Tactical Indie RPGs - The sucessors of X-COM, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and Heroes of Might and Magic.

Corette said:
Slaves of Magic, which is most easily described as indie fantasy XCOM, will be released November 3.
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If by "easily described", you mean "shamelessly aping", sure. No way that narration style was done by accident.
Doesn't look horrible, though.
 
Corette said:
Slaves of Magic, which is most easily described as indie fantasy XCOM
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Not even a bad idea, someone actually made this high fantasy OpenXCOM mod a couple years ago, I think it’s called X Chronicles or something.

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(Truthfully these "mod packs" are just Frankenstein’s monsters of assets from other mods, this is basically like XCOM Files with a few new wizard bits thrown in, but it's solid.)
 
Inkshade is pretty neat so far. I'm only a few hours in, and the focus seems to be much more on the escape room part than the tactical part, but I think that's just because it's so early. The tactics game so far is very limited and simple, but I suspect it could get apeshit after a few longer runs.

Less of a spiritual successor to Inscryption than a direct sequel (even if it's a different studio). Although slightly less horrific, since so far I haven't had to pull any teeth out for losing a game.
 
Super robot wars Y comes out this month. It's a mega crossover game that combines the plots of multiple anime mecha shows... And you get to fight Godzilla.


You can try the demo now and even buy the US version at launch. Although be warned that it spoils the shit out of the code geass S2 ending. Otherwise if you don't know jack about anime, just enjoy the idea of playing ninja secret agent putting together a team of badass individuals to ride a giant floating city and save the world.
 
I might as well add few titles that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread.

Knights of the Chalice 1 & 2.
OGL D&D 3.5 ruleset adaptations. Sequel is in particular sadistically hard.

USC: Counterforce.
Sci-fi title heavily inspired by Aliens. Has bit of a problem with player fighting same style of enemies all the time, but does it fairly well.

Dungeon Rats.
Spinn-off title for Age of Decadence by Iron Tower Studio. This one has focus on mostly on combat instead of insta-kill CYOA-parts.
 
Corette said:
Knights of the Chalice 1 & 2.
OGL D&D 3.5 ruleset adaptations. Sequel is in particular sadistically hard.
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KotC2 is amazing, best DnD game by far.

There's also a custom campaign for it called Hearkenwold, it has an open world and doesn't bust your balls nearly as hard. Highly recommend checking it out to anyone finding themselves turned off by the default campaign's difficulty.
 
ANF said:
KotC2 is amazing, best DnD game by far.
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The first game is great, but I've avoided the sequel because I kept seeing screenshots of an "upgraded" interface that used tokens for the party and enemies. Looking at the trailer, with the isometric, 2-D characters, it seems like that's not the case?
 
Flatline said:
The first game is great, but I've avoided the sequel because I kept seeing screenshots of an "upgraded" interface that used tokens for the party and enemies. Looking at the trailer, with the isometric, 2-D characters, it seems like that's not the case?
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Tokens are optional.
 
BiggestKai said:
Spirited Thief
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Got a few levels to go but I'm almost done with it.
My thoughts are the same, it's a very fun game with one amendment. I feel the game peaks end of chapter 1-mid chapter 2. The game doesn't get necessarily worse in late 2-3 but the problem is that the more complex mechanics they've introduced are so prevalent that the level design has no choice but to play bitch to those mechanics, which in turn makes levels much easier and also very one-solution to win.
These mechanics are:

