Rome Total War: Alexander will probably be one of the shortest reviews I’ve written on this fine repository for inane gaming takes. Solely because there really isn’t much here to discuss. If you’ve played Rome Total War, then this is basically the same game but considerably slimmed down. The first and most obvious reason for this is because we don’t have Rome, or indeed most of Europe in this version. Instead we have the Macedonians who mainly use Greek units. The Persians who use Eastern units and then a handful of weak barbarian civilizations. They use Barbarian units (as expected), but mostly only last for a few turns until they get destroyed. That’s about it, as far as the faction roster goes. You can play as the Indians, but they’re not in the campaign so… they’re only available for the multiplayer mode. As for the units themselves, while the faction roster is limited this expansion does feature around 25 new units. Mostly for the Macedonians. While some of them are fairly commonly used, a lot of them are still quite similar to existing units. Which meant that in my experience I was mainly Phalanx-maxing. To be fair to the game, the new units are nice. Even if most of them are very similar to existing units, you can already use as Greece. There are a few new cavalry units for example, but they function just like cavalry normally does. As for the rest of the rest of the new content, well… There is a new campaign, six new historical missions and that’s it. If you wanted to play as anyone other than the Greeks, then that’s not an option. At least outside of skirmishes and the multiplayer mode.

Which begs the obvious question “how’s the campaign then?”. Well it’s honestly pretty good if a little short. This is partly due the 100 turn limit, although I found I only needed two-thirds of that time to finish it. Basically you need to conquer a set list of provinces, while being at war with literally everyone else. The enemies are all allied with each other, but it will generally descend into you grinding down the Persians until they collapse. This is due to the rest of the factions being weaker barbarians. Who only have a province or two while the Persians control most of the map. As for the rest of the game, the battle AI is a bit better than in the base game so that’s nice. Although I do think it would’ve been interesting to get to play as… well anyone else. As it stands you’ll play through the campaign once, and that’s kind of it as far as the expansion goes. I mean sure there are those 6 historical battles. Plus the skirmish/multiplayer modes, but for me Rome Total War: Alexander feels a bit short. It took me around 10 hours to finish the Greek campaign, and then only a few more to get through the historical battles so it’s a short but sweet experience. The campaign itself doesn’t really have any particular twists, instead playing as a standard game albeit in a new map.

And honestly that’s about it! I’m really struggling to think of anything else that’s really worth mentioning. As I’ve said, there are some extra historical battles which is always nice and there is a new campaign that’s admittedly fairly short. There are some new units but they don’t feel that new. The sieges are the same. The AI has been improved slightly. Uhhh the game is still great like the base game and uhhh…. that’s about it. I guess I could gripe about the game being unstable on Windows 11. Or how the Steam Screenshot function barely works any more, but honestly who cares. This is a game that’s close to twenty years old at the time of writing, and it holds up well.

In conclusion then, Rome Total War: Alexander is an enjoyable if short piece of extra content. If you loved playing as the Greeks, you’ll love this expansion. Ultimately I’d recommend it to anyone who has played the base game. Although it won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already like Rome: Total War.

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Quick Note: It shouldn’t matter, but I’m reviewing the Xbox One version of this game – just in case it’s AMAZING on PS4 or something.

Oh Jagged Alliance: Rage, the critics and fans of the series have not been kind to you. You were to be a spirited spin-off of a venerable classic PC series, revitalised for a new age and of course a new customer base. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about this game. Even I can’t be too nice to a game that has so many issues, that it’s honestly concerning. I try to keep my reviews relatively short, but to describe all of the flaws in Jagged Alliance: Rage would take up basically my normal quota of 5ish paragraphs (plus 5ish lovely pictures). So I’ll just rattle them off in quick succession during this deftly written opener. The game looks mediocre, runs badly, crashes every few hours, has incredibly basic writing and characterisation, wastes a ton of time on inventory management, has limited enemy variety, inconsistent mechanics, a wonky difficulty curve, weird allocation of resources, some baffling design decisions and limited enemy AI. If (and it’s a big if) you can overlook all of that then you’ll find a decent turn based strategy experience. Now I know what you’re thinking “Big Boaby how am I meant to overlook the fact that apparently everything in this game is rubbish?”

Well I’ll tell you! You see, Jagged Alliance: Rage is an incredibly rough game that desperately needed a bit more time in development. I can easily envisage a version of the game that doesn’t run bad, doesn’t crash, has a bit more tweaking with regards to the inventory, item drops and enemy AI and would therefore be pretty solid. Unfortunately in spite of my sagely wisdom, I have to acknowledge the reality which is that this is the game we got, not necessarily the game we wanted. Despite this seemingly rushed (or underfunded?) development, the game still has a solid core where you are juggling stealth and normal combat in each level. Stealth is slightly overpowered, to the point that you’ll want to use it as often as possible as it grants instant killed at no cost. However, stealth also requires you to be out of position and understand the enemy patrol routes, which often requires an odd mix of haste and patience. You need to close the gap, while remaining undetected because sneaking is an alternative form of movement which eats up action points like nobody’s business. Before continuing I should explain that Jagged Alliance: Rage is a turn based game, where you move all of your guys and then the enemy gets to move all of theirs. Each character gets around 12ish action points per turn, with movement, shooting and using items all sharing this action point pool. You’ll therefore only be able to move a maximum of 12 spaces per turn (the map is split into grids of squares) or shoot around 4 times at the absolute maximum (many weapons require 5+ AP per shot). Enemies are relatively blind, but they can react to nearby gunfire, spot bodies and of course radio in your position which triggers an alarm which causes every enemy on the map to bum-rush your last recorded position. Stealth is therefore a great way to get kills without taking damage, but it involves a great deal of risk. Now you might be tempted to skip the stealthy route, but frankly because all of the enemies share vision and some of them are snipers and they all bum-rush you – things generally don’t go well. That’s not to say your necessarily stuffed, as you can make use of sight lines or bait them by having one guy distract them while the rest of your team sneaks around to deal with the enemy commander who summons reinforcements like an absolute jerk. But with that being said, stealth is generally the best option even if the intense gunfights can be quite fun to try and figure out. Yes the odds are against you, but if you can stop the enemy from getting vision (by shooting all the guys near you) then their comrades will keep running towards you like lemmings and you’ll be able to create effective killzones.

At least until you get unlucky with the hit%, or deal with a gun jamming. Which happens all the time to a ridiculous degree. Seriously you’d think that the guns were made out of unrealised aspirations and butter for how often they suddenly melt and fall apart in the middle of combat, to the point that I’d say a gun jams every… 5ish times it’s used if fires in bursts? You barely even have to reload in this game, because when your gun jams (and it will) unjamming it also counts as reloading. Don’t worry though, as your enemies guns will jam too if they live long enough. Then again, worry some more because unjamming a gun takes a lot of AP, which means you can shoot less, which means you’ll probably get shot more. Which is bad. I suppose you can just keep looting new guns and indeed you will throughout most of the game because guns continually get better while the enemies keep getting better armour, but once you’ve got a good gun with some weapon attachments it’s a real pain in the backside. To the game’s credit, Jagged Alliance: Rage has a weirdly comprehensive variety of guns and ammunition. To it’s disservice, you’ll spend way too much time looting every single enemy to see if they have the one ammo type you need because you can’t buy, sell or otherwise trade equipment. The game was smart enough to let you loot everyone remotely once a map has been fully cleared of hostiles, but it still takes a lot of time to optimise everyone’s inventory especially in the late game when you can have 4 mercenaries at a time.

