Heroines
its a game
– Real player with 6.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Strategy RPG Games.
Good design, challenging gameplay
The game starts off with a well scripted intro. It presents what’s at stake very well and got me hyped to explore the world.
Music choice is really good, as is the character design for most of the characters. Level design is visually appealing and I had fun from beginning to end, apart from occasional frustration with a couple of bosses.
But it isn’t flawless by any means.
Positives:
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Good level design, character design, skill animations and music
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Challenging
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
GraviFire
Puzzle game with very interesting mechanics and charming pixel art. Game is a bit short, with only 50 levels. Difficulty isn’t that hard, enough to make you think, but the lack of an undo button can get pretty annoying, and I feel that it adds some artificial difficulty, but the game is still pretty doable with patience. Having said that, it is pretty cheap, and is unique enough for me to be worth a buy.
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Logic Games.
gravifire is a sokoban-like/sliding hybrid set in space. block pushing comes into play by directly controlling a green alien trapped inside a strong body suit or something (there’s a short cutscene at the beginning), so you can move stuff around yourself, but the gravity changing mechanic moves all the crates in the same direction at the same time, hence the likeness to sliding puzzlers.
– Real player with 3.7 hrs in game
Templar Battleforce
I was in a mood for strategy and blowing things up one day. I found this game while I was cruising through my queue and pretty much bought it impulsively. How’d that turn out? Surprisingly well. While I haven’t gotten too far into the game yet, it did provide me with some inspiration to start a Let’s Play of something that wasn’t a dating sim. (And the dating sim Let’s Play didn’t even begin that long ago either.)
Before I get to the review, this is important to note. The thing about this game that may either attract or repel you is that it is heavily reliant on dice rolls.
– Real player with 152.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Tactical RPG Games.
Templar Battleforce is a sci-fi turn-based strategy game played on square grid maps with a focus on squad tactics. While it does have a story that accompanies the campaign, it is the gameplay, post-combat unit development, and a surprising amount of polish that makes this game so enjoyable. It doesn’t re-invent anything within the genre, but the mechanics are tight and well-explained, and the unit progression will hook players who, like me, love to work towards a better and better team.
TL;DR at the end.
– Real player with 116.2 hrs in game
Age of Fear 3: The Legend
I might not have bothered with a review since I need to be either incredibly impressed or massively wound up by a game to do it, but some dwarves asked me to.
I’m not kidding. I finished the first expansion (which was dirt cheap, short, well made and pretty fun overall) and then my little dwarfy soldiers had a conversation where they talked about how reviews help indie games and asked me to post one. Normally this would really annoy me, but considering how much time I’ve put into the completely free ‘Age of Fear: The Free World’ and the fact it genuinely made me laugh I’ll go along with the beardy little gits and pen this. I’ll do the usual and write sections about the different bits of the game that jump out at me, but I will say that you can stop reading, go download the absolutely free ‘Age of Fear: The Free World’, play that and decide if you’ll like this game based on your experience there. It’s free, which I might have mentioned already, has everything but a main story arc and is constantly being updated, which is crazy. Free game, yet still gets big updates? Yeah. Anyways, back to AoF 3.
– Real player with 108.2 hrs in game
Very good games and I played for 60+ hours now in this series. ThoughI have some feelings and suggestions:
First I go with some defaults and potential improvement in my opinion.
1. Difference race is not very well balanced.
1.1 Death power is too OP in general because the catapult of death is the only accessible one to capture, and super OP and can be resurrected. In late game you can even set up a catapult legion. Also. a legion of Lich is also OP because they can resurrect each other. No mentioning wights can be the solution to almost all hard fights. Basically a legion made up of death hydra, catapult and lich is way powerful than any combination in other races: high aoe damage with morale decrease for all, all-resurrect-able and not influenced by morale. Even units as dark knights which would be quite popular units in other races but it is off the top 3 OP list in Death units.
– Real player with 50.1 hrs in game
Crown Uncrown: 1D Tactics
Win a run and your party gets Crowned, becoming the BOSSFIGHT for your next run while keeping all its items!
Crown Uncrown is an approachable turn-based tactics roguelike with minimal complexity and lots of unique items which interact in interesting ways.
Defeat enemies in a series of highly tactical and positional combat to seize the Crowns.
Each run is short and unique—perfect for sneaking in a run or two even when you’re busy!
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Adapt on the fly by tossing an item to an ally!
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(Sometimes it’s also useful to just lob a bomb toward your enemies.)
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Enemies are equipped randomly from the same item pool as you, and their loot is a great source for equipping your party.
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Beware though, enemies grow stronger too as you unlock more powerful items!
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Because the enemy AI adapts dynamically to its random items, it often makes surprising moves!
