Cthulhu’s Catharsis
This is a lite turn-based strategy game for world domination in a Lovecraftian setting. It is like starting with Risk, adding some depth and dark humor, and subtracting the random element.
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Indie Games.
The friendly Mi-Go enjoyed this game a lot.
– Real player with 9.4 hrs in game
At Dead Of Night
Maya is forced to spend a night at the Sea View Hotel after her friends migrated there because of the weather forecast. However, she’s awaken by a scream. Investigating, she find Jimmy Hall, the owner, assaulting a guest. Locked outside her room, she manages to get to the reception to find a master key. Her attention is caught by voices coming from a spirit box : the ghosts haunting the hotel implore her to get out and tell the world what Jimmy did… Maya is determined to escape and free her friends but not before finding the truth… while avoiding Jimmy who is conscious about her roaming around.
– Real player with 36.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Survival Horror Games.
Pros and cons are down below) Don’t forget to drop a like if it was useful! Check out one chapter of the game here (I took the developers request and didn’t include the ending in the video to avoid any major spoilers, and likes and subs are highly appreciated and encourages, of course :3):
Advantages:
1. The game looks incredible (I mean, obviously as it is a part-game, part-movie thingy). Still, there are so many nice scripted scenes of enemy jumping from behind the corners and noticing you. Even looking in the spy glass, one can note lots of different animations for the same action of enemy walking by the door. The attention to details is very appealing.
– Real player with 28.4 hrs in game
STATIK
STATIK is a 4 player online co-op horror game. A group of kids in the 1980’s find an abandoned house with a shelf full of VHS tapes. When each tape is played, the events of the movie start to play out in real life. Will you escape with your lives or become another victim of the static. You can choose your ending by finding the maps secrets or defeating the killer.
Each level has multiple different endings and many easter eggs to find. No playthrough will ever be the same with the killer always making different decisions and items being spawned randomly.
STORY
In the boring town of Belleville, most summer days are spent by the lake swimming or biking around town. One day, you and your friends discover an old abandoned house in the woods. It’s a tall house, furniture and interior untouched like the owners just vanished and left it trapped in time. Inside, the beige wallpaper is decaying and peeling off. When you get to the living room, there is a big tv set on top of a vhs player. Next to the tv you find a shelf containing Vhs tapes with no label or name. You call your friends over to play the tape, thinking nothing of it…
GAMEPLAY
In STATIK, each VHS tape is a different horror movie that plays out in the old house. You will be hiding from the killer while he tries to hunt you down and send you into the static. Find clues on how to send the killer into the static or find clues on how to escape throughout the map. The closer you get to escaping or if you’re brave enough to face the killer, he will get smarter and he will be able to hear you better. Be stealthy and quiet or you will be sent into the STATIK.
- Co-Op Game
When playing a Co-Op game, stick together to solve the mysteries of the house and help each other by using a medkit to get a player out of the STATIK.
- Single Player Game
If you’re brave enough to play alone, you cannot get yourself out of the STATIK and have to solve puzzles by yourself. It’s possible but significantly harder.
Read More: Best Strategy Horror Games.
The VanMan
Where is the game? Literally doesn’t even have a Van. Very disappointing
– Real player with 0.4 hrs in game
Graywalkers: Purgatory
At the moment the game is fairly raw but the potential for a magnificent game is obvious.I have spent about 2 hours in this so far and there are a few bugs which the developer is actively working on and seems very passionate about the full development of the game.
Like all EA games you are hoping that the potential is reached and i feel that this is one which will get there.The turn based combat is solid and the character development tree is quite detailed.Much has still to be implemented but if you are prepared to help get them there this is the game for you.I have many games and have gamed for over 40 years (i am almost 67) and in my time i have owned more than i care to remember but this one will become one of my top favourite 5 games when it is fully fleshed out.It definately needs more development but i am more than content to wait and help them.If you like turn based games with character development you should like this
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
Note: This current build is as early as Early-Access can be. More on this below.
