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

BiggestKai said:
but they've also haven't updated their site since late 2023 with a Battlesector post.
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But that's kind of weird considering how Battlesector got an miniature campaign for the Sisters of Battle, a few months ago
 
Need for Sped said:
This is probably old as hell here, but I recently got to play Phoenix Point...and my God what an absolute turd of a game. They managed to both aggressively copy XCOM:EU and XCOM2, and make them boring as hell at the same time.
- Classes are incredibly bland (Even though you have the option to either hybridize classes and unlock skills from different classes through a point buy system, like in War of the Chosen).
- Skills are just as bland (Probably because the game as a whole relies way too much on the free aiming gimmick, and thus that significantly limits the scope of the skills)
- Weapon upgrades are non-existent: There's a metric ton of different equipment, but 95% are just sidegrades of each other (Either more damage but less accuracy, etc), same thing with armor.
- Enemies are bullet spongy as fucking hell past a certain point.
- There's no characters (Even though characters are nothing to write home about in either XCOM, they manage to blow this game out of the water in that regard)
- Maps are seriously uninspired and repetitive.
- Music may as well be white noise, completely forgettable (Ended up switching to the XCOM OST after a couple of hours)
- The strategic layer is pure cancer and it makes you yearn for the simpler days of "The aliens have made new progress on the Avatar Project". You have to keep the aliens from expanding, which they do by constructing lairs, which they eventually upgrade if you don't destroy, but they keep fucking building them indefinitely, to the point it feels you're playing whack-a-mole.

Seriously, if you ever think of giving this one a try...don't.
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I backed this game on a site called Fig which may or may not still be arround, dont care to check.
Such a disappointment on launch and the DLC didn't help.
but there is a good game under all of it, just needed polish and some charater.
 
Dissimilar, a french RPG with turn based combat is out.

Having played a few hours I have to say it's a very promising game plagued by some of the most rage inducing retarded decisions.

First, the good.
  • Inspite of being an RPG maker game, it looks gorgeous.
  • The gameplay isn't too standard turn based tactics. The gimmick is that you eventually(after killing any single count of a specific enemy unit, or in boss cases just surviving a turn) become aware of what an enemy's attack pattern is.
    • For example the first enemies are called Louis Cannons and they attack the furthest unit from them for 4 damage. The attack then splits off into a cross pattern, damaging friend or foe for 1 damage and debuffing them with 1 stack of weakness which means they take +#WeakenessStacks damage. So if it happens that another enemy, Star Fragment, with 1 hp, is present in large numbers, and just happens to be laid out in a very orthogonal fashion, and your team doesn't really have much in the way of area of effect attacks, you can tank 4hp to take out multiple star fragments in one turn before they even act.
  • Another gimmick is that your main character is the only human/non printable character.
    • Amelie gets "plasma" instead of health. Plasma is not only her health, which needs to be recharged at not-bonfires that reset non-boss combat encounters, it's also used as a key for certain doors requiring X amount of plasma, and it's a resource for when you've fucked up and got a printable fighter killed and would like to respawn them during a fight, or just want to make things easier and spawn more units that you would normally have or need in a fight.
    • All of Amelie's skills are(or at least appear to be) support oriented. Shields, stacks of strength(like weakness but the character deals +#StrengthStacks per attack), weakness debuffs, repairs, some other stuff. She cannot deal any damage, that's what the printables are for.
    • Enemies in a combat encounter spawn on specific 3d printers which come with each combat encounter. For example an encounter can have 5 printers and spawn in 4 enemies. The 5th printer will be "free", and you can spawn in characters that you can recruit while exploring. So far I have a versitile shot+dagger damage dealer, my second was a ranger, my third was a tanky melee character. The first time you use a "free" printer costs 0 plasma, but if the fighter that the printer spawned was killed you can spend 2 plasma to reprint them. The same applies for printers that spawned in enemies at turn 1, if you kill an enemy you can spend 2 plasma to print a new fighter of yours in the now unused printer.
  • All this combines to make a very enjoyable puzzle for each fight.
  • The two bosses I've fought so far had extremely enjoyable gimmicks.
  • The map has some very cool Dark Souls 1 loopbacks and shortcuts.
  • Music is quite pumping.
  • The plot is fairly interesting, although I don't think much of Amelie as a character.

