Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Nintendo has a series of games, the “wars” series, the last being a reboot of Advance wars on the Switch.
The game describes itself thus: Welcome to Warside, the fast-paced turn-based tactics game. With a single-player story campaign, multiplayer support, and a built-in map editor, the fight for victory never ends. Choose your Commander, assemble your forces, and battle your way to victory.
I tried to run this demo in Wayland and Xorg mode, but the demo would immediately lock up and disable my mouse buttons. I had to wait one minute for it to die. This one had to be uninstalled without launching once.
I then moved on to the next one, Broken Alliance. They say this about the game: From the makers of Death and Taxes comes a turn-based adventure-strategy game. Choose your faction and attempt to harness the vast power of magic to save your dying world. The way you play determines the sacrifices and consequences you have to endure, shaping your personal storyline.
My first thought upon seeing this was, low budget, Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM). In a way it is, and in a way it is not.
The minimum specs are: OS: Ubuntu 16.04+ Processor: i3 or equivalent Memory: 2 GB RAM Graphics: Integrated graphics or GPU with at least 512 MB of VRAM Storage: 4 GB available space
While this is a small studio producing this game from Estonia, the game(demo) is fully voice acted it seems. Said voice acting is also of a high grade, though there are a few odd pronunciations.
The graphics are what jumps out when you start the demo.
Instead of inky blackness, the fog of war is filled with ‘stars’(?), making it feel like you are exploring, instead of simply revealing tiles. It has a rich colour palette, and is very detailed for a low-res (even though it is played in high-res) game. What lets it down is the yucky 8-bit font. Though I loved the HOMM series, the thing I did not like was that buildings and mountains were smaller than my character, making things feel odd. Here, we have the same thing; however, this time, your “hero” moves about the map in a board-game fashion, as if it were a miniature on a map. This fools one’s brain a bit and then you don’t mind the lopsided scaling.
The character portraits need work, because it looks like something I would draw and I’m not artistic at all. That said, it is early access and there are a few things that need work. For instance, look at the mouse pointer in the image above. It almost blends in with the map. I realise they are sticking to a palette, but losing one’s mouse pointer can be frustrating. Speaking of palette choices, the palettes for the different biomes are well thought out and bring a sense of foreign-ness to each.
One can zoom in, quite far, and zoom out, quite far, giving the game a sense of scale. It does feel blocky when zoomed in all the way, and it looks better zoomed out all the way. You will also notice that blocks (the map is made up of blocks) do not repeat. Even if some of the graphics do, we do not get that cookie-cutter, stamped out feeling, making the game feel hand crafted. Procedural generation is the crypto or ai of games. While it has its place, it does not need to be shoved into everything.
I have already mentioned that the game is voice acted, which is great. I am also happy to report that the music is also really good, in the same way that HOMM music was good. It also has that harpsichord-type/bell-type sound played at just the right tempo to feel haunting with the strings extending the feeling. The only thing I turned down a bit was the ambient sounds (I enjoyed the BGM), as the eagle sound on the first map repeated a bit too many times for my liking, and the rushing water was a bit loud (I did not turn it off). They did not have a press kit on their website, so I cannot tell you much about the music or composer.
The gameplay feels rather similar to HOMM with a character on an overworld map that collects resources, and combat on a hex grid with the two opposing armies facing off against each other on opposite sides of the screen. I mean, why mess with reinventing the wheel? Unlike (like?) HOMM, your character can travel only on roads, but there are times when the pathfinding will cut corners, which is a nice touch.
I would like to see some light sources and shadows; I mean the game is made with Unity, because as it stands now, it feels like a high resolution DOS game.
I had fun, I mean the game is a fun, nostalgic romp, that held my interest, but the demo does not show off any innovations or inventions. I fear that may be the downfall in the end. The game has no price set yet, but I doubt I will pay full price. It needs something… I cannot say what, if they want full price from me. Maybe the story is great? We would have to see. I would really like this game to stand out, don’t get me wrong, as there is a lot of promise here.
The game installed via Steam and worked like a bomb on Ubuntu 20.04