Eye of the Command

o is what happens when you take Contra and combine it with turned-based dungeon crawling and a twist of rougelite. It has most of the mechanics you’d expect from a platformer, translated into a turn-based, linear roguelike. If that sounds like a good time to you, then read on.

EotC

is one gigantic 80s action flick stereotype. The player takes on the role of a shirtless commando with a huge gun as he single-handedly wipes out entire armies on the way to the evil leader’s volcano hideout. The five classes and three default guns give a bit of variety on the tactics you’ll need to kill everything in sight. Since the game is in Early Access, not quite everything is in yet, and there’s another class on the way.

You get your pick from five different classes and three separate primary guns, which govern your playstyle. Class perks include things like the additional weapon attachment slots or more health. Meanwhile, there’s a standard, long-range rifle of middling damage, a shorter-range gun that fires twice per round and lets you turn without it costing an actual turn, and a close-range shotgun type that can hit multiple enemies. Weapon range plays the biggest role in difficulty; the closer you have to be to shoot something, the less time you have to move. If all else fails, you have your handy commando knife, which can either be thrown at an enemy to stun or finish them off, or used to roll out of the way of oncoming fire. Tossing your knife means you need to retrieve it, while rolling has a cooldown. There’s also a chance to dodge oncoming fire, which can be increased with certain kinds of gear.

Movement is grid-based, and each move (including turning) takes a turn. Targeting is done with the mouse cursor, and you can shoot anyone you can see from your position, so long as they’re in range. Since you’re a badass hero, you get a hitscan gun that never runs out of ammo, while everyone else fires some kind of projectile or grenade that moves across the world with each turn. This is where things get tactical, as every turn you take brings the little balls of death closer to you, forcing you to plan out when to fire and when to move. When things got hot, I had to check where the bad guys were, where the current projectiles were, and where I was hopefully going to end up without getting pumped full of holes. Most of the time, it worked out; I only died twice in the time I played.

You don’t need a shirt, but you do need gear. How good it is, then, that all these bad guys have left loads of crates and safes lying around full of stuff to help you kill them. Cool sunglasses, boots, and other various wearables await to provide you with bonuses during your killing spree. Benefits include increasing your dodge rate, removing the turn cost for turning, and taking less damage. Some loot is random, some isn’t. You’ll also stumble across (or purchase) proofs of strength, which are little goodies that permanently increase your total health. For me, the stuff that removed the cost for turning was a no-brainer, as was the dodge-enhancing gear. If you play your cards right, you can get your dodge rate high enough that most shots go right through you. There are also some ninja bad guys (because of course there are) who fire extra-fast projectiles that are hard to keep away from.

Aside from wearables, there are also weapon attachments to get your guns more gunning: handy little devices that let you hit enemies on both sides of your targets, attachments that do more damage in general, and all kinds of stuff like that. Gear level is color-graded, with grey being basic and gold being the tippy-top (I think). You don't level up, but you can increase your weapon damage by finding or buying gunpower. You can also buy duct tape at various shops to increase the number of weapon attachment slots available to you.

Shooting stuff with your regular gun is nice and all, but sometimes you need more gun, and that’s where subweapons come in. These wonderful weapons of mass destruction require their own special kind of ammo but provide life-saving destructive benefits in return. You can get the first one in the tutorial, a flamethrower that torches everything in front of you in an arc. Other subweapons include a beam cannon and an area effect grenade launcher. In my runs, I was never low on subweapon ammo, and I could have abused their amazing power a lot more to make my life easier. All subweapons scale off of your main gun’s damage, so there are some additional tactics in choosing to bring the short-range, big shooter with you to maximize subweapon damage.

An action game without things to shoot is like a Terminator movie without Arnold—hint: they sucked—so EotC has throngs of generic bad guys to put holes in, and some of them do a little more than move around and fire at you. There are bad guys who shoot lots of bullets, bad guys who throw grenades that blow up in a radius after a few turns, and even bad guys who don’t shoot at all, but rather temporarily make their friends invulnerable, which is very annoying.

There are a few more bad guy types than that, though most are dedicated to the “shooting projectiles that fly across the screen towards you” category. Enemies are rolled out as levels progress, introducing you to them before they become commonplace. They all synergize pretty well to keep you on your toes. Also, some of the movies with Arnold still sucked.

The soundtrack is made up of totally radical chiptunes that get the blood flowing, but don’t take my word for it.

The grimy, oozy sewers of level 4:

The boiling, evil fortress of level 6:

EotC

features six linear levels, and then it's over. With no procedural level generation, it doesn’t take long to figure out the layout and speed along to victory. I had a good time, but my problem is trying to figure out who exactly the game is for. It’s short and trivialized in difficulty, and I’m not sure what Adventurepro still intends to do to branch out. It has every quality of a standard roguelike except level structure and length. I feel like the game has something of an identity crisis. If it’s meant to be a coffee-breaker, then 15 bucks is a bit much to ask. If it’s a competitive game to see who can finish it in the fewest turns, then it’s not going to attract too many people. Otherwise, it feels like a roguelike that’s cutting itself off from a lot of potential by staying linear.

I want to make it clear that I really enjoyed Eye of the Commando. The game is a blast, and it does a great job with its concepts, but I feel like it could be much more than what it is, and, as I've said, I'm not sure where exactly the developer intends to take it. Anyone interested in EotC should be aware that updates are sporadic, the game isn’t very hard once the loop is understood, and it’s very short. Otherwise, it’s a lot of fun.

The Necromancer’s Tale

by Psychic Software gives players a chance to explore the depths of the black arts in a story-driven RPG. The game takes place in the fictionalized Sovereign Monarchy of Rulsthen, around part of the area that would later become Yugoslavia. The player steps into the scene in 1733 as a young noble newly returned home, some time after the military leaders of Rulsthen turned to dark powers to drive back the Republic of Venice. Necromancer’s Tale is a tale of revenge and the consequences of delving into black magic to achieve it. If you’re into playing games for the story, then this might be for you.

The game begins with a lengthy, but skippable, narrated character creation sequence, which also serves as the backstory dump. It plays out like a choose-your-own-adventure, with the final result being your character. The entire thing is almost thirty minutes long, but if you don’t sit through it at least once, you’ll be left in the dark on a lot of plot points, the biggest being that one of Rulsthen's leaders decided to become a lich and start a separate war, which he lost. Now undead dwell in crypts, and people are afraid to leave the town at night.
TNT offers three difficulty modes. The biggest differences between them are that story mode autoresolves all combat and strategy mode makes it more difficult.