Now you might be thinking something along the lines of “well managing 4 guns doesn’t sound too bad hrurhrdudhdurr” but I’ve got news for you PAL. Because Jagged Alliance: Rage also features a bunch of quasi-survival mechanics, which require items that also take up inventory space. You need to stay hydrated (but not fed), think about bandages to heal the bleeding debuffs, have medkits and revival syringes for when you mess up a combat encounter mid-level, have weapon repair kits and armour repair kits and grenades and antibiotics if you drink the dirty water. Then there’s the fact that I picked Ivan who is cool as a character, but is an alcoholic so I also always had to have beer on hand otherwise he would be bad at shooting people. So there’s a lot of faffing around, as you’ll probably want a gun that’s decent at ranged and a gun that’s OK close up for each character, both of which probably use different ammo types, then some healing supplies and some survival supplies, before we even consider stuff like carrying grenades or whatever. Fortunately Jagged Alliance: Rage is happy to just let you focus on the combat and the inventory stuff, as the plot is very basic and consists of a series of pre-baked levels that you can do at any time – so long you’re on the right Act (of which there are 3). To access these maps the game has an overview map, which you can move across with one space taking one hour. As it takes time, you need to bring water/booze or suffer debuffs from your team being dehydrated or in withdrawal. This brings us to the day night cycle. The way it works is pretty simple, each map can be played during the day or at night. If you play at night, enemies have reduced vision and everyone except for one or two out of the 7 potentially playable characters suffers a debuff to their aiming unless they’ve got night vision goggles equipped. You might therefore be tempted to wait for night to fall upon the map, so you can sneak around better (and have the sheer thrill of shooting out the lights) but good luck. There just isn’t enough non-dirty water in the game to wait for multiple turns. Plus the game sends out patrols from enemy bases that force you into semi-randomly generated battles.

Should you stumble upon one of these patrols, you enter one small map from a pre-baked selection that will feature a bunch of enemies on two sides. You’re able to sneak behind these guys, but generally these maps are fairly easy so I often didn’t really bother and only used stealth to wrap them up. As mentioned, enemies share vision so once most of the enemy squads are dead the few remaining enemies will often have lost sight of your squad. Letting you switch back to stealth for those 1-hit instant stealth melee kills. This happens more often than you’d think, because the AI loves having one or two squad members hang back and sit in overwatch constantly. Overwatch is actually one of very few abilities that the enemy uses, although the squad leaders and commanders have an annoying rally ability which gives everyone standing near them some extra AP. So you’ll quite often have some enemies rush towards you, run out of AP, then a squad leader appears seemingly out of nowhere and lets them all shoot your exposed team member. To compensate, each of your mercenaries get some unique “rage” abilities (hence why it’s Jagged Alliance: Rage) that range from great to OK. Ivan can taunt enemies and gets passive damage resistance, Fidel can suppress enemies in an area, Dr Q has some light healing abilities and can convert rage points into extra AP and so on. To get rage you need to get adrenalin, which comes from dealing and taking damage alongside some other effects (like having the shrapnel or infection debuff or drinking alcohol). Aside from the rage abilities, basically every action is determined by what equipment you have equipped and there aren’t skill trees or anything like that.

In conclusion then, Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game with plenty of issues but a nice balance of risk reward through the effectiveness of stealth, ability of enemies to rack up the damage through large numbers and extra AP abilities and the introduction of rage abilities which require you to take and deal damage or suffer from debuffs. This keeps the game fun and frantic, aside from the admittedly large amount of time you need to spend dealing with the inventory system and survival elements. The enemy variety is fine, but by tying abilities and damage to equipment Jagged Alliance: Rage is able to scale the difficulty with each batch of maps. As for variety and the other elements of the game like the OST, visuals and so on they’re pretty lacking. The music is fine and the maps are generally varied albeit fixed, so replayability isn’t the best. It’s a shame the performance isn’t great and that the characters are so bland, but you can’t have it all. I’d therefore say that Jagged Alliance: Rage is an OK/10 game. TBS fans might have a good time if they are patient, but for genre newcomers I would recommend another game like Wargroove or XCOM: Chimera Squad.

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Over the past week my fat arse has been struggling with a pretty nasty cold and so I’ve been keeping it relatively light on the GAMING front. In spite of this I sat through the entirety of SteamWorld: Heist as I keep occasionally hearing good things about it, and thought it was finally time to see if this was actually a good game or just babbies first TBS. Fortunately it’s the former and SteamWorld: Heist has a solid amount of stages which it fills with a varied assortment of enemies, across the game’s three separate acts. Before diving fully into the game’s mechanics though, there are a few things to note. Firstly your crew members can never permanently die, although if they die on a mission they get 0 XP from it while if everyone dies you lose a big chunk of your existing currency (H20 in the case of this game). Secondly these crew members are pre-baked from an existing roster of 9 potential characters split across a handful of classes, each of which can only utilise certain weapons which are again split into multiple types. Finally missions give you a certain amount of stars, with stars being lost for having team mates die or failing to collect the (occasionally hidden) “epic loot” within a stage, which is important because at certain parts of the game there’s a barrier that only goes away once a certain amount of stars have been collected within that act. With that basic housekeeping out of the way, I’m happy to report that the characters are all generally pretty powerful and that you’ll be able to get through the game with whichever ones you pick, although you’d be remiss to sleep on Sally. You see while every other class can only fire once per turn, Sally can fire again if she gets the killing blow on an enemy. This doesn’t sound massively overpowered, but when you consider that you’ll only have 4 squad-mates available on a mission at most adding an extra shot per round really begins to add up. The other classes are still cool too, but her bounty hunter class is the closest the game comes to having an “essential” choice.

Regardless of which character(s) you pick to take on your missions, they all have 10 levels and have 4 inventory slots that can be filled with 1 weapon and then 3 utility items. Annoying enough you have an extremely limited inventory space and items which are equipped still count towards it, so you’ll often by spending your hard earned err… water on inventory storage upgrades solely so that you can have the pre-requisite 16 items for those 4 character missions. Additionally weapon selling can only be done either at the end of each mission (when you get new weapons/items) or from the pause screen for some weird reason. Which means you can be in a store, see an item that sounds good, then have to go fiddle with your inventory for a minute before you’re able to buy the item. It’s not a huge annoyance, but a weird design choice and one that means you’ll constantly be faffing with your inventory. Especially as you keep gaining items, many of which are duplicates. Oh and did I mention that the game only marks equipped items if they’re currently equipped? So if you do some smaller missions then item’s stop being marked as equipped, especially if you’re switching characters (lest you end up with 3 at max level and 3 at low levels). Fortunately the levelling system doesn’t make huge changes, but grinding up the lower squad mates can be a bit of a chore because of this system. Inventory is arguably the largest factor in an individual squad mates effectiveness, as outside of some HP/movement increases all that your levelling up does is increase or unlock their class abilities. These abilities are powerful, but generally new squad mates start with them unlocked anyway. Constantly cycling out older weapons is by far one of the most important parts of the game, as new enemy types are constantly introduced and they generally continue to gain more and more and more HP.

Speaking of enemies, the game has a surprisingly large variety considering that the game only has around 45ish stages to play through. The main reason for the divergence in enemy types is that each act introduces a whole new faction of baddies, each of which has it’s own unique enemies. While each faction have significant overlap, the way that they operate is still pretty different and the way that the game leans into it’s level design emphasises this. Initially you’re facing scrapper bots which don’t have too many gimmicks, although they still have snipers that rarely move, shielded enemies that can only be damaged from behind and low health melee bots that try to rush you. The latter diesel-bots have standard enemies with partial shields, alongside a “goop” mechanic that a synchronises with bullets and explosive damage to cover swathes of the map in potentially flammable (and highly damaging) material. Finally the Vectrons make almost excessive uses of shields, which require you to aggressively focus your fire lest you be unable to take them down. They also have laser weapons that take a turn to charge and fire at a designated area, but can shoot through cover making them a menace. Plus their basic infantry can teleport for free at the end of their turn, making them a pain to pin down in one place. As a consequence of the myriad foes arranged against you, the game does a good job of feeling fresh and rarely if ever feels stale. Especially as despite each level being semi-procedurally generated, the different objectives and the inclusion of generators that must be smashed and alarms that continually spawn in tougher and tougher enemies keep the pace up. This pacing is then neatly tied into a risk reward system, as shooting enemies doesn’t give you any bonuses such as XP and instead you need to gather up loot that is spread across the stages seemingly at random. As such it’s common to have to choose between running through a stage to keep reinforcements off your back versus aiming for the maximum reward, or to decide whether to finish off an enemy or grab what could be a useful upgrade. It’s a good system that keeps each stage fresh, especially as higher rankings require you to gather the pre-placed “epic loot” that often requires you to go out of your comfort zone.

