Gem Wizards Tactics

I'll go straight to why I don't recommend the game and if you want to know the details continue reading the next paragraphs. The game has bugs and the developers are parching it, but so far there is still some breaking experience stuff. Today I lost my save twice, each for the new updates; there is no much of a plot so you aren't in front of a story driven tactics game; the art is ok, I'll explain it in more detail later; and finally as a strategy game it's unbalance, the developers are making changes along the release so today may be some changes in the units' skills. I paid 90% its prize, I regret that, but well I would suggest you to buy it half its prize because the content isn't there yet and this practices aren't a good sign either. If you need a score, its a 4/10 until its fixed, then it would be 5/10. I must clearify that I played 7 hours so far, there are some good ideas in it but it's not enough work there to make it worth its full price. [b] The bugs [/b]- Yesterday it was...

This thumbs-down is with the caveat that if the dev ever made a proper story mode I'd be all-in on a thumbs-up. I thoroughly enjoy the gameplay and I think the design is incredibly smart. Interesting mechanics and interactions, features that are both intuitive as well as thought-provoking. I like everything about this game...except that this is a single-player game with no single-player content. What's worse is that there does exist a snippet of story in the form of "Derby's Story" which plays out like the prologue to an actual story mode that is never delivered. If this game were in early access with a plan to add real story content later, this would be a very different review. As it exists, however, there seems to be no story mode in sight; therefore, I cannot recommend this game.

Purchased this game thanks to a twitter post. So far t reminds me of a frenetic advance wars with way more strategy to consider. It's not just about utilizing terrain, it's about the interaction of unit placement, terrain, and terrain modification through abilities, and exploitation of all the above with skills that have further interactions upon use. For example in the tutorial you can electrify water with a storm doing damage to everyone in water, but it spreads water in the process destroying forests in the flood. So I had an enemy standing in in a forest near a river and I used another unit's water shooting ability to knock him into the river while adding further water to the map to electricute said water and killing all the enemies at once.

Brilliant Evergreen Design! First and foremost, *learn the rules*. there is a slight learning curve to this. Because it looks and smells like most tactics games, you might think that your primary action will be whacking enemies until their hitpoints hit zero and they disappear. While you technically can do this, you will almost certainly lose! That's not what this game is about. If you take the time to learn the abilities, learn about positioning and flanking, terrain effects, and the "stack pushing" mechanisms, you will quickly become invigorated by the possibility space. Also, the objective isn't to just wipe out the enemy. The objective is to capture flags and satisfy the win condition. Enemies are only a *part* of the tactical/strategic arc. Once you factor all of this in, the brilliance of this tactics system will reveal itself. It's been reported that this game is a bit thin on the content and the story campaign. I don't personally mind this, and what content is there is hilar...

This game right here is a masterpiece in game design as far as I'm concerned. The short version is that it feels a bit like a wacky version of advance wars, but that wouldn't be doing it justice, because it is something different entirely. It has a very narrow, focused scope, and concentrates on strategical fights on randomly generated maps. There are no bases, no constant rebuilding of cannon fodder, just two armies duking it out. It IS possible however to rescue units during battles, and they will stay with the army, provided they survive. Then why is it so good? Precisely because of that. The game removes all tedium, any "war of attrition", and instead focuses on the fights and strategical depth. And boy, there are so very many things to do. Every unit has at least one, often two, very unique skills, that range from terraforming, bumping units one or more tiles, dig the ground for oil, flinging fireballs, switch positions, dragging units, converting units, summoning, and many mo...

Not "great on Deck!" It should not be marked as such. This game doesn't have controller support. The devs last year said they were trying to add controller support, which is a "huge task." But the task is done! The game has been ported to consoles, where presumably it has controller support. The fact that controller support was created, but never backported to the PC version is disappointing. Why do devs do this? No cloud saves, either, apparently. This is to encourage players to replay the awful unskippable tutorial. Why? Why make a tutorial you can't skip?

A step back from into the breach, a step forwards from advance wars/wargroove.

Do NOT buy this game to play it on Steam Deck. There is no controller support. It should not have the verified badge. I'm sure it's a fun game if you have a mouse and keyboard. The designer has a lot of great ideas!

A real good effort that'll get there with time and with enough updates. The campaign mode has just the right length (9 missions gives you ample time to build up your units, but it's short enough that you can complete a run in an hour), but there being only one mission type (capture X amount of flags), coupled with the infinite reinforcements mechanic (which itself is not a problem since the game gives you warnings and time to prepare) means that the ways you tackle the maps are similar. Derby's story (which was added after release, from my understanding) added "Kill all enemies" objectives, which could be cool to include in the campaign somehow! That and different mission types (Defend your flags for X amount of turns maybe, or engage in a property race with the AI à la Advance Wars) would greatly reduce the repetitiveness. Each faction has unique units, and the campaign is all about mixing and matching different combinations together to make the best force possible. And this is fun...

Deep interactions among unit abilities and terrain types. I'm having a good time discovering more of the "broken" combos. Great tactics game - very creative!