Stats are filed into three categories with three career paths, which play a role in your job occupation and some plot elements. Stats can’t be adjusted after character creation, and there’s no way to gain more later, so you’ll always be at a disadvantage during certain skill checks. All is not lost, though: whenever the game tosses you a check and you come up short, you can spend skill points to make up the difference. Skill points are replenished at the start of every chapter, but they are not cumulative. Some of the challenge becomes knowing when and where to spend points. I kept a mental map of areas that contained static skill checks I hadn’t resolved yet and then spent my leftover points before the end of the chapter (when I could predict they were about to close). Some checks are made during plot-essential moments. I came up short on a few of these and took a beating to my trust.

Social groups and individuals all have a level of trust, and it's essential to keep it as high as possible. A low trust level will lock you out of important information and easier routes through the game. It can also get you in trouble with the law and sent to the gallows. Trust is primarily gained from conversations, and picking the right and wrong choices will make small adjustments to the score. After awhile I started saving before each conversation because I was sick of bungling into trust loss and ticking people off to the point they wouldn’t speak to me.
Oftentimes, there are one or two optimal methods for achieving a plot goal that depends on your skills and trust, and then a brute-force method with consequences.

The majority of TNT is spent looking for clues on who murdered your father and learning more about the dark arts. Since the whole thing takes place in and around the city of Marns, that means a lot of backtracking. You go to work every day, talk to people for information, and run around filling in all the gaps for each chapter. Even with fast travel inside the city, there’s a ton of walking, and you can’t speed up the movement process outside of combat. I began to curse rather loudly when I realized that something I missed or someone I needed to talk to was, once again, outside of town.

This problem becomes even worse when time comes into play. A lot of events in the game require you to be somewhere at the right time. It’s impossible to miss important events, but the game is touchy about where and when you can move the clock. The game gets a little more generous with where you can wait as the game progresses. However, only one gate out of Marns is active at night, so if you need to be on the other side of the landscape to talk to someone, it means even more walking and the occasional fight.

Combat is turn-based on a hex grid. Most encounters are clearly marked out before you walk into them, but there are a few potential ambushes. Agility determines combat order and how many action points you have to spend. Health is automatically restored at the end of battle so there’s no resting downtime. I noticed that most enemies tend to hit very hard, and it doesn’t take much to die; all the more incentive to summon a gang of deaders to take the beating instead. Undead minions can be armed and armored, but there isn’t much armor to go around, and it never seemed to make much difference in how fast they got wiped out. The only things that matter are giving them weapons and keeping them between you and the bad guys.

You start off with two spells: one of them commands your undead, and the other gives you more magic points. Magic costs health, action points, and magic points, so if you aren’t careful, you can cast yourself into a one-hit kill. The farther away the spell is from your current position, the more likely it will fail.

This distance-based casting is another tedious trouble with TNT. Every undead requires the command spell to make them do anything. This isn’t much of a problem near the beginning when there are only a few lackeys to boss around, but towards the end I needed a small army to handle dangerous monsters and opposing small armies. It’s possible to speed up combat animations, but there’s no way to speed up having to move every single minion, hope the command spell doesn’t fizzle, and then walk them across the field to hit someone. It becomes pure agony, and there’s no reward for fighting except looting the loose change and weapons off of bodies and the bodies themselves. When a minion goes down for the count, it can be reanimated, so long as you’re willing and able to drag it back to a ritual site.

One of the first events in the game is discovering the same book of spells that let Rulsthen win the war. The heart of TNT’s story is the slow descent into madness for the want of doing something good. It begins with learning a recipe for a sleep potion, but as more troubles show up, it becomes necessary to uncover more of the spells in the book to deal with them. In fact, that’s the basic gameplay loop of TNT; some new problem arises that only a necromantic Deus Ex Machina can solve, so you give up a little more of yourself until merely being close to the local church makes you queasy.

For a game about necromancy, TNT didn’t let me animate my first skeleton until about a quarter into the game, and I didn’t get to keep it due to plot. Animating skeletons is yet another chore. Doing questionable acts like digging up graves or moving corpses will rouse the suspicion of the local townsfolk and requires the use of a spell to keep nosy villagers away. Setting up this spell takes a bit of time and animations and then it’s on to the digging.

Thanks to the Lich War, most graves are empty, since the church burned them to prevent the dead from getting back up. I had to dig up about half of the cemetery to find one, and the fun doesn’t end there. Despite being devoid of flesh and sinew, skeletons are apparently quite heavy because I moved at a crippled snail’s pace once I got one. Best of all, skeletons have something in their contract about not being animated in any old place. No, in order to make them bones walk around, you need a special ritual area to do the deed. There's a fine line between wanting the player to earn their skeleton raising merit badge, and wasting the player's time.

Some of the animations for doing all of this are sped up a bit after the first time, but the entire act of safeguarding my evil deeds, marking out the ritual site, digging up the graves, and lugging the body over to do the ritual is still a major task. I was so grateful when I finally learned how to animate zombies, which apparently don’t care where they’re animated and can be raised right on the spot. Also, to the best of my knowledge, there are no limits on how many undead you can raise and have following you about. When you don't want them following you, the best place to leave them is in the crypt, since nobody goes there out of fear—of the undead.

There are some pretty good tracks in here, particularly the combat themes and the witch's piece, but I need to make special mention of the music because the town theme started to annoy me. As I moved through the story, the theme for the city became the same but slightly spooky. The subtle change is nice at first, but it becomes tiresome towards the end because it plays for the majority of the game and could have done with a few more variations as the chapters moved along.

It’s fun becoming a necromancer and losing my marbles when the game isn't wasting my time with backtracking. I enjoyed learning more black magic while keeping up a façade. The subtle changes in flavor text were well done and it became a challenge to ensure I did the “right” thing to allay suspicions among the unsuspecting, foolish townspeople during my rise to power. There are a number of places where you can make the moral choice or one that helps you out; sometimes this can end up getting people close to you killed, but they’re just pawns, right?
One of the biggest highlights is attending the ball. Without revealing too much, it can be a real challenge to avoid saying the wrong thing to the wrong person if you aren’t paying careful attention to your dialog choices.

Exploration is a fun aspect of the game even though there aren’t too many places to uncover. There’s one or two optional locations in the game that are pure dungeon crawls with appropriate rewards for those who survive, but being a necromancer means having an army of cold bodies to do the dirty work for you.