The combat is therefore generally pretty fun and while the game does have a slight habit of spiralling out of control, it’s rarely the game’s fault and more often caused by your greed. You see if you lose a squad mate you’re losing one hit per turn (and remember, almost every character can only fire once per turn) and the ability to flank certain enemies, which makes the remaining combat encounters harder, which then gets doubly dangerous when enemies are spawning in due to an alarm being triggered. Losing a squad member due to poor positioning is often the difference between a mission being easy and exceedingly difficult. One mechanic the game has that keeps the game tense is that each shot “sways” slightly while you’re aiming, kinda like Valkyria Chronicles if you’ve ever played that game. What it means in real terms is that unless you’re using a grenade or a sharpshooter weapon (the type that your starting character wields) then you might miss a shot slightly. Over the course of the game you’ll gradually get adept at this mechanic and can even use it to bounce ricochet shots around to hit enemies in creative ways, but it can also mean that you just whiff a shot entirely. In a game where you often have a timer counting down to dump more enemies on you and in which you can only fire a limited number of shots a turn, this mechanic adds some much needed stress to the game. Even if I’ll be the first to admit that it can be exceedingly frustrating. Fortunately you only lose your currency when you fail a mission and all missions can be replayed infinitely, so it’s only a light penalty. This also means that you can leave a mission with a low ranking, then go back to replay it later once you’ve levelled up your team and gained new equipment. So the difficulty is rarely overwhelming, although it can creep back in no matter how well you’re doing.

Outside of these missions there isn’t really anything to be found in the game, for better or for worse. While there is a New Game+ mode, it doesn’t carry much over to your second run outside of letting you start with all the characters you previously unlocked. Instead the real “side game” of SteamWorld: Heist is collecting hats, of all things. These hats don’t do anything, but the game has invested a weird amount of time into having a variety of hats, giving them to enemies, letting you loot them and even simulating the feeling of having your hat shot-off during a tense firefight. Considering that most of the in-game stores are kinda useless and that you’ll constantly be cycling through your inventory anyway, these hats constitute the majority of your spending throughout the course of your playthrough. The only other thing to do would be to listen to the robotic band that can be found in each bar, which plays through a handful of tracks that are part of the game’s faux-retro theme. As SteamWorld: Heist is embracing the steampunk, aesthetic the music is a mix of western themes with some light swing-band vibes, although I’ll confess that I’m not an expert in this sub-genre by any means. Generally the game is sparing with it’s musical theme and instead you get some standard background ambiance during engagements, although after defeating each boss you do get a specific track from the OST that fits the game’s theme. SteamWorld: Heist also features an announcer who narrates over brief cutscenes between each of the game’s acts, in a faux trans-Atlantic accent. These cutscenes are one of the major methods the game uses to give you it’s modest story, alongside some brief chatter between characters who all make robotic sounds instead of actually talking to you. The story is minimal but the narrator helps to infuse the game with some personality and without him the game might feel a little bland. It’s nothing amazing, but it helps to make the game standout, much like it’s competent but charming art style which nicely distinguishes the various areas and zones by imbuing each of the factions with their own feeling.

In summary then, SteamWorld: Heist is a competent TBS with minimal story telling or side content in favour of focusing on it’s missions and combat. These encounters do a good job of balancing risk and reward, which encouraging the player to go fast from mission to mission. The shot sway in SteamWorld: Heist can be annoying, but it does ensure that the game remains challenging and generally the game is pretty flexible with the characters and load-outs you use while not being excessively challenging. So SteamWorld: Heist is a pretty solid game with a nice soundtrack and one or two things that help it standout from the pack. Not the sort of game I’d consider a must-play, but as it’s on pretty much every system (PC/Playstation/Nintendo/Xbawx) for a reasonably low price I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a TBS game. It’s an especially good fit for handheld systems, or for players who like to play a game while listening to a podcast.

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Quick Note – This is more of a “quick look” than a full review as I’ve only played through 2 of the 4 faction storylines. They were both very similar and it seems like all of the factions play fairly similarly, but worth noting in case I’ve overlooked something.

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius is one of those games I picked up for $1 years ago, mainly due to the IP and have finally gotten around to giving a proper go this week on the advice of a friend. I’ll admit that I was slightly skeptical, as the last game in this vein I’d tried was the underwhelming if bearable W40K: Sanctus Reach, a flawed and low budget TBS game that is OK/10 but really lacking in polish and variety. As such I fully expected this to be another middling W40K, of which there are many and to my shame of which I also have bought many. Gladius on the other hand is good-ish, it’s no Dawn of War or Space Marine but it’s actually a decent game bearing the W40K name, instead of a boring game being propped by it’s source material. In this case practice has definitely made perfect, as Slitherine have made a couple of games using Games Workshop’s intellectual property at this point and they do seem to be continually improving, not just in game design but also in polish. As for the game itself, it’s a classic 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) albeit in a simplified form as there is no diplomacy, and somewhat limited resource management. For those not in the know, 4X games are basically a type of turn based strategy game with more of a focus on building an empire and which generally utilise hexagonal grid maps.

As for the gameplay, it’s generally fine if nothing majestically special. You’ve got four factions to choose from in the base game, each with a handful of gimmicks but that generally play fairly similar and have broadly similar units. You can choose the Imperial Guard (no not the aStRa MiLiTaRuM), Space Marines, Orks or Necrons (because this game came out during the OMGOMGOMGOMG NECRONS ARE SO COOL phase that Games Workshop went through after the race got rebooted into Tomb Kings in SPACE). The Space Marines are to the surprise of no one, the babby introductory race and can only have one city making management a doddle, because they also only have to worry about one resource in the form of requisition. In exchange for this handicap, they can deploy mini-forts every 10 turns and most of their units have decent amounts of armour and firepower to make them able to withstand the swarms of other factions which have multiple cities. Then you’ve got the Orks who gain influence from attacking and deal more damage when you’ve got a lot of that resource but are weaker when you’re low on it, plus they have some very powerful late game units and are pretty good in melee combat while boasting decent regeneration abilities. The Imperial Guard are about what you’d expect, mainly lots of units and cities that are expendable but will have low morale if they take too many losses. On the plus side they’ve got decently strong fortifications and some of the longest range artillery in the game. Finally you’ve got the Necrons who can only build cities on certain tiles, but who also can spend resources to rush unit production with those units being fairly powerful and having decent regeneration abilities.

And each of these factions have broadly similar strategies, unless you go for their bespoke campaign quest-lines. You see every game of Gladius is the same, in that it’s either a skirmish game against bots or a multiplayer game against other people and/or bots. As a consequence of the total lack of diplomacy and the lack of customised single player maps, there isn’t a huge amount of variety between games. Especially as each faction has broadly similar units, Tactical Marines will be better than Guardsmen as an example, but they function the same and each unit has an equivalent across factions with some factions exceeding in certain areas. This means that no matter which faction you play, a lot of the units are similar and indeed most aspects of the game are just the same. Tech works the same for all factions. Every faction except for the Space Marines have the same resources to manage (ok Necrons don’t need to eat food but still), every faction has the same XP system, every faction has to deal with the same aggressive native fauna and each faction has the same outpost bonus resource system. As such the game is pretty approachable and not exceedingly difficult to understand, especially as each quest-line pushes the player through the most obvious steps of how to proceed. Then there’s a tutorial system on top of this, although I must confess it’s a bit crap. Basically every-time you interact with something for the first, a pop-up tutorial message appears. Which is great, except for the first two turns where you keep clicking on new things like a unit, or a city, or an enemy, or a resource, or the end turn button and so it dumps a bunch of information on you at a rate that is just unnecessary.

