Farabel is a charming and addictive little turn-based strategy game. The central premise of "turning back time", while interesting to the plot, does not really change the feeling of working through progressively difficult levels. Everything is balanced to provide a good upward hardness curve. However, unlike something like Memento - where gradually seeing the past makes earlier story make sense - I couldn't shake the feeling that Farabel was simply a series of interesting scenarios, without any cohesive plot. Although, lowering the main unit's abilities each turn provides an interesting twist, while working out which specific abilites you can least live without. Turn-based strategy itself is nuanced and rewarding. It's similar in feel to something like Crowntakers or Banner Saga. Mastery of unit abilities make you feel like you're controlling the battlefield with skill. The optional challenges for each level provide replay value and the battle sandbox with two variations (win a series...

Farabel is a basic hex grid turn based combat strategy game. It has an interesting progression system for the campaign. You play it backwards, fighting the final battle first then working your way back to the first enemy encounter. The only unit to gain XP is the king, who gets a stat boost with every level. Backwards. As in, each time you win a battle you lose a level and must choose a stat to lower. This does make each successive battle more difficult. It certainly SOUNDS like a good idea. Well... no, actually it doesn't. And, in my opinion, it isn't a good idea in practice either. Made me rather unhappy to win a battle. And, since you must win each battle to progress back to the beginning of the war, there is no feeling good anywhere in the campaign. Add onto that the fact that the combat system is very simplistic and you don't have a game that made me want to push through to the end. Maybe it gets better farther in. But I do not care enough to find out. Other thing...

This game thinks it's really, really clever. This game is not, in fact, really, really clever. This game is in sore need of a 'rewind turn' button because one wrong click can screw up a whole battle, and the UI makes it really, really easy to make a wrong click. The reverse leveling nonsense feels more than a little annoying and gimmicky, the battles love springing the last-minute surprise that spoils your plans and forces you to replay the whole level nonsense and the whole thing is more tedious than fun. Skip it.

Strategic Thinking Success is Losing Your Strenght Rewind Possible

the tactics bit is actually pretty fun... but i wish i could decide anything. The best option is usually pretty obvious (particularly in the "strategy" portion) and the time travel gets boring fast. But that didn't make me quit. You cant save in level and i got a gamebreaking bug with an invisible and invulnerable ballista that shredded my team. Since you cant just reload, this game isn't fun enough to replay a level I've already figured out. And then it had the audacity to ask me for a review... so here it is. 4/10 pretty boring, neat idea executed poorly.

Hey, let's make a game where your character gets weaker as you play through the game! Cool! Or is it....? It's not. It turns out no one else does stuff like this because it sucks and feels bad. It feels bad.

I love turn based tactical games, and I'm especially fond of hex-based games in this genre. I didn't mind the UI and liked the graphics well enough. That said, the whole going backwards in time gimmick is annoying and I wasn't compelled to keep playing after the first few levels (which appear to be completely scripted, so forget any replayability).

this is not strategy, its just figure out the puzzle, rules are badly balanced and levels set up so they can only be completed with just one particular method, add in the fact that your characters degrade all the time (they unlevel) this leads to no sense of achievement, you're not sculpting a character you can have any connection with just mitigating deteriation, no wonder it was so cheap....

I like trying out new approaches. But the "new approach" here completely sucks. Losing abilities and getting worse each time you win does not give a sense of achievement. Does not give a sense of victory or progression. This is no fun and the game will go to my "ignore" pile.

Some weird reverse time thing where your heroes get weaker each map, is not what was expected.