Aside from the aforementioned tedium, player agency goes back and forth between being locked into what the developer wants and what you want. At one point early on in the game, I learned a spell that would spring a trap on trespassers. I needed to collect personal items from people I didn’t want getting caught in the spell. My first thought was, “Gee, I sure hope none of my closest friends walk into this thing and fill me with a terrible sense of hubris!” Needless to say, when I went to talk to said friends, there was no option to collect personal things from them. You can probably guess what happened later.

There are a couple of spells you learn that are “one and done” coupons for the story. You need to learn how to conduct a séance to talk to your dead father and then it never gets used again. Another spell lets you spread disease, but this is really just a moral choice in disguise.
There are also those that I would have liked to have punished out of my own principles but ultimately get away clean despite my supposed descent into darkness. There were also some I would have liked to have spared, but they ended up deceased in the name of the story because that’s what the developer had cooked up.

Player agency notwithstanding, there were major breaks from what was supposed to be 18th-century Europe. As a schoolteacher, when given the chance to physically discipline the orphans, it ends up being the bad choice despite being the norm of the day. Several characters are homosexual, and there’s an opportunity to pursue a same-sex romance. Homosexuality was still punishable by death around the time the game takes place. Furthermore, even if I wanted to play the role of the perverse, decadent noble, there’s no way some commoner is going to find it acceptable that I want to get into his pants.

More of the usual modern fantasy tropes ooze into TNT as well. Female military officers, dock workers, and a girlboss crime lord are some of the empowered women I encountered. The player’s half-brother is black for some strange reason, and there are a number of out-of-place merchants, one of whom bemoans the terrible plight of Senegal. It’s funny how you can be hanged for moving corpses or doing black magic in front of people, but nobody seems to bat an eye at homosexuality.

The entire point of placing a game into a historical setting, even one in altered history, is to create a scenario of how things might have gone differently with whatever magical boojums you’re using in your story, but when you violate the clear norms of society at the time, then you might as well put the game in a generic universe.

The game is not overwhelmingly woke, but there are enough elements that it’ll turn your stomach if you’ve lost all tolerance for it.

I still would have loved to have more agency over my actions, but there’s only so much you can do. As of the time of this review, there have been some quality-of-life updates, including making your minions lug the dead bodies around for you.
Overall, I enjoyed the game, but it would probably be a while before I tried out the changes. Sadly, I can’t try them because my key got revoked for some odd reason. Despite some wokeness and the fact that many spots in the game don’t respect the player’s time, it's quite a bit of fun. There’s some genuinely good writing in here, and games that explore the morality of evil deeds are few and far between. TNT is one of the very few games to explore necromancy and the consequences in-depth.
If you have a tolerance for woke tropes, weak combat, and playing games for the story, The Necromancer’s Tale will be an excellent game. Otherwise, you'll want to leave it buried.

Devil Spire Falls

is the sequel to the aptly named Devil Spire. Developed by Ithiro Sumi, DSF is a procedurally generated open-world RPG inspired by games such as Daggerfall. Devil Spire Falls is meant for anyone looking for open-world sandbox RPGs and Early Access games that might get finished.

Devil Spire

was a spiritual clone of FromSoftware’s first-person dungeon crawler King’s Field. KF made the player solve puzzles, slay monsters, and gain levels until he could get a powerful sword and slay the great evil. DS made several breaks from its Japanese PlayStation counterpart (the first King’s Field was never released in the states). These breaks included procedurally generated dungeons, character creation, and multiple play modes with different endings. The default mode of DS lets you scale the titular tower in order to conquer the evil by any means necessary. Magic, melee, and ranged combat padded out the player’s arsenal. The spire itself was sectioned off into different themes like ice caves, deserts, and technologically advanced steelworks, each with their own appropriate bosses. Devil Spire Falls has much greater ambitions than its predecessor. Instead of a dungeon crawler, Ithiro intends to make a world complete with cities, dungeons, and everything in between. For the moment, civilization is a bit sparse and there are only two dungeon types: a generic brickwork and the Devil Spire itself.

The world is made from scratch, and depending on the computer’s muscles and how big you want it, creation will take some time. The game recommends worlds at least 10 kilometers big. Smaller worlds generate faster, but have much worse balance, and because there’s not much content for the time being, larger worlds are a waste of space; they also risk crashing during the generation process. World smithing works a bit like Dwarf Fortress. A historical account is made as the world is born. The history consists of nothing but mountains, dungeons, and towns/villages because that's all there is. I only had one crash during generation, though the game had a big five-minute hang when I generated a massive world. You can create as many worlds as you like, but other than size there are no modifiers—yet.

Character creation consists of seven different classes, three different races, and (eventually) multiple origins that will determine your primary goal. The only one available right now is the Mysterious Stranger, which gives you the main quest to conquer a Devil Spire. Eight stats define your character, affecting everything from weapon swing speed to influencing others. In addition to starting stats, you can adjust your age, height, and weight. Age affects hair color and supposedly puts an upper limit on how long you live. Being really tall lets you see more but also makes you bump your head into the ceiling, while being really short means that arrow traps will shoot over your head. Being fat means taking more damage when falling from heights but not getting knocked back so far when someone wallops you. These traits can’t be changed once the game starts, so make sure you’re happy with what you’ve got.

Humans, reptilians, and felines inhabit the world of Devil Spire Falls. Humans are your typical balanced choice with no strengths or weaknesses. Reptilians have natural armor and swim better than the other races, but they’re terrible climbers and take a hit to charisma because they’re ugly. Felines see better in the dark and get bonuses to climbing and fist fighting, but can’t wear shoes or full helmets.

There can only be one character per world, but you can remake your character whenever you feel like. The max level of a starting character can be up to the highest level you’ve achieved in that world, maxing at fifty. Adjusting your level also adjusts your gear, so a high-level character starts with nice armor instead of rags. A newer update gave the option to regenerate the world, meaning you no longer have to trash whatever world you’re playing anymore when new content comes out. Finally, there’s the option of making your character immortal. Immortal characters wake up somewhere nearby after dying, with a loss levels and stats.

You’ve made your character, spent hours adjusting his boxy complexion, and now it’s time to explore. The starting location is determined by origin, and since there’s only one of those, it always dumps you in a forest (except one time where it dumped me in an ocean and I had to swim to the forest).

