, with great voice acting all around. Moving onto actual gameplay, the player controls rapidly growing armies in a top-down RTS manner, and is very unique in that combat is geared more towards swarm tactics rather than formal regiments. This makes for great fun in later parts of levels where 100+ units swarm over the map and smash into other enemy hordes. A good comparison is the combat of the Overlord games, where your minions do most of the combat and heavy lifting, while the player stays back and tries to not get hit. Overall, this game is astounding on all fronts, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the real-time strategy genre, as well as many who aren't! My only complaint is that you will have to wait to get more of this game's wonderful art,...

I'll use the tagline that got ME to buy this game: Command & Conquer mixed with your motherboard's fever dream. The voice acting is absolutely phenomenal and the art is amazing.

I like what's here but, it looks like the game is maybe an eighth of what they intend it be at most and it's been over a year since they have announced the next part of the game with no update to be seen. If they ever finish this game I would recommend it but, in it's current state I would recommend looking elsewhere. You will just be disappointed at where the game currently ends.

I'm going to be honest - I don't really like these 'simplistic' RTS titles as a rule and so I bought this purely for it's aesthetic and my-oh-my is it worth the asking price for that alone. If you like the videos - you'll likely enjoy the game too - I'm glad things like this exist and happy to support the developers!

Was introduced to It Stares Back through the Reddit post they made to advertise it, and instantly fell in love with the artstyle of this game, and was enamoured by the lore weaving together the world it's based in. Cosmic horror, biopunk, and post apocalyptica seamlessly weave together to form the world of the Great Tapestry, a grotesquely beautiful hellscape beset by a ravenous, deafening, void. As the Noble Guide, you are tasked with ripping the souls of long dead soldiers from the earth to fight it back. It Stares Back plays like an RTS, but heavily streamlined; no build queues or technology trees, if you have the resources to build a unit, you can spawn as many as you need wherever you've constructed an outpost. Though there are only four units to choose from, I never felt like there was too little choice to be made; the strategy of this game is more based around where to attack and where to defend rather than army composition. The wells of resources that allow you to crate units ...

Атмосферная, но короткая стратегия.

What you got here is a narrative driven strategy game. Its not pure rts even though there is resource gathering cause once gathered, every spawn points acts a fix node, thus giving the entire thing more of a... moba(?) feeling. In essence what it reminds me of is Eufloria. You get your hands on spawning nodes and do your best to keep them under your thumb. The more nodes you control the more it snowballs in your favor, or if you lose them: That of your opponent's. If you'd ask me on it, i'd say the strategy part of the game is simplistic at best (as it stands now with its 4 units 4 upgrades and half of its development) but its still a very unique experience thanks to the mind screwing of how it handles its narrative. As far as i have seen the story itself is not too deep either (not claiming i have seen the entire extent of it, which is probably not the case and also not gonna spoil anything), but the way its presented, the symbolism overload, the voicing, the art and how it moves. It...