Now I’ve mentioned the quest-lines above which are a good idea, however much like the tutorial pop-ups in the implementation is a bit janky. You see, the way it works is that you’re given objectives to complete such as “go to these 3 spots with a hero” or “build these 3 buildings” which is fine. The problem is that W40K: Gladius loves to spawn enemies that interfere with those goals as soon as you receive the complete the previous mission, which means that players who try to go through the quest-line quickly will end up getting their cunts kicked in. Much like the campaign in Supreme Commander, it’s often better to just leave objectives nearly completed until you’ve been able to build up your armies and defences, with the final quest missions always involving a sudden explosion of enemies bum-rushing you which can be annoying to deal with. While it does make for a great show-piece battle, it is often overwhelming and if your troops are out of position due to dealing with enemy AI factions or just unlucky with where Gladius chooses to start spawning things, then it can be very tedious to deal with. As for story elements they’re pretty light on the ground and the game doesn’t have any voice acting or a memorable soundtrack. Visually it’s perfectly fine and the units and buildings do “sprout” quips in text form above them when they’re in view which is a nice touch, but it still feels like this a game with a modest budget which I’m sure it was.

And that’s about it for W40K: Gladius, because that’s really all there is to the game if you don’t pay extra for the DLC packs. Which isn’t necessarily a slight on the game’s honour, as I found it to be an enjoyable if basic 4X strategy experience. You don’t really have to worry about grand AI alliances, extensive resource management, convoluted tech trees or bonus extraneous game features. You just build units, build cities, upgrade the cities, gradually research better units and try not to get overwhelmed by either the AI or the newly spawned quest enemies (should you go for the quest-line). Nothing about the game is particularly high quality, but the combat is fun enough and if you go for the four faction quest-lines it provides a decent value for money. As such W40K: Gladius is a game I don’t regret playing and would kind of recommend, but you know it’s just fine. Nothing to kick yourself for missing, but worth a look for fans of the IP or who are looking for an approachable 4X / TBS game.

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Before delving into what makes Fire Emblem 7 such an enjoyable game, I’m just going to mention two things that may be deal-breakers for the uninitiated or even those who are looking to play this game after experiencing some of the newer games in the series. Firstly much like the newer games, Fire Emblem 7 has a decent amount of RNG or Random Number Generation involved, as every attack will have a chance of missing and a chance of inflicting a critical hit. Even if a lot of enemies won’t have a chance to inflict one of these crits (which are worth x3 the normal amount of damage inflicted), the bosses and certain enemies definitely will. Plus there’s always a chance that your guy will whiff their blow, leading to you either taking more damage than expected or possibly dying. So far so XCOM, but then much like XCOM Fire Emblem 7 throws another spanner into the works by making it so that the death of any character aside from your trio of plot-critical lords is a permanent death. As such your options are either to play through the game with the spectre of perma death always looming over (almost) every single character, or you can take the slightly more cowardly route by resetting the game every single time a character dies – which of course means that you’ll need to play through the level from the very beginning. No matter how you slice it Fire Emblem 7 can be a brutal game, and while I don’t condone it I can understand why both Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to make the permadeath optional in later games.

With that out of the way, Fire Emblem 7 is one of my favourite games for the MIGHTY Gameboy Advance (GBA) and a fantastic game that I think anyone with some patience will be able to enjoy. It’s a Turn Based Strategy (TBS) game that borrows heavily from RolePlaying Games’s and as such can also be considered as a Strategy RPG (SRPG), with both the player and the enemy in the form of bandits, cultists and other ne’er-do-wells moving all of their units one at a time during their respective turn. For the player each character is a unique unit with some custom art, a backstory, their own inventory which can hold up to 5 items and their own skills split into 8 categories which each increase as they gain levels. For the enemy they have hordes of disposable grunts to be used at will, with many levels causing more enemies to spawn in during certain turns and often from an irritating angle which will force you to take considerable care when using your more fragile units. All units in the game are split into various classes, each of which can use a handful of the game’s weapon and spell types and due to the game’s balance each class is therefore good against certain other classes but in turn weak against others. The first piece of the puzzle is the fact that weapons and magic both fit into a triangle system, with axes beating lances, lances beating swords and swords beating axes – while arcane magic beats light magic, light magic beats dark magic and dark magic beats arcane magic. Then you’ve got the fact that different classes (and by extension characters) not only have different amounts of movement points, but these classes also tend to empathise certain skills at the expense of others. Heavily armoured knights and generals have high defence and attack for example, but have low resistance making them weak against magic and low speed which means enemies can often get two blows in. Mages on the other hand have relatively high resistance and can attack at a slight distance, but are weak against physical attacks and generally have modest amounts of health. The intersecting nature of these classes ensures that no one unit is strong against everything, so you need to use your entire squad as a team lest your favourite unit get dog-piled and ground down by the enemy.

Then just when you think you’ve got everything in hand, the game’s inventory system pops up to nag you. The trouble is, while there are myriad weapons within the game each weapon can only be used a certain number of times before it breaks. Remember how you can only hold 5 items on each character? Well that means that you’ll need to factor in your weapon and how many hits it can dish out before it breaks, lest your unit be weapon less and thus unable to hurt a fly during the middle of a large skirmish. Before you ask, no you can’t repair items for most of the game (and when you can it’s only via a rare staff that in turn can only repair 3 weapons before it breaks) meaning that you’ll probably want to carry spares around. Then as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got classes that can carry up to 3 weapon types and you’ve got to consider how the quality of certain weapons/spells. You see not only do you have multiple weapon types, but you have multiple weapons within each type alongside some rare weapons which are effective against certain types of enemies. Generally speaking weapons go from Iron to Steel to Silver, with each type of weapon only being usable by characters with a high enough level in that weapon type. Oh and the better weapons not only cost more but can be used less before they break. So it’s entirely possible that you’ll have a character with a Steel Sword, a Steel Lance, backups for each and then a unique weapon such as the Axereaver which inverts the weapons triangle (i.e. it’s a lance that’s good against axes but weak against swords). It all gets somewhat complicated very quickly, but that’s part of the fun and it’s a good way to ensure that you’re invested in finding new loot before it’s pilfered by enemy thieves and to go out of your way to rescue villages before they’re pillaged by enemy bandits. If it’s all sounding a bit much then don’t panic, as you can store (temporarily) un-needed items with your supply convoy after a certain point in the story.

Due to all of this Fire Emblem 7 can be a complex game of cat and mouse as you manoeuvre your troops around, dodging enemy reinforcements (or funnelling them towards the right units) while you consider which weapons to use. This gives the game a nice feeling of depth and outside of the occasional piece of absolutely terrible luck, the game is well balanced and most deaths really are your fault – you MONSTER. As alluded to above there are also ways to gain new items outside of buying them from shops which appear in some levels, such as by killing enemies (who automatically drop any items they have in their inventory that are coloured green), stealing items from enemies with your thief, by visiting friendly villages before they are ransacked by enemy brigands/pirates and even by recruiting units to your side. Yes that’s right, some levels contain enemies which will “give you” a hint at the start of most missions via their dialogue with other units that reveals that they know one of the characters on your team. If you can get this unit into melee range with that named enemy, then you’ll be able to convince them to join your team and to stop aiding the bad guys. Of course this inherently involves some risk as now your unit is in melee range of that unit, which might place them in a sticky spot. And as if all that wasn’t enough, you might also be in a mission with a named friendly NPC (who appear as Green units) who has to be chatted to before they end up suiciding themselves by charging the enemy. These interactions are themselves often quite sweet and involve an abrupt change of heart on the part of the enemy, with many of these recruitable characters being powerful indeed. Or you can just kill them because you are a MONSTER.

As for the characters themselves they can all be described as charming archetypes, most of whom are suitably simple to understand for a game with modest pretensions to being a full RPG but who are still entertaining enough to justify their screen time. You’ve got nervous and naïve knights, gambling obsessed swordsmen, men of duty, men who are just in it for the sheer THRILL of adventure and much more besides. Ultimately you’ll be able to find a few characters that you enjoy, as while most of them are relatively shallow each of them feels like a D&D character and you’ll inevitably have your favourites. These characters are then able to propel a story that is likewise fairly simple, but which definitely has it’s moments and which manages to create an Arthurian feel of a world which has it’s noble lords and wicked villains, it’s power hungry despots and it’s wise sages. The whole game is brimming with charm and character, even if almost all of it is told through plain unspoken text (with a little bit of fantasy tweaking and dated verbiage) and static imagery. Of course there are a few exceedingly short cutscenes, but due to the limitations of the MIGHTY GBA the game is limited in how it presents itself. Fortunately it more than makes up for these limitations via some great artwork which is occasionally used to great effect in showcasing how the world appears through the eyes of it’s characters.