World distance determines difficulty. The farther you go from your origin point, the higher the level of everything you’ll encounter, from dungeons and villages to monsters and—that’s about it, and there are not too many monsters at this point. Bandits are the only things infesting the regular dungeons, and topside is slim pickings for monsters. During the day the only pests I encountered were manrooms and kobramani (I think I’m spelling that wrong). Manrooms are ugly mushroom men from the first game, and the kobra things are some kind of sea creature, so you won’t see them unless you go near the water. You can fast travel from the map, with the risk that you'll be interrupted by monsters along the way. Actually, every time I tried it I got attacked by invisible monsters so it ended up being useless.

Horrible things come out at night, like fire-breathing headless mules driven by revenge against the living for some reason. Gigantic abominations also crawl about the landscape in the dark, giving you a major boss battle in the middle of your run and the chance to get some nice loot, if your character doesn't get killed.

Not everything is out to murder you though. Wild horses can be tamed by feeding them, or by managing to stay on them long enough until they accept you. Horses not only let you get around faster, but they can carry a lot of junk. I managed to find and tame a unicorn by feeding it a small orchard’s worth of apples. Unicorns give all the benefits of a horse along with the ability to fly, and they’re pretty!

One newer addition to the game are roads, which lead to villages full of people waiting to die from fall damage or hostile fauna. The locals offer quests, basic goods, and a chance to train in skills. All NPCs belong to one or more factions, though factions themselves mean little right now, other than an increase in disposition. You can align yourself to certain groups by charming your way into the various leaders’ good graces. You gain promotions the same way, and once you’re a superior of a faction, you can recruit new members or promote people of lower rank.

Towns are the newest addition and a little different from villages. A bit bigger and walled in by fences, sometimes they have a nice well in the center where you can draw water. In every town I visited, every citizen was also a shopkeeper, with a larger selection of things to barter than your average villager. Sometimes towns have formal stores with signs out front explaining what they sell and the goods inside, waiting for you to try and steal them.

DSF

contains thirty-five skills with ten levels of proficiency each. Exploring them all in detail would take far too much time, but they can be divided up into combat, armor, crafting, and miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t quite fit anything else. The game uses the “get better by doing” system similar to The Elder Scrolls series. The more you jump, the better your acrobatics; the more furniture you make (or smash apart), the better your building skill gets. Every skill level comes with a new perk, such as the level ten riding perk, which lets you ride monsters.

As previously mentioned, you can also buy training from NPCs, provided they like you enough. Bartering for skills costs disposition rather than money. Depending on how high your charisma is, it can cost less to get training. Why asking someone to train you makes them like you less, I have no idea. I guess people in this world really don’t like to be bothered. The same thing applies to asking questions; each question lowers disposition slightly, not that most people have anything useful to tell you at the moment.

You can raise disposition by chatting, trading, and doing quests. Giving people expensive objects is the fastest way to get people to like you, and you’ll never be hurting for loot to trade once you get going. When you max out disposition with someone, you can recruit them, provided you have a high enough speech skill for the follower perk. Followers will leave if you displease them, but there’s another speech perk that makes them permanently loyal. I tended not to bring any help along because they get in the way more often than not. Gaining skills gets you experience; after a few levels of skills, you’ll gain an experience level. Each level gives you 2 attribute points to spend however you see fit. Where you spend them is important because the only way to increase things like mana and hit points outside of items is by raising the appropriate attribute. You don’t get better merely by leveling up, so you can be as strong as an ox and still get laid out in a single blow if you only have 100 hit points.

After a busy day of adventuring, there’s nothing better than relaxing in the comfort of your own home. Actually, building a house is a pain in the rear and not that useful. Villages and dungeons often have all of the amenities you could want, and nobody seems to care if you barge into his home in the middle of the night to use the anvil. But if you really want, you can make your own house.

A house requires building skill and lots of wood, stone, and grass. Getting said materials is similar to how it’s done in Minecraft, i.e., smashing trees and rocks with your weapon or bare fists until they shatter into pieces and collecting up the remains. Once you have enough stuff together, it’s a matter of finding a nice place to plop down your new home and then a fade to black in place of hard labor. Building anything passes time, and it takes three days to build a house. You can make it out of various different materials, and I assume the better the material, the more durable it is.

For those who want to go all the way with the homesteading, there’s also farming! Although finding the proper gardening tools can be difficult, and it's another matter of usefulness versus desire. You can do it if you really want to grow your own crops to process into things, but for now you can often find or buy enough of what you want without it. This is another one of those features that will probably be more valuable later, but for now it’s more of a curiosity.

Equipment in DSF is divided into levels. Different categories of armor and weapons (depending on respective skill type) can be levels one to ten. You can also forgo weapons and armor altogether for unarmed and unarmored skills or even gain improvisational weaponry skills by beating on people with anything not normally classified as a weapon. Equipment can be crafted provided you have high enough skill, the materials, and the proper workstation. To date, I’ve yet to find the highest-level crafting materials in the wild, but I might not be looking hard enough. Beating on enemies and being beaten lowers the durability of your things, and eventually you will hear a heartbreaking shatter as your precious level 10 cuirass falls apart. Damaged and broken gear can be repaired the same way it gets made; if you have the raw material it’s made out of and the skill, you can fix it. With a high enough crafting skill, you can also conduct field repairs by combining your damaged item with another item of the same type and material (copper weapons to other copper weapons, crystal armor to other crystal armor). Higher-level material is pretty rare, and all crafting goods are heavy to lug around. So your precious crystal musket of fatigue might be bound for the junkpile.

Items and spells can be placed on hotkeys, and it's probably a good idea to do so. The game pauses when you open your inventory, but nobody wants to dig through a huge list of stuff in the middle of battle.

All weapons have a wind-up time. The bigger the weapon, the longer the wind-up. That includes enemy attacks as well. Strike your foe before they strike you, or try to dodge or block their attacks. The more dexterity you have, the faster you wind up. The stronger you are, the faster you swing. All attacks cost stamina, so after a few swings you’ll be exhausted, but this applies to your opponent as well. Dodging costs less stamina than blocking but has to be timed (higher levels of dodge skill give you a chance to auto-dodge). Getting hit comes with the risk of getting knocked down, leaving you wide open to attack. Certain skill perks can let you get back on your feet faster, and there’s always the chance of knocking your opponent down as well. You can also kick them backwards (a skill unto itself) to gain some breathing room. Most fights are over pretty fast because the enemy AI is fairly dumb and the player tends to hit like a truck. Harder difficulties even the odds, though, and enemies with magic can be a real threat.