Disclaimer: I had a very small hand in this game’s development during my time as an intern at DLD. I have no financial interests tied to the game’s fate. Also, I bought this game at a significant discount.
With that out of the way, let’s get on with the review.
Gameplay:
This game can be over-simplified as Fallout1/2 or XCOM gameplay + Darksiders-like Lore. If you’re a fan of turn-based RPGs, tactical gameplay and a rich, original story, this might be for you.
– Real player with 6.3 hrs in game
Mythic Legions Tactics
Discover the world of Mythoss and build your “Mythic Legion” in this innovative, customizable, non-Pay-to-win TACTICS game featuring Fully 3D Realistic Environments, Hundreds of Class options, and Skill Based Battles! Build your Legion! Change your faction! Fight in the WAR OF THE AETHERBLADE!
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Free-To-Play Multiplayer game that that comes with a purchasable Single Player story that includes more than 150 fully 3D Battles, Hundreds of Weapons and Armor, and nearly a Dozen Races.
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The game will be available on PC and mobile platforms initially (iOS, Android) and is being designed with strategic, satisfying gameplay in-mind…
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Fully Customizable Characters!
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Cinematic cut scenes with high-paced action!
GAMEPLAY
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Single-player or Multi-player where you can battle against your friends in Hot Seat or Tactics With Friends, or anyone in Tactics With Friends or Auto-Battler Modes.
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Not a “pay-to-win” game. Players can only enhance their power in the game by building up their skills and completing challenges during actual gameplay.
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Players can purchase different character skins and graphical enhancements to accessories or weapons (like adding flame effect to a sword.
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Turn-based strategy & tactics players will embrace the familiar joy of a classic genre with innovative features, such as movement across fully 3D realistic environments that include different elevations and landscapes such as hills, stairways and even in water. On top of those there are special moves, full 3D camera rotation, and Auto-battling options.
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Combat matters! Besides normal combat mode, players can choose to attack certain limbs and making special targeted attacks.
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Customization is king - like the Mythic Legions toy line, players can customize their characters at a very high level and add details to their characters body, armor, weapons, clothing, accessories – no 2 characters will be the same
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Players will build a “special ops” team within the faction they choose and will follow the storyline getting into battles, side missions and boss battles to advance in the game and unlock levels and rewards.
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One of the coolest features is that players will be able to play the storyline of a certain faction, and then go back and play the storyline as a different one. For example, play as the good guys chasing the stolen Aetherblade, or as the bad guys trying the outrun your pursuers and return the sword to its master.
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When players do switch storylines, they will be playing against the faction team they’ve previously created which is now run by the games AI.
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Character Skins & Power Level – Players will be building their characters using a “slot” system. Which will allow them to build up their characters skills and powers. Players can decide to change their character skins during the game (say from Knight to Barbarian) and the skill/power they’ve already built up will automatically transfer over. This also includes when players decide to switch storylines to a different faction. For example, if you build up a character to a 20 during one storyline, you will start the other storyline with a 20 so you are not starting over. The games AI will scale automatically.
STORYLINES
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War of the Aetherblade is the 1st season of the Mythic Legions Tactics game and is set in the high-fantasy world of Mythic Legions with Humans, Elves, Knights, Orcs, Trolls, Undead Skeletons and Vampires, and more
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The game’s story starts with the coronation of the Elven Queen Artemyss Silverchord at Castle Silverhorn. During the ceremony, the castle is attacked by the Legion of Arethyr and the mystical Aetherblade sword is stolen. Queen Artemyss’s legion, along with other factions and splinter cells, are now racing to win back control of the Aetherblade before it falls into the hands of its master Arethyr and he lays waste to the realm of Mythoss.
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Play the storyline as different factions – Mythic Legions has a deep storyline and there will be 5 factions included in the Single Player game.
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When a player does decide to switch factions, the skill and power levels that they’ve already built up will be transferred to their new storyline. So players don’t have to start from scratch.