Features
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1-dimensional battlefields
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Cute 1-bit pixel art
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100+ unique items
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Unlimited undos if you’ve made a mistake
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No character classes or stats (Everything is item-based!)
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Alternate color palettes
Generals. Positional Warfare
You are a general. The war has begun, and your country expects only victory from you. The action takes place in the headquarters. Here are schematic images of battlefields. You place figures of your soldiers on the field and give them orders for the day. Test the strategist within yourself. Waiting for you:
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Simultaneous moves - You don’t know your opponent’s intentions until you make a move. You will need to consider all the possibilities of the enemy before you give the final orders for the day. Only at night will you get a complete picture of what happened during the day. And you have to adapt to the changes.
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Multiple battlefields at the same time - you must control the situation on all front lines. Develop the attack in all directions, or concentrate your forces on one-it’s up to you.
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Addictive gameplay - you control a huge army. You will have to correctly allocate the reserve. Choose a convenient direction to attack, or an excellent position for a blind defense.
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Various types of units - soldiers, engineers, tanks, artillery and aircraft. Each has its own distinctive features. And they also interact with each other in different ways.
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Unique countries - Bluelands, Kingdom of Greendagar, Kredsanokia, Zoldania and Perputsk Republic. Each has its own specialization, landscape, and history.
Guide your country to victory in a turn-based strategy game Generals. Position Warfare.
The game was developed by one person.
Need More Troops
This game is like an indie version of “King’s bounty” minus story and budget, plus random map generation, rogue-lite elements, and auto battles. Enjoying it so far.
– Real player with 14.3 hrs in game
Very good game of HOMM stripped of all that fiddly tactical combat nonsense. Actually, I like the tactical combat nonsense, but this game does retain some of it. What I never liked was running around collecting my troops from their spawn points and this game does away with that entirely.
The tactics remains as you really do need to consider your enemies' disposition as well as your own. You don’t need to shuffle your units around too much (those stupid archers are the problem), but switching between their skills is very critical. I made one mistake this last game and it cost me dearly. However, I had time to come back and regroup. I still may have lost if the final troops had been a different composition. As it were, they completely played into the strengths, of both my leader and remaining troops.
– Real player with 8.7 hrs in game
TRYON
Its good but you need to fix your restart feature and level 16 is too hard if you’re trying to get 3 stars.
– Real player with 0.9 hrs in game
6/10
– Real player with 0.3 hrs in game
Age of Fear: The Undead King GOLD
Very well crafted game, especially for a small indie dev. While this has elements of a fantasy rpg (spellcasting units, magical items, fighting “monsters”, etc.) it is an excellent turn-based tactics game. Each of the factions that you can play feels unique and requires different tactics to win battles. The stories can be hit and miss, sometimes they are funny and compelling, other times just ho-hum, but that is par for the course in even AAA games from my experience. Possibly the most impressive thing of all is the prompt, thoughtful replies that the dev, Les, provides to questions and comments on the discussion board. I bought the whole works in their “Stay at Home” bundle for about $20 and I have had more fun with this game than many titles I have bought for 2-3X as much and I still have plenty of content left to explore. GREAT WORK!!! Support indie games–buy this now!
– Real player with 415.4 hrs in game
Never judge a book by its cover. I was very surprised when found this diamond among many of indie-games. Nice design is pleasing to the eyes, great music, very nice story line, which is voiced in the form of a fantasy story - all that are creates the atmosphere of the game, that very addictive and don’t let you go. Very nice Turn-based fights like Heroes or Kings Bounty series. You can proceed main story or play random fights to raise your hero and troops. HUGE amount of artifacts and items. Random encounters with rewards and traps. If you like hardcore you can choose “Death Seeker” difficulty, that gives a huge challenge to every experienced player. You even can choose option “Items for troops” and gear them with artefacts, that can break difficulty but also can give a new experience for playing.
– Real player with 124.2 hrs in game
Dead Hand
pretty good game. really easy to get into the loop of trying, failing, learning and persevering. that being said, so far, after 12~ hours, i’ve found it to be pretty hard, and I consistently get flattened right at the beginning of the second area (easy difficulty), so be warned.
also, i really dig its dark industrial soundtrack. goes really well with the spooky and mysterious tunnels you explore. In general, the atmosphere draws me in, even considering how simple it is.
– Real player with 22.2 hrs in game
THIS IS SO GOOD.
Basic gameplay overview: You are an AI weapons platform. Shit went south. You must complete your purpose and trigger the dead hand to launch the nukes. Enemy AI weapon platforms block you.
Aiming is location or pointer based. So each weapon has a spread (represented by the crosshairs) and the bullets will land somewhere in it. The bullets are all physical and follow a path from the barrel. Where they land is where they impact. Terrain is destructible so that is VERY important.
– Real player with 16.1 hrs in game