Magic in DSF is different from any other game I’ve seen. Instead of your bog-standard Vancian system or endless pages of spells that become obsolete as you gain new ones, each spell you know takes up a certain amount of spell memory. Spells all have levels, ranging from one to ten. The higher the rank, the more memory it takes up. When the number of spells you know starts to overwhelm your memory, your failure rate increases until it becomes impossible to cast any spells. High-ranking versions of spells aren’t necessarily a good thing. A high-ranking heal spell could heal five hundred points of health, but if you only have a max health of two hundred, it’s a waste, and it hogs up spell memory. The same thing applies to combat spells; overkill isn’t always a good thing, and depending on what you’re casting, your spells can hit you as easily as the enemy. I’ve managed to burn myself to death several times with my own fireballs.

Spells can be made up of many different effects due to the procedural nature of the game. You might find something that summons uncooked dough while increasing your strength, spells for teleporting to the east part of the world and restoring stamina, or spells for summoning monsters and making a pair of generic boots. Magic is cast from grimoires and spell scrolls. Scrolls let you cast any spell free of charge with no chance of failure, while grimoires let you memorize them for later. You learn the effect of any spell you cast, no matter the source, so individual spell effects can be written onto blank scrolls and grimoires later on.

Magic is also tied into the enchantment system. Any spell effect you know can also be placed onto an item, provided you have the proper gemstones, altar, and skill (enchanting). I made some very unbalanced regeneration equipment that pushed my health and stamina into the thousand range, and I also made some magical jumping gear that let me almost fly—minding the sudden stop at the end.

The soundtrack is an eclectic selection of free tunes from various artists. Some are downright weird, others are fitting, if generic to their setting. Outdoor music changes with the location, biome, and time of day. So far, I haven’t heard any bangers.

In a typical run I make a character and jump like a maniac up a few steep hills to power up my acrobatics quickly because being able to make long jumps and double jumps is great. I move inland, hitting up dungeons as I go and trading what I don’t need to NPCs for training. Dungeons are really small, sometimes only one or two rooms big, though I imagine later on they’ll get more complex. The Devil Spire is the only one that’s massive. The game is also pretty easy on normal, so I tend to play on hard, and there’s a helpful popup explaining how each difficulty level modifies the game. One thing I search for is cider since it’s one of the most common quests NPCs ask for, and it’s exploitable since the cider ends up in the NPC’s inventory once you complete it. You can trade for it back and repeat the quest over and over for easy experience and rewards. Occasionally they’ll ask for a weapon instead or for you to go assassinate someone, including themselves.

Once I’m far along enough not to die from something foolish, I steal a horse or two from a nomad camp. Horses play a valuable role in the game not just as transportation but as pack animals. Sometimes you’ll come across some wild ones, but they tend to be much lower level than the ones kept by nomads, and they don’t level up. There also doesn’t seem to be any real consequence for stealing horses, for now. At about level 40 I hit the spire, and unlike the dungeons in the rest of the game, this one could rub shoulders with the confusing layouts of the best Daggerfall dungeons. The spire has great loot inside, especially at the end, and once you’re done, you can do it again. A new spire always appears when the old one is destroyed, and they scale up in level with each one you take down.

Devil Spire Falls

obviously has a long way to go, but the game is already fun. Everything else hinges on Ithiro continuing to fill out the rest of the game, and for the moment content is coming at a regular pace. It’s already more balanced ,and the path to godhood can no longer be achieved in a few hours of exploitative play. The dev seems to be listening to the community, and players have a vote on what gets put in next. As of this review there's been one additional update to NPCs. This update adds new jobs like guards to protect stores, stopping to eat, and going home to sleep (and not dying when they do). The patch also adds a bit more penalty for crimes and tones down the exploitive problems in bartering (no more instant love for trading a few trinkets). I’d recommend Devil Spire Falls to anyone who’s willing to take the risk on something that isn’t finished yet because it has a lot of potential and the developer seems to know what he’s doing. The asking price is decent, and it’s competent right out of the gate. Like any EA title, it’s just a matter of waiting to see if it lives up to expectations.

If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Self, I really wish there was some way I could manage a hotel in some far-flung corner of the cosmos, waiting on Studio Ghibli rejects while doing all the micromanagement as they leave me a two-star rating on Cosmo-Yelp.”, then Ancient Forge’s new management sim, Hotel Galactic, might be the game you’ve been jonesing for. Anyone who’s interested in easy-going management sims with cutesy-looking characters might find HG enjoyable, if the game ever gets the dozens upon dozens of bugs fixed.


The game comes with a sandbox mode I didn’t really mess with and the story mode. In story mode, the player pilgrim meanders into a run-down hotel on a floating island once managed by a grumpy, melancholic ghost named Gustav—now reduced to haunting his old job site while complaining about the good old days alongside his non-deceased friends. So begins a lengthy tutorial showing you all of the controls bit by bit.


Hotel Galactic bills itself as a “cozy management sim with a heartfelt tale.” The player takes on the role of an ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally ambiguous hotel management spirit. The game opens with a difficult-to-follow backstory about weird spirit beings called pilgrims (you) and an animated fly-through of space that probably took most of Ancient Forge’s budget and might explain why they’re charging so much for a game so unfinished. The whole thing is in Japanese with English subtitles, but the subtitles ended up out of sync—when they bothered to show up at all—so I was left in the dark about the bigger picture. Let’s just say that the player is a meddlesome spirit who’s decided to get into the hospitality business.


Mechanics are introduced through the plot, along with the generic bad guys, the Galactic Peace Corps, which is some kind of government/police/bureaucracy that is never clearly defined and has nothing better to do but harass and extort you as the hotel gets off the ground. I only got visited by them one time before my game became ruined beyond repair, but I imagine they become a major thorn in your side later on.




Everything is presented in a cutaway side perspective, giving you a pseudo-2D view of the world that doesn’t rotate. The WASD keys let you move in four cardinal directions, and the middle mouse lets you scroll awkwardly at ludicrous speed. The upper left-hand side of the UI shows your current number of staff, rooms, and guests. The right keeps track of time and when the different kinds of ships are due.

You can pick up your little minions and drop them into various rooms to force them to change priorities. You can also view your staff’s various skills and adjust their priority levels accordingly from the roster; then you hope everyone does what you want them to do.