  • Rogue spirits. Any character who ends a turn in the same room as a sleeping spirit awakens them. The spirit goes apeshit and tries to teleport to that character(telefragging is a thing in the game) - chasing them across the map if need be - and also kills anything in the cardinal directions(sometimes it's also diagonals and sometimes it's just the whole room, the spirits appear to get more enraged as time goes on) from the area it's going to teleport in. They're often used as either escape monsters or as a puzzle mechanic where you need to lure them onto a glyph to get them to magically activate something your thieves couldn't. My problems with this mechanic are two fold
    • Spirits going apeshit means they're eventually going to latch onto guards and kill them, meaning if you trigger a spirit it usually ends with the whole map getting cleared out. This made certain levels(mana stone) extremely easy when it shouldn't have been, and also leads to a very tedious benny hill chase where I had to stall a spirit while my other thief was doing other objectives.
    • They have a counter mechanic to this where purple paint can contain spirits and not allow them to pass. This is fine, but it has the issue of making the scouting phase(you scout with ghostly spirits in a no risk environment where getting caught only resets some of the fog of war and then actually heist with flesh and blood thieves) annoying as hell.
  • Sharpshooters. They don't move and get infinite viewing cones, but the cones are modified to be linear(ie it's just the tiles in the direction they're looking at and not the adjacent ones too).
    • Mainly they replace large quantities of guards in chapter 3 in favor of a couple of sharp shooters keeping an eye out on corridors which I really hate, they're extremely easy to avoid as opposed to the clutter of patrols of the guards and they're often spawned with some mini puzzle that boils down to either distract them or push them into a conveniently placed bear trap to kill them and access some extra loot.
I still really like the game and the story is surprisingly compelling but I recall struggling a lot earlier in the game and without that difficulty it just feels like it's missing a part I loved about the game. I'm more patting myself on the back for being a clever little boy whose perfect plan was executed flawlessly instead of frantically course correcting a misstep and that's just not as much fun. I guess it's difficult to balance for the player having the choice of three thieves each with their own pair from at least 6 abilities and a fourth with 2 from the choice of 12, and the ghosts which can put glyphs to make things easier and support the thieves.

I also made more merged tracks.

Escaping Time - the one that plays at the end of each chapter.

Runic Trap

Tension - my favorite of the bunch

Night

Dream

Haunted Cave - The cut here is sadly obvious but that's just how the sound file is.

End of Madness - Second favorite of the bunch, love the piano bit at the end.


If these are too much space on the forum server I can make a zip file instead and upload it wherever.
 
Michael Wade said:
Super robot wars Y comes out this month. It's a mega crossover game that combines the plots of multiple anime mecha shows... And you get to fight Godzilla.


You can try the demo now and even buy the US version at launch. Although be warned that it spoils the shit out of the code geass S2 ending. Otherwise if you don't know jack about anime, just enjoy the idea of playing ninja secret agent putting together a team of badass individuals to ride a giant floating city and save the world.
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SRW Y is pretty ass and I say that as a certified SRW autismo. It's eh: the game, looks cheap and it's not very interesting. The best part about it is the added difficulty because for once in a modern SRW title the higher difficulties feel like proper higher difficulties instead of just bloated numbers.
 
Tism the Return II said:
SRW Y is pretty ass and I say that as a certified SRW autismo. It's eh: the game, looks cheap and it's not very interesting. The best part about it is the added difficulty because for once in a modern SRW title the higher difficulties feel like proper higher difficulties instead of just bloated numbers.
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I Haven't gotten too far but I heavily disagree. I think the plot and presentation is much better then 30. Better main character, better interactions, harder and more engaging to play.

I Wanted unicorn and 00 but this isn't a bad line up by any stretch.
 
Michael Wade said:
I Haven't gotten too far but I heavily disagree. I think the plot and presentation is much better then 30. Better main character, better interactions, harder and more engaging to play.

I Wanted unicorn and 00 but this isn't a bad line up by any stretch.
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I think it delineates too much from what SRW should be roster-wise, but 30 is a really low bar to clear.
 
NerdShamer said:
There's an lot of things about this that just screams "cheaply made" to me.
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Low budget doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad.
RPGs and strategy games are genres where ruleset and systems matter more than graphics.
 
Yeah, but it's not exactly promising if you have everyone landing their hits in the trailers and most of the classes are just ticking off the usual main combat roles. Granted, the 4X part is kind of interesting. But still.

Anyways, Menace got an gameplay preview.

 
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BiggestKai said:
I also made more merged tracks.
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Missed one. I really enjoyed this level, tight areas, higher alarms are tough to deal with, lots of loot in cool areas and the alternate/achievement route was very fun. Also I liked the music.

Guard's Tower
 
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