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Boss Battles – every Faction will feature a boss battle featuring one of the core characters from the Mythic Legions universe
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Side Missions – Each storyline will have side missions (like a jail break out) and challenges that will either advance the story or unlock bonuses.
WHAT MAKES MYTHIC LEGIONS TACTICS UNIQUE?
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3D Realistic Levels - Most Tactics games are 2D and won’t let you rotate the camera around to see different angles. The few 3D Tactics games that exist are made where the environment itself is made of just a bunch of textured 3D squares of Hexes instead of more realistic environments. Instead we place the Hex grid over the environment instead of making it using them.
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Visual Customization - Lots of games allow for visual customizations, but we believe we have taken it much further. Not only are we customizing the standard things like skin color, face, hair, tattoos, but every piece of armor and weapon can be recolored to any color, mix and matched between different types, and effects can be added to each such as flames or frost. The customizer in this game will literally let anyone create a digital action figure and pose them in a display environment as well as shared with anyone to see your collection.
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Slot Based Characters - This is slightly more difficult to explain. The basic concept is that all of the character data is stored in a specific slot. Since Mythic Legions Tactics lets you play 5 Single Player Faction storylines as well as Multiplayer battles, we didn’t want the player to always have to start back off at level 1 every time they choose a different story or played Multiplayer. So to accomplish this you can create a different playable Character for each Faction storyline and even different ones for Multiplayer all within the same slot allowing the slot to level up. This slot continues to grow the more the player plays the game, so no matter if you are playing Single Player stories or Multiplayer battles, the Slot keeps its experience, Skills, and unlocked Classes.
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No Pay To Win (Everything is Skill Based) - Well when we set out to make this game, one of the most important elements was to make sure it wasn’t something people could just come in, buy a bunch of overpowered equipment, items, etc… and just destroy other people. So instead we removed ALL stat boosts, specials, and other enhancements from equipment. We made the game more about how skillful your characters are with each weapon, armor, or item. So by unlocking a skill, that skill then levels up as the character uses it more there by increasing the stats, attack, defense, etc… of the character. So the more you play the more your character improves instead of buying that improvement!
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Melded Classes - This is probably one of the most unique features for Mythic Legions Tactics. This allows players to essentially merge two different classes into a new one. As an example, if you leveled your character up to unlock the classes for Priest and Mage. You could Meld the two into a new hybrid class called a Blue Mage which gives the player access to most of the same Skills and Spells for both classes as well as a few new unique ones to the new hybrid class called Blue Mage. A more extreme example would be melding a Barbarian with a Necromancer. Honestly I don’t know what the new hybrid class would be called just yet, but they are on opposite sides of the Classes hierarchy with very different Stat requirements. But at the same time it is absolutely something you could do and allows for people to have a lot more fun trying out the various options for potentially hundreds of unique classes!
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Turn-Based Strategy with Auto-Battle - Most tactics game battles take a long time to complete even a single one. Some people love this. It means you can get 50+ hours of gameplay in a single game. However, others don’t like the tedium of having to choose every action for their characters to attack the enemy. While it is far more efficient to do so, it also isn’t always necessary if you are grinding to level up, or just want to play to see the story. To make the game more enjoyable for everyone, we have added what are called Battle Templates. The game will come with a few pre-made ones, but essentially a Battle Template allows you to select a set of predefined rules and action for your characters to follow instead of you having to decide each and every action. This will let you be able to just Auto-Battle levels by having your team just go through those actions automatically so you can enjoy leveling up, the customization, and the amazing story. Also, just so everyone knows, Battle-Templates work on both Single Player story levels and Multiplayer!
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Win Conditions - Normally win conditions in a tactics game are just to defeat everyone. We are definitely going to have that win condition, but sometimes the win condition might be to sneak past guards and unlock something, get all of your players to a specific area on the map without losing anyone, or incapacitate the enemy instead of kill them. These different types will offer a variety of gameplay options not seen in strategy tactics games.
Aberration Analyst
You are an analyst in a very secretive, underground organization. Scour tabloid headlines, police reports and other sources in order to locate supernatural threats to the safety and sanity of your fellow citizens.