Guests arrive nightly on a ship and check out in the morning after a certain number of days (featured above their heads or highlighted in their rooms). Once a week, a workers' ship arrives carrying new hirelings from various species, with additional ones introduced as the plot unfolds. I assume each species favors different skill types. In the end I hired every single one I had room for because I needed every warm body I could get, and beyond the hiring fee you never pay them a dime. Staff can gain skills over time, or at least certain skills. Several of my galley slaves gained research, but not much else. Staff also age up, but I didn't play long enough to see this in action because it takes a lot of time, so I don't know if they go to the old folks home or something like that. The named NPCs on the employee roll don't age, though, so I assume your regular staff eventually retire. A merchant ship also shows up twice a week with a random assortment of goods: ingredients, seeds for produce, furniture, blueprints, etc. — giving you something to spend your hard-earned money on to stay afloat.



It’s tough to be a god, since most menial tasks aren’t automated. Cleaning beds, delivering meals to guests, and watering produce have to be commanded from on high. You’d think that a trained staff would know when it’s time to bring food to a guest from the kitchen, but no, these tasks require your divine intervention. That's all in addition to watering crops, cutting down trees, mining stone, taking food orders, crafting junk, and anything else that needs doing. I suppose this constitutes part of the fun and interaction. Nevertheless, I’m hoping that there’s a way to automate some of this later.


If things get too busy, you can temporarily close the hotel, though this doesn’t work the way you’d expect. Instead of closing the building off to new guests, it puts everything into suspended animation. Time stops moving, and any guests currently in your hotel become stuck there. Trapped guests don’t eat your food (which would be an exploitable form of income), but they do dirty up your sheets. The main reason to close the hotel is to gather up available resources, clean things, and do other prep work that needs to be done before facing the next wave of guests.




The hotel is puny to start with. Rooms are unlocked as the plot dictates, and each room has a minimum and maximum size (some of them can be increased through research). There’s not much space to work with, especially since the trees out back take up a lot of it. Trees can be uprooted, but only after the technology is researched. So the only way to go is up, and even that is limited, since you can’t build any new elevators until those get researched too. I’m going to mention this again later, but I’d like to point out the disastrous layout of the hotel. Your first kitchen is in the basement, so whatever dining room you make has to be at least one floor up, and elevators move slowly considering how much foot traffic the place gets. Rooms get unlocked one-by-one. In construction mode you map out where you want it and wait for your not-wagies to bring the materials. Several new rooms and mechanics are introduced through dialogue segments. One of Gustav's friends will want to speak to you (usually from a very specific place that they'll walk to before you can actually start the chat) and then you'll get a new quest to do whatever it is they want.





Cooking is one of the other big features in Hotel Galactic. The menu consists of whatever you toss together in the hopes of pleasing guests. Different species have likes and dislikes, though I noticed that they tended to go for the newest item on the menu. Since I was at the mercy of whatever came in on the merchant ship and my limitless supply of peach trees, everything on the menu had peaches in it. At the start, you can only have three active items on the menu, but this can be expanded through research.

Ingredients can be prepared in different ways. Boiling and chopping are the only options to start with, which I assume affects the quality in some way. It also changes the cooking time for each dish. You can adjust the price for each menu item, but I didn’t mess with that since guests never complained about prices and I wasn’t hurting for money. Staff need to eat as well, but they require bento rations from a ration station. The game starts you off with one station, which can hold up to ten meals at a time. Keeping it stocked will turn into a full-time job as you get more employees.





Keeping guests happy is the path forward in Hotel Galactic, since it’s the only way to harvest alien goo. This goo consists the residual happy feelings guests have when they receive good service, and it all gets siphoned into your research station. You get it from serving meals and when they check out, but there might be some other places as well that I didn’t notice. Each species provides a different color of goo, and you’ll need loads of it. Guests have a full range of needs, though at the start you’ll only be able to take care of the most basic: food, bladder, and sleep. Later on, you’ll be able to build bathhouses and, presumably, spas, arcades, and a range of other facilities to handle other wants to get your hotel rating higher. As guests check out, they leave a rating and a tip; the happier the guest, the higher the rating, and the bigger the tip. Also, the more goo you secretly absorb for your diabolical experiments. Once you have enough, you can start researching new technologies to improve things; just try not to think about where it came from.


Each tier of progress is gated behind a certain number of research projects. Once you research enough stuff in one era, you click on the big padlock icon to unlock the next one and continue the story. The problem with this method of progress is that you’re at the mercy of the RNG gods. Need a certain color of goo, but the wrong species is getting off the boat? Tough luck. Staff also have their own needs and wants, though right now it doesn’t seem to matter much. Employees get happy and unhappy, but work all the same. I have no idea if they can eventually break or walk off the job. I did have several of them fall asleep on the floor, but I chalked that up to bad pathing. I’m just grateful you don’t have to pay them.





Everything takes some kind of resource. Food needs ingredients, furniture needs raw materials, and workers need tools. It’s all part of the circle of life, or in the case of Hotel Galactic, one long, big strip of land. HG starts you off with trees, rocks, and fiber. Trees produce wood and peaches. Rocks produce stone (duh). The grass that provides fiber needs research first, though, in order to get sickles. Over time, you’ll get better tools and craft stations and process your materials into better forms. From time to time, the island will get pelted with meteors and space wrecks, providing additional iron and scrap. When the plot progresses far enough, you’ll rejoin another segment of the island to your own and start farming. With farming unlocked, you get access to four seedbeds that need to be watered once per day and occasionally weeded. They can also be fertilized, but I never got my hands on any. Eventually, you’ll get a nice healthy plant of some kind and a chance to harvest produce—at least in theory.




Nothing in particular stands out amidst the generic, Eastern-centric soundtrack. Bouncy, cheery tunes carry most of the action, and specific musical cues herald the arrival of the guest ship. All of it is pleasant, but none of it is memorable.




The side perspective causes its own share of woes. Furniture has a nasty tendency of not stacking properly from any other position except the back wall. For example, food and storage crates will line up perfectly fine when lined up against the back of a room, but end up haphazardly piled when put on the left or right, or even end up all over the middle of the floor. Objects in the foreground block your view with no guarantee that the cursor will pick up on any object behind it. I had to move things multiple times to make sure there wasn’t anything sitting on the ground obscured. There were multiple instances where no earthly (spiritual?) force could compel my workers to do what I wanted, so all manner of inconvenience befell my hotel, such as guests waiting over nine hours for their meals, the laundry going undone for days, and machinery going missing in transit. Worst of all, you can’t slap them to make them work faster.


