I love an element of randomness in single-player turn-based tactical games - it can force you to adapt on the fly when your plans go sideways, and sometimes gives you the thrill of pressing an unexpected advantage. Massive Chalice, though, overdoses on that good thing. Its Game of Thrones-meets-XCOM concept is a good one, but when your soldiers can be suddenly struck down not just by a lucky shot from an enemy but also by natural causes like hereditary heart disease, and entire castles can be destroyed by unpredictable events on the strategic map, there’s an overabundance of opportunities to lose one of these long 300-year campaigns through no fault of your own.
At first, setting up multiple noble houses representing character classes and then cross-breeding them to create hybrid classes through arranged marriages seems like a fantastic idea for a strategic management layer of a squad-tactics game. Hitch a melee-focused Caberjack to a stealth-ranged Hunter, and their offspring is a Shadowjack who can sneak up on enemies and bash their faces in at close range. Wed that same Caberjack to an area-of-effect Alchemist, and you get a Boomstriker with a powerful shotgun-like short-range attack cone. Combine that with various armor and weapon variations that can put a spin on how a class behaves in combat, such as crossbows that penetrate through multiple targets, and there’s a huge range of combat roles.
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At first, setting up multiple noble houses representing character classes and then cross-breeding them to create hybrid classes through arranged marriages seems like a fantastic idea for a strategic management layer of a squad-tactics game. Hitch a melee-focused Caberjack to a stealth-ranged Hunter, and their offspring is a Shadowjack who can sneak up on enemies and bash their faces in at close range. Wed that same Caberjack to an area-of-effect Alchemist, and you get a Boomstriker with a powerful shotgun-like short-range attack cone. Combine that with various armor and weapon variations that can put a spin on how a class behaves in combat, such as crossbows that penetrate through multiple targets, and there’s a huge range of combat roles.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...