Further complimenting the occasional piece of high definition artwork (Relatively speaking, it is the GBA after all) is a great art style for units and gameplay which is simultaneously easy to read but still looks great in spite of the system’s limitations. Units may only be made out of a handful of pixels, but both the animations and art design is excellent and makes the game visually pleasing to the eye. Critical hit animations are stylish without feeling overlong, each class feels unique and I’m always surprised by how much a simple colour pallet change or slight tweak can make a character or enemy feel unique. As for the music, it’s also great in spite of the system’s limitations even if the number of tracks and their length is fairly limited. You will be hearing the same battle theme again, and again and again but fortunately each theme is handled well as is instantly recognisable. Fire Emblem 7 is therefore a great example of how much can be done with a limited amount of headroom and is an exceedingly efficient game in the way that it’s able to contain close to 40 unique levels, a full OST with around 30 tracks, almost the same amount of units and myriad weapons/spells all in one exceptionally small package.

Then when you reach the end and face off against the final boss, which is a total pain in the butt btw, the game gives you a charming ending screen which explains what each character does after the world has been saved. By that point you might think the game is over, as you’ll have encountered many characters, plenty of dialogue and wrapped up close to 30 levels. But then the game reveals that actually you’ve got an extra route revolving around Lord Hector that you can playthrough (who is otherwise portrayed as Eliwood’s stalwart pal but doesn’t have much autonomy). Oh and if that wasn’t enough then you can also replay Lyn’s route (the first 12 levels) and Eliwoods route (the other 18ish levels) in a newly unlocked Hard mode which is even more challenging. As such the game that has pretty much everything including great art direction, a solid difficulty curve, plenty of strategic head-scratching and a surprisingly good plot with charming characters reveals that it has plenty of replayability too. Oh and did I mention that there are multiple levels that only appear if you meet specific requirements, such as completing a level under a certain amount of turns, killing a fleeing enemy or by “rescuing” a hostile unit that would otherwise try and kill you? To see everything you’ll need to play through both the normal Lyn & Eliwood route, then the Lyn & Hector route and you’ll need to do both while meeting these hidden objectives. Fortunately you can always check a guide to see what’s needed, but I’ll warn you now that knowing how to unlock a hidden stage and actually unlocking it are not the same thing and some of them can be quite challenging to unlock.

In summary then Fire Emblem 7 is a game that can be challenging, complicated and occasionally unforgiving but which is nevertheless a fantastic game brimming with charm and content. There’s always a twist awaiting the player, whether it’s a new enemy type, a new plot development or a new hidden stage and while the game can occasionally be frustrating it’s almost never unfair. Every mechanic compliments each other nicely and the game excels with it’s solid gameplay, great visuals and charming cast of characters. Ultimately Fire Emblem 7 is a game that anyone can enjoy and one that I would highly recommend to anyone, although these days copies can be expensive as this was always a relatively niche series (at least until Awakening encouraged you to have babies with your waifu which caused every weeaboo in the world to become a gushing fanboy). If you see this game in the wild be sure to pick it up, and if you can’t afford it then just know that you can’t really afford to let Fire Emblem 7 pass you by either, so do what you have to (*cough* emulation *cough*) to experience it for yourself.

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XCOM: Chimera Squad was always destined to be a black-sheep in the overall XCOM family, as not only did it release at a budget release price-point but it also lacked a lot of the depth that the series is known for. Instead of needing to create and nurture your squad while the spectre of permanent death lingered over them constantly, here your squad is largely pre-defined and it’s impossible for them to permanently die. This is because XCOM: Chimera Squad is taking a more narrative approach to the game’s story, with each character being deliberately designed and balanced to ensure that you always have a balanced assortment of squaddies. While you can’t recruit all 11 agents on a single playthrough, you can have a maximum of 8 of them at a time and can take 4 with you on each mission. Each of these characters fits a specific role and while there is an upgrade tree, 3 of the 5 choices for each character are mandatory and so you only have to make 2 decisions as to how they’re going to develop. Again this was done deliberately so that the developers could spend time fleshing out each squad mate and generally speaking they’ve done an admirable job, as while the writing isn’t stellar they were able to give each squaddie their own flavour and plenty of opportunities for them to insert their own quips. These characters also have their own interactions both during battles peaceful police operations and while at home in the base, so that they feel like a somewhat natural and cohesive squad. Perhaps one of the biggest selling point of XCOM: Chimera Squad is the fact that you get to control multiple alien squaddies, specifically a Muton, a Snek, a Sectoid and two half-man half-alien hybrids. These alien squaddies have some of the abilities that their counterparts had in the previous games, with the Sectoid acting as a Psi-capable unit and the Muton and Viper having melee rage attacks and binding attacks respectively. As for the hybrids, one is a melee combatant while the other has an energy shield and mainly functions as a defensive buff provider with a focus on close range attacks.

The reason for this disparate group to come together is that you’re the new XCOM commander Reclamation Squad commander and this rogue’s gallery is your sci-fi SWAT team with which to keep order in a post-XCOM 2 world. In this setting humanity won and now humans and various sentient alien species have to live together amidst the remaining cities of Earth, one of which is City 31 where the game’s story takes place. Perhaps unsurprisingly the alien occupation has left myriad pieces of devastating equipment lying around, and it’s the job of you and your squad to reclaim them and keep them out of the hands of those who would cause further damage to a reeling world. Unfortunately for you and your team, there are three gangs/cults operating within City 31 and you’ll need to investigate and cauterize each one before they can wreak havoc on the city. In spite of how it sounds, these investigations don’t require much in the way of investigating, as essentially you’ll have a series of timers which obscure main-story missions and that give you time to engage in multiple randomly generated missions so you can build up your squad. While you’re galivanting around saving the day, you’ll of course have to develop new tech (although the research system is massively simplified) and are encouraged to rotate through your team so that individual squad members can engage in training. This training system necessitates squad members being out of action for a few days, in exchange for them developing some skills such as additional actions and bonuses to max HP, their dodge skill and so on. Unfortunately you can only train one squad member at a time, and if a squad member takes too much damage in a mission there’s a chance that they’ll get a “scar” which reduces one of their stats. The only way to remove this scar is to have them spend 2 days in training, and for context I finished the whole game in just over 70 in-game days so removing scars eats up a lot of your training time. Of course you could leave your scarred members be, but most of the debuffs are pretty significant such as -3 movement per turn, -30% chance to hit, -3 max HP and so on. Further encouraging you to rotate your squad is the fact that the more powerful training options are only unlocked once your squad member has reached a certain level, so if you keep one on the bench they’ll be relatively weak and if you keep a unit on active duty they’ll always fall short of their max potential.

Then to make things even more of an exercise in plate-spinning, you’ve got the Assembly which functions as your research lab and SPEC OPS which is basically a designated beach-warmers slot. To keep it quick, the Assembly is where you can research and unlock new gear, but fortunately all you need to do once it’s been researched is to buy it so there’s no waiting for something to be researched, then waiting again for it to be produced. Some unlocks are purchased 1-by-1 (for example grenades and medkits) while others only need to be purchased once and then upgrade is applied to all applicable squaddies (such as the weapon upgrades and the armour upgrades). As for the Spec Ops, these are essentially bonuses that can be attained by having squad members busy themselves for a few days. Initially you can only get basic bonuses such as +60 intel or +$80, but as your team gets more developed and as you build up “field teams” across the city more interesting Spec Ops unlock. Two of the more useful late(r) game Spec Ops are to receive a free Field Team, which saves you a bunch of the intel resource, or to reduce unrest in every single one of the city’s 9 districts at once. Speaking of which, City 31 is split into 9 pieces and in each part you have a separate unrest bar alongside the ability to build one of three Field Teams. These field teams are split between Security, Technology and Finance and each type provides a bonus to the applicable resources (Intel, Etherium and Credits respectively) once per week and also increases the unrest reduction of operations in their respective district. You can then upgrade these Field Teams using the intel resource (or farm the applicable Spec Op) with these upgrades increasing the bonuses / unrest reduction provided. There are also “situations” that occur, and these are basically non-missions that involve sending out your squad but no enemies or fighting occurs. Generally the cadence of XCOM: Chimera Squad is mission -> situation -> mission and so on, but the main story missions can interrupt this as they unlock after a certain amount of in-game days have passed.