Sometimes resources would fall “out of range” and remain on the playing field forever. Other objects would become “cursed”, lying in plain sight, but put away. My produce often needed to be rooted out because they could no longer be watered due to a perpetual watering order that I’d never actually given and couldn’t cancel. Quests constantly stalled out, and sometimes, when I moved staff, they’d fall through the world; fortunately, the developers had some kind of catch for that, and they’d reappear eventually. The hotel layout itself is abysmal. Whose idea was it to have the kitchen in the basement? You can build another kitchen later on, but by that time you’ll already be pressed for space, and I wasn’t able to rezone preexisting rooms, only demolish. That’s when my game came to a tragic end. See, I’d reached the end of my actual building range without realizing it, so I decided to demolish two rooms I’d made so I could install a new elevator to speed things up, but the two demolished rooms never went away; I got stuck with two unusable ghost rooms instead. Elevators themselves are terribly slow, and there are no stairs or ladders, so there are no alternatives for getting people up and down the hotel (as far as I know).


Many guests will often not get off the ship until you save and reload the game. If you don’t do this, they’ll happily stay there and take all of their profits and goo with them. In fact, most bugs can only be fixed this way, so I wound up with a massive save list.
Item crafting can stall if you run out of resources and the game even warns you about this issue in the tutorial. An unfinished item will clog up the crafting queue, and you’d never know about it unless you checked the problem yourself. This is especially bad if you have some of those “cursed” resources I mentioned lying around because the game counts those among your inventory, but your staff will never collect them.





In other words, Hotel Galactic is a buggy mess, and there’s no way Ancient Forge didn’t know before shoving it out into the wild, using Early Access as a shield; the gaming public hasn’t been very forgiving, and the title currently sits at 41% (mixed) on Steam. This isn’t the first game Ancient Forge has released in a poor state. Their tactical RPG Glorious Companions sat in limbo for six years before being released with showstopper bugs. Said bugs were allegedly fixed, but then the game was abandoned with no further content updates. According to Ancient Forge, Glorious Companions was always a side project. I have no problems with this excuse, except that they were selling an unfinished game the entire time.

The developers have released a repair roadmap for Hotel Galactic to try and win back goodwill and confidence. The first week of this repair has already passed, but I can say the game has a long way to go to be in a playable state. It’s understandable that there will be bugs in any early access title, but this is blatantly unplayable and in pieces, and I’m not talking about placeholders or missing content.





I was dangerously close to being entertained when things weren’t breaking down, but I can’t comment on how long that would last since the gameplay loop was constantly disrupted by bugs. As previously mentioned, the research method can be a major bottleneck to progress because you can’t force a desired species to stay at the hotel (at far as I know). Some elements of Hotel Galactic aren’t in yet, which is to be expected. If everything gets fixed, then the game will probably be a lot more fun, probably. As of right now, though, I couldn’t recommend this to anyone, especially at the price they’re charging. Put your vacation on hold for at least six months to a year and wait for a discount to see how this pans out.


https://game.page/hotelgalactic-earlyaccess/RPGHQ

Dustwind Resistance is a tactical real-time, mission-based game heavily influenced by Fallout: Tactics. It features a single-player campaign, a skirmish mode, and the ability to create user-generated maps via an editor. This review focuses primarily on the campaign mode, which I played on normal difficulty, though I will highlight differences in the skirmish mode where relevant.

Story

The story of Dustwind Resistance centers on Jake Kowalski, a farmboy; his dog Diesel; and later his wife Amanda and Diego, the son of the Governor. Their community is attacked by an army of bandits led by the story’s antagonist, known as "The Warlord.”

The creatively named antagonist sets the tone for the narrative. The campaign revolves around defending against the bandit onslaught. You start by protecting Jake’s farm, which serves as the game’s main hub for trading, and rescuing surrounding communities before confronting the Warlord himself.

The story is lackluster. This might be forgivable in a tactics game, but the narrative is filled with cartoonish tropes that drain any sense of seriousness or stakes from the experience.

Gameplay

Dustwind Resistance’s gameplay is a mixed bag. It improves on some shortcomings of Fallout: Tactics, but introduces new problems through its mission design, making the experience often unenjoyable.

The character skill system is well-designed compared to Fallout: Tactics, which struggled with a skill system rooted in its narratively complex predecessors. In Dustwind Resistance, all skills feel useful. Skills are divided into "attack", "defense", and "other" categories, covering the game’s three weapon types (melee, light, and heavy weapons), environmental skills like mechanics for disarming traps, and character improvements for movement, perception, and defensive bonuses.

The “Virtues and Vices” section includes traits similar to Fallout’s perks, which aren’t level-restricted. Virtues are positive traits, like faster reloading or immunity to critical failures when disarming mines. Vices are negative traits, such as reduced stealth due to a character’s stench, which grant extra skill points.

Characters earn skill points after each mission, which can be freely distributed to skills or traits. However, that means that upgrades never occur mid-mission, forcing you to upgrade characters at the mission’s start. This is problematic because fast-scaling enemies punish players focusing on environmental skills, and the inability to adapt to in-mission circumstances feels restrictive. Additionally, the lack of XP rewards for killing enemies makes combat feel pointless in a game with a leveling system.

The enemy roster primarily consists of raiders, with some robots and hyenas, lacking the variety of Fallout: Tactics. While the 3D models don't come close to the iconic sprite work of Fallout, Dustwind Resistance excels at making enemies visually distinct, allowing players to identify threats at a glance. This is skillfully executed and necessary for gameplay clarity but doesn’t elevate the overall experience.

The campaign features 10 missions with decent variety, though the first mission—a forced tutorial featuring Jake and Amanda as children—is unappreciated.

From the outset, Dustwind Resistance is overly direct with mission objectives, using a compass and large arrows to guide players. While Fallout: Tactics could be vague about objectives, Dustwind’s “paint-by-numbers” approach feels out of place in a tactical genre that thrives on unknown variables. The map screen, nearly identical to Fallout: Tactics, is thematically inappropriate for Dustwind’s smaller-scale story, and the military-like mission styles clash with the narrative tone.

Most missions involve reaching a specific map point, killing enemies, or finding an NPC, with smaller tasks like locating gate switches. While the map design and objectives are fine, the gameplay connecting these elements is problematic.

Fallout: Tactics is a relatively easy game, all things considered, which the developers of Dustwind Resistance have accurately identified and tried to fix. In most cases in Fallout: Tactics, you can use defensive strategies and baiting to create manageable encounters. Environmental hazards exist but are not particularly deadly; mines, for example, only disable vehicles. In Dustwind Resistance, however, having your vehicle destroyed by a mine results in a game over.