Now the bad.
  • The biggest complaint, note how I've mentioned that enemies will target the character furthest or closest to them, depending on the enemy unit/attack. The problem is that map sizes aren't static, and in fact often tend towards the large 7x7 + squares or rectangles. Another problem is that while the game fully tells you what the behavior of the enemies are, it won't actually give you a prediction path to confirm if diagonals count, or if they'll path find in one way, or if "move to closest enemy and then move to furthest enemy it can reach" actually means two seperate instances of the 7 tile movement range it claims in the stats. This means you're expect to do annoying as fuck tile counting in an isometric camera angle(there's a simplified tactical map in a menu but it's clunky and annoying as fuck to get to, see the next bullet point) at least 4 times a turn(one enemy unit's distance to Amelie/any of your spawned units). For fuck's sake just tell me who's it targeting, in a fight with 9 enemies I'm not spending 7 minutes a turn counting who's going where.
  • The game is one of the slowest and most time wasting affairs I've had the displeasure of playing.
    • First off, in spite of being an RPG maker game it somehow has the fucking audacity to drop frames every now and then. According to one of the three discussion posts on the steam forums I'm not alone in this.
    • Second, exploring the map is slow as FUUUUUUUUUUCK and there are unskippable slow as FUUUUUUUUCK cutscenes attached to almost everything. Amelie walks very lesiurely. The isometric view combined with the artstyle causes her to get stuck on map edges. Dialog is slow even on the fast text setting. One of the common story cutscenes where Amelie is being interogated by a group of people has to constantly flash in and out of a black screen and then loading up the image of the people interrogating her for some reason. If you lose a fight you don't just respawn next to a not-bonfire with your plasma refilled, you have to very slowly trek back to the nearest one and then interact with it and then wait for the "reset terminal" screen to load and then wait for the cutscene of a bar filling up to load and then wait for the cutscene of a bar filling up to finish and then you can finally start the slow trek back to the fight you lost(which will be even longer because unless you've found a shotcut to bypass whatever battles/plasma gated doors you've passed on the way back they'll be reset because of the bonfire). EVERY SINGLE COMBAT TURN has to go through a 3 second animation of ALLY TURN #N or ENEMY TURN #N followed by a clockwise spin animation. EVERY SINGLE ENEMY has to wait a second to figure out who the hell they're attacking or where they're moving before they actually move. It's a genuiene pain in the ass to play.
If you're fine with my pet peeves I'd say play the game because it's got some cool puzzle tactical fights. If not then I'd wait for QoL patches if that's ever happening.
 
BiggestKai said:
The two bosses I've fought so far had extremely enjoyable gimmicks.
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I've fought two more bosses. One had a very cool gimmick, the other also had a cool idea but I two-turned that boss because my fourth recruitable character let me build around ridiculous amounts of strength stacks on all of my characters.

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Edit:
Speaking of very powerful recruitable characters, I give you THE CUBE™.
Warning: loud volume:



Every time it moves(or gets moved) it leaves behind an instance of itself. You can use a skill to then damage anything in the cardinal directions of THE CUBE™. This skill gains more base damage the more instances.
This skill also has a variant where all instances of THE CUBE™ also throw out their own cross shaped attack, and each one of these attacks can stack and also benefit from the additional instance base damage modifier.

Sebastien, my fourth recruitable character, has nothing but support skills and an "inspiration" meter that he gains three of every turn, and he can use as many skills as he wants to as long as he has inspiration. He also has a cooldown based skill that doubles his current number of inspiration stacks.
One of Sebastien's skills is "capturing movement", being able to spend X inspiration stacks to move a character X tiles. This skill can be used multiple times a turn. Every time Sebastien moves THE CUBE™, a new instance is spawned. You can therefore move THE CUBE™ as many times as you have inspiration stacks. Sebastien spawns in with two, and he can double that to four. He also gains three every turn.

The result: Everything gets a dose of BC™C.
If I were more cognizant of this fact I would have nuked the whole map(excluding amelia) during that webm.
 
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I remember Duel Gears being hyped years ago. There was a basic demo (more of a tech demo) but then the devs went silent. Though iirc they were Japanese. I think it came out at some point?
 
Turn based mech games have been mentioned, particularly Front Mision, so I'll throw out a couple of recommendations.

One is an older title called Titans of Steel: Warring Suns from 2003. I don't know if linking to MyAbandonware is allowed, so I won't.

Another, and I'm surprised is not in the thread, or at least didn't show when I searched are the two Mission Force: Cyberstorm games from Sierra. The first is on GoG for a little under $4 right now, $6 normally. The sequel is on MyAbandonware and GoG's Dream List, meaning GoG doesn't offer it yet.

Last is Mecharashi. It is an actual Front Mission game that was being made under contract for SquareEnix, who decided to yank the contract when the game was about 95% done, in typical SquareEnix bad decision making fashion. The devs decided to polish up and publish what they'd already made. It got them sued, but near as I can tell the case was thrown out months ago. It was originally called "Front Mission 2089: Borderscape" before it stopped being a SquareEnix title, so if you were wondering where Borderscape went, it's this.
And yes, it's a gacha, but I've got a ton of the freemium funny money, and I've only ever tossed them a twenty for one of the battle passes they ran a couple of months back.
It's also been out in the SEA region for some time, so the meta is already figured out if you're in to optimizing/staying strictly F2P.
 
There's one Mecha TBT I downloaded recently called Phantom Brigade that had a really cool simultaneous turns with real time movement(as in every movement took up real time in that turn, think Frozen Synapse) but everything else about the game was so lacking I refunded it quickly.

Is Battletech any good?
 
I wasn't a big fan of Kriegsfront tactics but i fear it wasn't what i expected either.

When i think [mecha srpg] i think front mission or super robot wars, but kriegsfront is like X-com with manual direction facing. There is way too much focus on vision cones, stealth, height etc. on top of permadeath.

So you can't just walk to a guy and punch him cause your accuracy will be shit, and if you go around him and punch his back, now your back is turned to other enemies and can't track or dodge them anymore.

I do play mecarashi, it's a low budget gacha but great front mission style srpg, as it was originally meant to be a front mission game until squarenix remembered they hate this franchise and cancelled it. Good game but not casual at all, you need to tryhard and use guides for events and material farms.
 
BiggestKai said:
Is Battletech any good?
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Kind of, but it's just revisiting the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere with several waves of DLC.

Let's just say that the prerendered cutscenes in Mechwarrior Clans are firmly within the terrible side of things . As far as gameplay goes, your allies act like they've been lobotomized. And for the love of God, do not give them the Arrow missile.
 
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