Once the main quest missions are unlocked, they’re not mandatory (with a handful of exceptions) but as you can only do one mission at a time and they always spawn in batches you’ll generally want to do main missions as soon as they become available. Failing to respond to a mission will cause the unrest in that district to increase and once the unrest in a district reaches the maximum level of 5, it gradually begins increasing the overall City Anarchy at a rate of +1 anarchy per max unrest district per day. Fortunately you do gain some abilities as you build and upgrade your field teams, which let you reduce unrest in a district, auto-complete a situation, freeze unrest in a district (to prevent it going up for failing to respond) and one that reduces the City Anarchy level which is important. Why is that important? Well once the City Anarchy hits a score of 14, you instantly receive a game-over and lose the game. On the plus side once a district hits the max unrest level, a new mission is automatically created for that district which you can complete to reduce that district’s unrest. The caveat is that if you don’t complete this mission you’ll lose your field team and it’s worth noting that these missions tend to be quite difficult. They’re not impossible of course, especially as you get infinite retries but they’re noticeably harder than the normal missions which generally aren’t too bad.

On that subject, missions now have multiple phases and always start with a Breach phase. This is another one of the major changes that have been made to the formula, as you’ll be able to decide in what order your team enters the mission and what entrance you’ll be taking. Sometimes you’ll need an item (equipped in your breach slot) to be able to use different entrances, and each entrance will provide pros and cons. Once your squad bursts into the room the enemies will have a varied reaction time, with some being surprised, some being alert and others being aggressive. These reactions dictate whether they’ll do nothing (and have a bonus for shots fired at them), get a free non-aggressive reaction such as Hunker Down or fire at your squad during the breach action. Fortunately your squad members each get a free shot during this breach action, so you generally want to prioritise summoners and physic enemies alongside the ones that are going to shoot at you.

Some missions have multiple of these phases, with the final mission having 4 of them, and during each phase you’ll enter a room filled with baddies and either have to take them out or complete an objective such as escorting a civilian to an evac zone. One of the most difficult parts of XCOM: Chimera Squad is actually these escort missions, as they always make aggressive use of the game’s reinforcement system which causes new enemies to spawn in. The twist is that often these new enemies are able to get a turn in before most of your squad, so depending on your positioning and what abilities the enemies have this can be a significant barrier to quickly wrapping up a mission. To make matters worse, often these reinforcements continue to respawn at the end of a turn so a simple escort mission can involve 3 enemies spawning per round, and for most of the game you can only have each character fire once per round.

Which brings us neatly to another part of the game that’s undergone a change, as now squaddies and enemies take turns one-after-another with the overall order being determined at the start of each round and being impacted by the order your characters entered the room during the breach phase. This means that you’ll need to be strategic with your breach order, as you’ll often want shotgunners to go first and more accurate squaddies to go in last, but this then means that you’ll have to wait for multiple enemies to have their turn before the guys at the back of your breach option can do anything. Generally this isn’t a big deal, but occasionally your squad members put themselves in bad positions after the breach or are otherwise unable to prevent themselves from getting disabled, mind-controlled or charged by a Berserker. I quite liked this tweak as it makes the firefights feel much more intense and forces you to react quickly to the more threatening enemies, although as you don’t have the ability to command your entire squad at once those missed shots can quickly cause things to spiral out of control.

Another slight change that’s related is that enemy grenades, and some types of the grenades that you use (such as Claymore’s satchel charge) are given a spot in the turn order before they detonate – which means that you can often avoid them if you’re lucky with the enemy targeting… or miss the ones you’ve thrown if you’re a FOOL. One last thing to mention with regards to the breaching system is that your squaddies occasionally have other abilities that can be used, or can equip some items which enable them to take other actions, but generally these are limited to one per mission. As missions can have up to 4 breaches, this requires a bit of patience on the players part lest they blow through all of their good abilities during the first part of a mission. Similarly your squaddies have abilities that they can use, some of which have a general cool-down on the basis of combat rounds, but others are only usable once per mission. A good example of the former is that you can now use a “team up” ability to make a squaddie on your team take their turn next, which is very powerful. Squaddies also have the ability to use certain equipped items during combat, although these don’t count as an action and include things like grenades, medkits and the like.

My general feeling is therefore that all of the tweaks have been included to make a faster paced XCOM experience that still manages to be a challenge without ever feeling cheap. Abilities are quick, the breach system ensures that you always know where enemies are (so no more stumbling into a pod of enemies) and the turn ordering system makes moment-to-moment decision making more important. That’s not to say that you can’t take your time on each turn of course, but generally it’s a question of whether you can tank a few shots or need to pop an item/ability you were trying to save for later. Overall the game is relatively short and while the campaign has 3 investigations plus one or two boss missions after the last investigation is wrapped up, the whole thing never overstays it’s welcome. I will confess that some of the mission types felt repetitive, especially the escort/rescue missions which seemed to keep popping up but fortunately the inclusion of the situations means you’re still able to press ahead without getting bogged down. The only time the game felt silly was with the miss system, because I found that unless I put a squad member in danger with an exceptionally aggressive flank, most of my shots had already an 80% chance to hit. Which is often enough, but man oh man did those occasional misses feel spiteful. Of course this is a) entirely true to the series and b) a reminder that any good strategy isn’t dependent on a single shot hitting. Still, I had a few close calls as missing an 85% shot caused enemy A to take their turn where they crippled squad member B with an ability who then missed their turn so enemies B and C got some shots off and so on. With that being said, I played on “Challenging” and I’d say that the game was challenging without being overwhelming, especially as it’s almost impossible to softlock yourself by getting all of your best squad members killed. Indeed it can sometimes be beneficial to restart a mission as otherwise you’ll run the risk of having scars impact your squaddies for the next few in-game days. Don’t be tempted to savescum however, as on Challenging and Impossible you are dependent on the game’s autosave feature as you can’t make any manual saves!

In conclusion then XCOM: Chimera Squad is a great game and a solid entry for both the series and a good starting point for TBS noobs. While it has some quirks to it, generally these serve to create a fast paced XCOM experience that’s faithful enough to the rest of the reboot series while still being familiar. I enjoyed the setting, which some people hated as it gave a good justification for the Breach mechanic which is a lot of fun. Plus the inter-character reactions can be amusing, as was some of the NPC background chatter referring to alien conspiracies and news bulletins which made light of the political aspect of the post-XCOM 2 world. While XCOM: Chimera Squad is a budget release in terms of price it isn’t a budget release in terms of polish or content, as it’ll take you around 20 hours to beat and there are relatively few bugs to be found. I did encounter some animation glitches, but never had the game crash or encounter a significant bug which shows that the QA department did a good job. Overall I’d say that XCOM: Chimera Squad is well worth the modest asking price and I’d highly recommend it for anyone looking to try out XCOM or TBS games more broadly, although I would recommend the higher difficulties for more experienced players.

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Wargroove was one of those indie darlings that appeared out of nowhere and quickly made a name for itself, mainly by successfully aping a previously dormant series and appealing to it’s fanbase. Yet unlike most of the indie games that try to do this, the game itself is actually very refined and has enough changes to the formula that make it an enjoyable experience without just being a mere clone. Although in all fairness it is very similar to Advance Wars, to the point that at times I was getting tripped up as I was forgetting that the range for artillery archers worked slightly differently. That isn’t a bad thing however, as being similar to a great strategy game is a pretty solid strategy and one that appears to have paid off for Wargroove to the point that we’re now getting a sequel at some point in the relatively near future.