Many issues have been superficially addressed but make the experience significantly worse. Three aspects are used repeatedly, later even stacked cumulatively upon each other:

• In general, the game is vastly more deadly; it’s common for a character, whether NPC or player-controlled, to be knocked out in one or two shots. While this isn’t inherently an issue, as it could encourage tactical play, the game doesn’t provide adequate tools to support such strategies.
• Early on, the game introduces snipers—enemies with maximum range that deal massive damage and suggest you try to circumvent them. This is hardly possible in later missions due to map design or multiple snipers covering all angles. Later, robotic snipers, which are far more robust and have greater weapon range than your characters, are often invisible until they shoot and kill one of your characters.
• Dustwind Resistance has enough mines to make superpowers blush with envy and Just like in Fallout: Tactics, they are not fun to navigate.
  Even a character with maximized mine-disarming skills takes 5–10 seconds to detect a mine, which is annoying in itself when you encounter the many corridors filled with them.

With mine detection and disarming time combined with the sniper situation, it’s barely possible to either shoot the snipers or defuse the mines. Attempting to outmaneuver snipers with a dash into cover often ends with characters exploding on a mine.

Scarce skill points force specialization in soft skills (like mine disarming) alongside combat abilities, but this leads to frustrating scenarios, such as a mine specialist triggering a nearby not yet spotted mine while moving to disarming another. Without a second disarmer, you’re forced to quickload or accept a party member (likely your dog) exploding into bits.

While later I managed to have all characters use sniper rifles, which alleviates the above issues somewhat, Dustwind Resistance counters this with hordes of melee “trash mobs” that overwhelm you in unbelievable numbers.

Beating the last two stages felt like eating razors. Game design-wise, it’s somewhat admirable; stacking all these mechanics into one cumulative challenge makes sense in-universe and is tactically sound, but the game doesn’t provide adequate solutions for its proposed problems.

Consider this in-game scenario: robotic snipers with more range than any of your weapons cannot be outgunned or seen without trial-and-error quickloading. Rushing forward into cover to take potshots often ends with you triggering a mine. Managing to shoot or attempting to flank triggers around 30 melee enemies that your snipers, limited by minimum range, cannot handle.

These challenges are beatable, of course, but they’re not fun. I wouldn’t be able to beat the game in Ironman mode; the only reasonable way to play is by spamming quicksaves.


The defense and vehicle missions deserve mention. I was excited for the defense missions, as the game’s design suits defensive play. However, the second defense mission is among the hardest, crushing any sense of power fantasy. Enemies cleverly target defensive structures or low-range fighters with snipers while rushing your snipers with durable melee combatants. Mines are ineffective, as enemies seem to avoid them, and defensive options like barricades are easily bypassed or used as cover by enemies. The two available turrets are strong but insufficient, turning the mission into a micromanagement-heavy repair and revive exercise.

The first vehicle mission, featuring the Scrap-Truck, is the only mission I enjoyed. The vehicle is a fun, resilient weapon platform, allowing players to assign a driver and gunner and control whether the vehicle’s gun or characters’ weapons are used. Navigating areas, finding switches to open gates, (just like Fallout's Macomb), and clearing enemies is genuinely engaging, though vehicle controls are as clunky as those in Fallout: Tactics.

Overall, Dustwind Resistance has a few moments of enjoyment but fumbles execution in nearly every aspect. At its best, it’s a callback to the quirky Fallout: Tactics, but it fails to capitalize on its improved mechanics in a fun way.

Design

Graphically, Dustwind Resistance is serviceable. The environments are well-designed for their purpose and evoke the intended aesthetic, but the need for visual clarity in chaotic missions results in garish colors and cartoonish weapon and character designs, sacrificing flavor. Character artwork is washed out and lacks detail, possibly to mask artistic shortcomings.

The soundscape and music are minimal. Sound effects are adequate, but the sparse, slow ambient guitar tracks fail to energize the experience. A high-energy combat theme during fights could have elevated the gameplay, but the drab audio reinforces the game’s mediocrity.

The humor, attempting to emulate Fallout’s style, misses the mark. Elements like “Frogpigs” (a stand-in for Fallout’s Brahmin) and a “tactical plunger” weapon feel unnecessary and forced.

While culture war critique will not affect the score, It would feel wrong not to comment on it.

The game’s character designs align with contemporary identitarian trends. Jake and his father, both dark-skinned, have the surname Kowalski, which suggests Polish or Eastern European origins without explanation. Amanda, Jake’s White wife, has a solo prison-break mission where she provokes a jailer by mocking his fear of girls before easily defeating him, leaning into Feminist tropes. Diego and a temporary companion, Jeff, are also dark-skinned, while the Warlord is, of course, White, aligning with the current zeitgeist.

Odds and Ends

The game suffers from its limited roster of four predefined characters, limiting the ability to change up builds across playthroughs. On the other hand, Skirmish mode allows up to six custom characters that can be created from scratch, offering more flexibility.

Dogs, like Diesel, are interesting companions but weirdly implemented. They use specific melee weapons and armor, have increased movement speed and perception, and move as if crouched. However, their ability to climb ladders, use medicine, throw grenades, drive vehicles, and operate vehicle guns breaks immersion, as they’re functionally indistinguishable from humans and often look absolutely goofy.


Skirmish mode includes several missions and an editor. While I only tried one mission, the character creation is robust, allowing players to choose combat robots, “Titans” (this game’s mutant equivalent), dogs, and humans. This extends replayability post-campaign.

The game’s cartoonish atmosphere—spanning narrative, design, and gameplay—clashes with its attempt to present a serious story about military tactics and war. Fallout: Tactics elegantly balances its military operation framework within a rich setting, with systems like recruitment, mission briefings, and side objectives that enhance the narrative and journey. Dustwind Resistance lacks these, and while it smooths some of Tactics’ quirks, it falls short of what made the original a compelling game.

Conclusion

I did not enjoy Dustwind Resistance. Despite my love for Fallout: Tactics, Dustwind Resistance fails to deliver on its inspiration. Its improvements are undermined by frustrating game design. Aspects like mine handling are nearly identical to Tactics’ most annoying mechanics, while the flavor and systems that made the original fun are absent. The result is a boring, condensed experience that left me wanting to replay Fallout: Tactics instead.

The game isn’t offensively bad, but its mediocrity and lack of fun make it hard to recommend. By mission three, I was so bored I nearly quit, only continuing to complete this review. I’d rather do laundry. I’d score it a 4/10, using the full scale (unlike some gaming journalists). Instead, I recommend Fallout: Tactics, a genuinely good game, though I understand purists may dislike its departure from Fallout’s RPG roots.