Players have various tools at their disposal in order to achieve their goal.
Tabloids are a great place to start looking for information about monster sightings and attacks. Unfortunately, the tabloids also have two major weaknesses. First, they are almost totally unreliable, and should not be trusted by themselves. Second, their availability is limited, only ten headlines are released per day. Still, they make a good place to start identifying possible monster activity.
More reliable than tabloids, reports come in two varieties, Police and Coroner. Reports are available for each city, but will cost money to access. They provide factual information, but will not mention monsters or anything that might threaten the reporter’s credibility.
Selecting your team is an important step in the process of monster research. Make sure you try to identify the type of monster you are going after, otherwise your team may not be properly prepared.
Lore is collected as a player progresses through the game. Each attempt to take down a monster will result in small, but helpful hints that will make it easier to identify possible monster activity.
Dead In The Tropics
Outlive your friends in this social multiplayer elimination game. Once a day, a player must be sacrificed so the others can live. What lengths will you go to to be the last remaining?
The group must decide who is the next to be eliminated. How could you make that impossible choice? You only see one option. At night you vote.
Work together during the day, turn against each other at night. Will you be defeated by the starvation, the trials of the island, or the complicated island politics?
Key features:
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Deep, strategic, turn-based gameplay. Simple & easy-to-learn mechanics that cause nuanced, social consequences.
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Online multiplayer. Betray real-world friends or strangers on the internet.
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A game with voting at it’s core. Do you lie & scheme, or fly under-the-radar? How you play is up to you.
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Balance your individual goals with the survival of the group. Eating more will give you a survival advantage, but it will not make your popular.
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Randomly generated events and tools, along with the unique turn-order system, make every playthrough different. The decisions you make early will determine how the week plays out.
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The AI of the island will decide your circumstances. Those met with good luck may find themselves targeted by others, while the unfortunate may be ignored as unthreatening. Adapt your strategy to the hand you’ve been dealt.
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Those eliminated will still have a role to play on the final day if you choose to stick around. Short sessions mean it won’t be long until you’re back in the action!
To learn more about Dead In The Tropics, please visit:
The Curse Of Mantras
The Curse Of Mantras is a dating sim with optional card battler gameplay.
You play as either Lily or Ace, and you wake up in a strange supernatural world known as the Afterlife. A strange man, Mantras, greets you and introduces you to the world’s rules and your companions.
Your companions are other dead people that represent an avatar of one of the four elements: water, fire, air, earth, and one of the two arcana: life and death.
Lily and Ace are the avatars of death. The most powerful avatar, the only one who has the power to activate a strange device, a music box, which can make them remember their past lives, and most importantly, why and how the died.
Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition
I hadn’t played this game since the 1st edition that came out in the 80s. Back then three Hunters chased a nearly-impotent Dracula around the map, eventually slaying him. Nearly every time, anyway. Dracula had hidden movement behind a screen, and left some rumors in his wake, but the damnable hunter cards would give him away at horrible times, and if you encountered him he would get caught during the day more than half the time (you rolled a die, but the hunters had more cards) - a vampire during the day is as feeble in combat as you would think. We called it “The Frustration of Dracula.” He was fun to play, but it was very difficult to win with him. Still, I have fond memories.
– Real player with 37.3 hrs in game
While no game is ever going to translate perfectly from the board to digital I have to tip my hat to Nomad games for taking on Fury of Dracula, not just for doing it, but doing a very capable job.
*When you read negative reviews about the lack of 1 vs 4 during initial roll out of the game, I have to point out that this was clearly posted on the store page well in advance and in the discussions. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone and it’s a poor excuse to give a thumbs down. It was perfectly clear and the developers have repeatedly stated why they released it as 1 vs 1 and 1 vs AI initially, along with their plans to work on and release 1 vs 4. Understandably, the developers want to get it right, so we just need to be patient. Their professionalism and consistent feedback to our inquiries leads me to believe they will get it done.
– Real player with 30.8 hrs in game