To quickly recap for anyone who hasn’t played an Advance Wars game, in Wargroove you are the commander of an army with a variety of ground, air and sea units that you can purchase at different price points. To purchase these units, you need to obtain funds from various buildings which are dotted around the map (that you view from a top-down perspective) and these buildings can only be captured by infantry units. Some of these buildings are bases, ports and airports towers that can be captured which let you train new units and as such these are crucially important to control. All of the units you can purchase are effective against certain other units, while being weak to others, ensuring that you need a somewhat balanced variety of troops to avoid getting #rekt. To make matters more complicated, the maps are split into tiles with each tile having a terrain type and these terrain types provide both defensive boosts and movement penalties to your units. As those units also have a different range of movement and attack per turn, maps will often feature natural chokepoints and areas that are difficult to traverse. Finally each army is led by a commander unit who has a power that increases as they’re near the fray (much like the last Advance Wars game), with these powers varying depending on which commanding officer you’ve picked. To give an example, Mercia the protagonist of the campaign’s plot has the ability to heal all units near her by 5 HP points (out of a max of 10).

With that out of the way, you’ll probably be curious as to what Wargroove has changed. The most obvious thing, aside from it taking place in a fantasy setting as opposed to a contemporary one, is that you no longer have to worry about ammunition. Units can attack and attack and attack until the end of the world, which can be helpful for both you and the enemy. There are also some unit types that have been radically changed from their counter-parts, with recon units having been replaced with war dogs which are similarly speedy but are much cheaper at the expense of having the lowest defence in the game. The capturing system has also been changed, with units being able to capture unclaimed buildings in one turn. The catch is that claimed buildings have their own HP pool and ability to damage attackers, so you can only capture enemy buildings once you’ve battered them down and dealt with counter attacks. When you capture a building it gains the equivalent of half the capturing units HP for free, but then it needs to gradually replenish itself at a rate of 1HP per turn. This then becomes important as the healing/repair system has been changed, with units now taking HP from the building that they heal at and of course they can’t heal more HP than the building has. Plus units can’t occupy buildings by sitting on them anymore, instead to heal you need to be next to them and new units you’ve bought will be spawned beside the building not on top of it. As such there is a bit of a risk reward system going on, as frontline buildings can provide a needed dose of health for a strong unit, but they’ll take time to replenish their own HP which makes them weak to attackers. Alongside the new building changes, Commanding Officers now can’t switch from unit to unit but are instead always on the battlefield and the game ends if they die. Yet the game also encourages you to use them as they’re powerful and their abilities can have a big impact in swaying a battle. Speaking of abilities, some units have abilities such as the Shamans (anti-air) which let them spend money to heal units within a short radius. Last but certainly not least, units have the ability to inflict crits upon their targets if specific conditions are met. To give some examples, swordsmen (infantry) crit when they are next to their commanders, shamans crit when on terrain that provides a +3 or more defence bonus and trebuchets (rockets) crit when engaging targets at their maximum range. These crits are very, very important as they’re often able to allow you to destroy an enemy unit in one hit.

So it’s fair to say that Wargroove has taken an existing formula and added to it, without neglecting any of the features that made Advance Wars so enjoyable. This includes the AI which is constantly capable of putting up a decent fight, but never one that feels unwinnable (especially once you learn their quirks, such as their LOVE of attacking your Commander). Fortunately you’ll have plenty of time to learn these quirks as you’ve not only got a skirmish mode, but you also have a fully fledged campaign and a handful of other modes (more on them later). The campaign itself features 7 Acts, each of which has 3 main missions and then the roughly the same number of optional side missions. These optional missions are often harder than the main ones, but you’ll need to beat them all if you want the true ending. This is because the final mission of Act 7 is an Epilogue mission and to unlock it you’ll need to have earned 100 stars, but each mission only provides a maximum of 3 depending on the post-mission rank you received. As such even if you A-Ranked every main mission, you’d still be 40 stars short. Fortunately I found that the turn-limits for receiving an A-Rank were fairly generous and as such it wasn’t until I got to the final two Acts that I was failing to consistently get them. And by that point in the game I’d already been working my way through the side-missions anyway, so unlocking the Epilogue didn’t cause me too much trouble. As for the campaign itself it’s fairly enjoyable and much like the Advance Wars series, the first dozen or so missions act as a gradual tutorial to all of the game’s concepts. In a nod to the first AW game, you basically go around the world getting in slapfights with various headstrong commanders from other factions before they realise you’re actually a pretty cool guy and join you. It does have some challenge towards the end, especially with the pre-deploy missions where the number of units you have is limited, but there isn’t anything as stupidly punishing as the final missions in the AW games.

And honestly while the game looks great and plays great, it’s the writing and characterisations if anything that give me a bit of pause. I was kind of hoping for something like Fire Emblem 7 or Advance Wars, but the tone is a bit different and everything just feels… for want of a better term, so heckin’ wholesome 100 big chungus. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a developer that has multiple office dogs and an office snake has written such an aggressive upbeat game, but it does feel a little weird at times. I found the AW characters largely enjoyable and while the Wargroove characters are equally as one-note, they’re just not as cool. I think it’s due to the fact that in AW every character (except Colin, but that’s his character) is very confident while being laidback, whereas in Wargroove every character is very supportive and friendly. It’s a small difference and not really a big part of the game, but I just wanted to note this as it’s basically the only thing that I think Wargroove does worse. Especially as the campaign has a mini-cutscene for every mission and while they are skippable, they’ve had a lot of time and attention put into them (plus every character has multiple pages of backstory as told via the in-game codex).

With that one criticism out of the way, I’ll just re-iterate that Wargroove has an overwhelming amount of content and as such you don’t really need to worry about the campaign’s storyline that much. In fact you could get hundreds of hours of playtime while barely interacting with it, as not only does the game have a skirmish mode but you can also straight-up download custom campaigns from within the game that have been made by other players. Plus you’ll be able to create your own maps, so if you were so inclined you could just rely on the community to keep you entertained. Of course the campaign does unlock new COs and other content, so you’ll probably want to play it anyway, but you don’t have to. Speaking of which the game also offers two other main modes of playing through it, in the form of the Arcade mode and the Puzzle mode. The Arcade mode is unlocked at the end of the 1st Act of the campaign and involves playing 5 skirmish battles back-to-back in one of three difficulties (easy, normal or hard). These difficulties determine how much gold the enemy gets from their buildings, with the respective values being x0.5, x1 and x2 in line with the difficulty setting you chose. Then you’ve got the puzzle mode which unlocks once you’ve cleared the 3rd Act of the Campaign and features 25 maps, each of which give you a single turn to complete an objective (generally winning the stage). It goes without saying that these maps can be fairly challenging to figure out, as you’ll need to make every move perfectly lest your best laid plan fall apart. Unlike the Arcade mode however there isn’t any penalty for failure, so you’re free to keep playing these maps again and again until you can figure out what the optimal methods are.

So to conclude, Wargroove is an enjoyable TBS experience that is heavily inspired by Advance Wars without falling into the classic indie trap of merely cloning an existing franchise. Instead it offers not only a vast amount of content, but also plenty of twists and new ideas on the established formula which make it a great game to play. In spite of the relatively weak characterisation, this is a game with a lot of heart and effort put into it and this hard work is constantly on display in the form of different game modes, high quality sprite work and a well balanced difficulty curve. Ultimately Wargroove is a game that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone, whether they’re a TBS fan or not, but I would say that it’s the best AW inspired game I’ve yet to play. As such I hope you’ll consider giving this game and try and will join me in looking forward to the sequel

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Today I’m taking a look at an enhanced re-release of 2004’s classic release, Rome: Total War. For full disclosure, I was a massive fan of the original release of Rome Total War and still have my physical on-disc copies of this game – which turns out to have been a prudent move as you can now no longer buy the digital versions of the original game! Instead you MUST buy the Remaster, which is currently selling for £24.99 / $29.99 / 29,99€. The only respite for purists is that when you buy the remastered version, you also receive the original digital versions – but are they even required now that the shiny new remaster is out?

To it’s credit, the remaster does a decent job of updating the visuals to modern standards (although the unit fidelity is still behind more modern releases obviously) and more importantly comes with a range of resolution options that are more pliable for modern systems. You can now utilise ultra-widescreen and UHD resolutions, in addition to taking advantage of your 4K display by enabling more modern 4K textures (FreeLC activation required for them though, as they bloat the game size significantly!) The changes are honestly fairly subtle, but between these upgrades and the new resizeable UI the game is definitely more pleasant to run on systems with high end resolutions – in addition to being more “future proof”.

This wasn’t just a standard visual upgrade however, as the developers (Feral Interactive) decided to tweak some aspects of the gameplay, which has been a mixed bag in my humble opinion. On the one hand, it is nice to see that they attempted to make some modest tweaks to the formula without sacrificing any of the feeling (and indeed, limitations) of the old game. Naval battles are still decided via auto-resolve, the occasional rebel army/fleet still seemingly appears out of nowhere (so take care when repositioning a single unit or even small army on the campaign map) and diplomacy is still handed via physically sending diplomats around the map.

The major changes are that you can now access all factions from the start of the game (via an option hidden under advanced settings), you can now access an additional 16 factions which were previously only accessible via mods and you have an additional agent type – the Merchant. Honestly I found these new agents to be a waste of space, as the AI (and even rebels) spawn them en masse and all they do is clutter up the map while producing relatively little gold. While doing a bit of testing I found that my high level merchant added an astonishing 100 gold per turn, which is about the upkeep cost of the absolute lowest infantry unit you can keep as a garrison. With such a low rate of income, I found that the best use for my merchants was taking out other merchants belonging to enemy factions – but I found that these enemy merchants could be safely ignored as they can’t really do anything to you. Considering that you can spawn 1 merchant per city and that most cities will need at least a few filler units acting as a garrison (otherwise you’ll suffer public order penalties which can lead a city to rebel) they don’t seem particularly important, but at least the option is there I suppose.

The major caveat to these pleasant changes, which range from worthwhile to forgettable, is that the remaster now has two problems which are worse than the original Rome Total War experience. Firstly, you will experience more crashes to desktop (CtDs), although to Feral Interactive’s credit they have produced a few patches which have made the CtDs less present. With that being said, even four or five months after release I had one every 10 hours or so. Not a massive issue in the grand scheme of things, but as the game only autosaves on turn start and turn end and as each battle can take anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes, it’s entirely possible to lose an hour of two’s worth of progress if the crash happens at an inopportune time (e.g. during a turn in which you have had 4 battles and decided how to spend a stack of cash on your settlements).

Those thinking you can just skip those pesky battles will be forgiven for remembering that the game has an auto-resolve feature, however it is very, very random except in clear-cut cases. If you have a 95% win chance during a siege then it’s a no-brainer, but for any semi-balanced engagement you run the risk of getting absolutely slaughtered by an AI force that is outnumbered and outclassed. The auto-resolve is also extremely loathe to let enemy generals die, to the point that a single general can and will engage an entire army to… lose half his health and then retreat out of combat range. After he already retreated, so your army has wasted a turn chasing him around the map for no result. It is truly a cat and mouse game for those who are reluctant to load up a manual battle (Achievement hunters beware, the “auto resolve every battle in a campaign” achievement is going to be a colossal pain in the arse).

The other major issue with this remaster, is that it has made the path-finding and formations even worse. Now to be fair, it wasn’t perfect in Rome Total War either but it is now noticeably more sluggish. For the Greek civilizations this is especially galling, as they depend heavily on the Phalanx formation which is now extremely temperamental due to the need for seemingly every man in a unit to be in the right spot before they actually form the formation you need. Units now also flail around like morons for longer when you try to re-position them during battle, which is a double-edged sword that can lead to you or the enemy getting plenty of free hits in. These issues come to a head in the sieges, which feature tight spaces (which make formations a pain at the best of times) and plenty of bitter close combat back-and-forth fighting. Getting your troops to face the enemy, without letting themselves get flanked, while all this extra fannying about is going on can be simultaneously challenging and irritating.

Roman players (which are the recommended choices for beginners) are also hindered by these changes, as their frontline units have a very powerful free missile attack that can decisively change how a one-on-one fight pans out. Due to the aforementioned issues however, they now need more time to get ready as legate Hugh Janus holds up the whole cohort’s re-positioning due to getting stuck on a pebble. As this powerful missile attack has a very, very short range it is depressingly common for the formation fumbling to result in your Triarii charging an enemy, abruptly stopping to stand still while every, last, soldier finally gets their javelin out, then failing to use their javelins as they get counter charged by those loathsome Gauls. Fortunately you can disable missile attacks for them when they are selected, but considering how powerful these missiles are it is a shame to forego them.

Some of the other changes aren’t a downgrade per say, but they are somewhat underwhelming. The new loading screens are bland and repetitive for example (and you will be seeing them a LOT unless you are going for the aforementioned auto-resolve every battle achievement), while the in-game Wiki is extremely basic to the point that I had to read old forums to gleam information as it is just a glorified webpage that loads in the Steam Overlay browser. To access the expansion packs you need to mess around with the mandatory Creative Assembly launcher which boots before of the game, which isn’t really an issue but does add a bit of delay between starting the game and actually getting to play the game. For context the original version on Steam just had a pop-up when you hit launch, asking which one you wanted – now you need to wait for the launcher app to start, then hit a section within it, then select play to access the new expansions.

But at this point I’m nitpicking and to be fair, there are also some small minor changes which are helpful. The map camera controls are improved which is nice, but more importantly the tactical interface during battles from latter games has been added, enabling you to see more of the battle details at a glance (and make those pesky sight blocking trees get out of the way). There are also a few more tweaks on the campaign map regarding visual overlays and “heat maps”, but I barely used these – however it again serves the purpose of letting you see more information at a glance if you are so inclined.

At this point I’ve almost entirely been comparing the remaster to the base game, so if you haven’t played the base game and have stuck with me thus far then I can tell you that it’s still a great TBS/RTS hybrid. You train units, capture settlements, move armies and agents around on the turn-based map then switch to a smaller map for RTS battles (which are generated based on the local world terrain that the armies are clashing in) when your forces actually engage with the enemy. Each faction has been crafted with a fair amount of historical accuracy in mind, which leads to them having decently divergent rosters and thus leads to the armies having their own play-style and plenty of unique units. This extends to the settlements as well, with only certain factions having the ability to construct high-end fortifications and sanitation systems (which are near essential as cities gain “Squalor” as they grow, which makes them increasingly difficult to keep happy and thus non-rebellious). As such the factions are asymmetric if not entirely balanced, which makes the long campaign quite fun as your tactics and army compositions will need tweaking from foe to foe. Plus it makes the game more replayable, as each campaign will play out at a different pace depending on how good your end-game units are – the Barbarians are generally advised to go as quickly as possible for instance.

For new-comers I would highly recommend one of the Roman factions, alongside a warning to move QUICKLY as you WILL be required to face your erstwhile Roman comrades in a civil war scenario in the closing stages of the game. If you take your time, your fellow Romans will quickly sweep through the map and thus become quite challenging when you eventually have to slap them down. Similarly if you are desperate to play as, say, the Gauls or the Greeks then you had better move quick as the Roman factions function as a group in most diplomatic matters and therefore declaring war on one means fighting them all.

With my closing verdict, I would say that Rome Total War: Remastered is a worthwhile purchase for newcomers to the series and frankly does a better job of making you feel like an Emperor in waiting than it’s sequel. It has plenty of content due to the inclusion of the expansion packs and has a lot of re-playability and length due to the variance between the factions. For veterans of the series, this is a good if occasionally mixed remaster with a handful of pleasant Quality of Life features and some newly playable factions but otherwise not much in the way of substantial changes. If you already have the originals (like me) then it’s entirely optional of course, but I would still pick it up on a sale if only to give yourself an excuse to sink another 30 to 40 hours into a campaign.

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