Waiting for these various Godots, I wanted some class-based combat and didn't feel like trudging through any outdated, clumsy '90s pixelation so this seemed like a good time to dive into some squad management games instead of full-scale RPGs. Yes, terminology is relevant here, but I'll return to it at the end of this post. While I do like RPGs, I find the bare-bones dungeon crawl routine by itself, divorced from meaningful long-term decisions, to grow rapidly tedious, whether expressed in over-randomized roguelikes or linear series of overly-scripted missions like Icewind Dale or Fallout: Tactics. Despite their overlap with some of my all-time favorites, squad tacticals are one genre I've never much gotten into. Skipping the obvious choice of the unplayed XCOM titles in my library I instead slotted three turn-based squad management games from the past few years, all with vaguely medieval aesthetics and all seemingly low budget, for the sake of comparison.
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The first of the three, most promising initially and most disappointing ultimately, is Battle Brothers, a poor man's Mount&Blade with zombies and goblins thrown in.
The combat system is basically solid, with stringent movement and fatigue limits making you plan out your units' positioning beforehand. Initiative sees a more relevant implementation than usual due to the need to organize sequences of attacks (e.g. freeing your archers from melee engagement before they can shoot or cracking an enemy's shield using an axe before laying into him with swords and javelins) and flanking gets its due in both attack bonus and demoralization of the flanked.
Aesthetically, the battle busts do nothing for me (either here or in RimWorld) but though uninspired and generic, every flavor of the game could be counted sufficient (the writing can even be quite entertaining at times) had its gameplay been better.
Sadly, the skill system is mostly cosmetic with obvious false choices: no particular reason not to grab the exp bonus at second level or get all your melee the survival chance bonus at third, or the weapon specialization at fifth. Also, despite their special abilities, enemies' target priorities and attack patterns are quite homogenous. Everything from trained mercenaries to zombies and wolves seem to know what an archer is and try to focus them - and while we're at it, who handed out head and body armor to all these wolf packs anyway? Combined with a maximum army size of 12 on a hex grid (severely limiting hand to hand combat) and the need to focus fire to thin out enemies due to the steep damage/health ratios, your group composition basically writes itself. If you're passingly familiar with the notion of combined arms and medieval formations, ever heard words like phalanx or tercio, you're set strategy-wise. You won't be swapping more than a couple of roles out of your 4/4/4 shield/polearm/shooter formation. There's simply little to no incentive to build themed groups, no matter where or what you're fighting, especially since you'll never know where or what you're fighting.
Battle Brothers' most glaring flaw by far is its heavyhanded abuse of leveling sideways, a.k.a. "level scaling" since your main activity is running quests against enemy groups who will always spawn as slightly tougher or slightly more numerous than your own current group - on paper. My own chief gripe with it however goes back to why I called it a poor man's copycat of M&B, despite one using FPS combat and the other turn-based tactics.
Battle Brothers displays all the same set pieces: trade goods, troop recruitment, quests, occasional roaming bands. On the other hand, it only lets you accept one quest at a time. Trade goods yield trivial profit and troops only gain experience while fighting. The map is randomized, and despite local event modifiers, every noble house is pretty much the same, producing the same generic troops and armor. Meaning I have no incentive to waste a few hours' wages to stop at Langenburg in that screenshot, despite it being on my way to my next quest. The whole game boils down to bullheadedly chasing one quest marker after another, making no plans whatsoever. Wherever you go, there you are, recruiting the same peasants and fighting the same randomized enemies. It removes both the ability and incentive to multitask or think long-term - by design. It's galling to see Battle Brothers abusing Dwarf Fortress' "losing is fun" tagline or bragging that it "is a hard game" - no, it's not much of a game at all, and losing is a matter of dice rolls and not player decisions.
I'm tempted to be lenient and call this an amateurish imitation of greater inspirations, but the more I've gotten into it (and the more I see its developers finding new ways to ask customers for more money instead of delivering actual content) the more it looks like a cynical cash-grab banking on superficial nostalgia. It tries to recreate the emotion of playing better titles, streamlined toward the core impression, the "feels" of pitched battles, squad management or a randomized map while eliminating any of the variety, adaptation and meaningful choice which elevated DF or M&B to niche notoriety. Battle Brothers is a dullwitted impression of something more interesting.
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I have less to say about Urtuk: the Desolation because it's the newest, being sold in "beta" - whatever that still means when everyone markets products as "beta" versions to lower customers' expectations. Its main problem (more so than even most modern games) is being blatantly conceived as a mobile app, even if that port hasn't been finished yet. The large-print, thumb-friendly interface, the intemperate jittercam abuse included as a basic feature (thankfully toggle-able) which could only be bearable on smaller screens, the limited number of options per menu, all scream phone app. This need not necessarily spell doom. FTL and Into the Breach ultimately made a good show of it after all. Still, a product intended to twiddle your thumbs as you mindlessly yammer with your friends on the bus will necessarily be geared toward limited attention spans.
Urtuk's"map" is even more pointless than that of Battle Brothers', being merely a random-generated lattice of encounters where you'll never see more than two steps ahead and have little reason to backtrack. You automatically get level-scaled gear to suit your party as you advance through tougher fights (more sideways leveling) but at least character advancement is expanded by a fairly wide choice of "mutators" adding bonus attack procs or abilities. It does offer more flexibility within its 6-character party composition, but its real strengths are terrain interaction and ability chains:
In the image above my own character, a monk, instantly kills an enemy by flipping him into a spiked pit, incidentally also giving a regeneration buff to the priest who has to cast protection and lifesteal spells from his own health. (Fun story: while trying to bait something into position to set up this screenshot, I also managed to get myself knocked back into a "dead zone". Reeeeee-load.) The difference is striking. Though both Battle Brothers and Urtuk use the same hex grid with the same vertical levels and elevation bonuses and both include some knock-backs and penalties for dropping multiple z-levels, in the first case terrain is mostly a nuisance while in Urtuk it becomes an active part of combat in a way almost reminiscent of Into the Breach.
In addition to stamina limiting your actions per turn, your crew also get a "focus" (or rage bar) which fills up as you fight to allow for global-cast ultimate ability buffs like life-stealing, critical or bonus hits. The end result is a satisfying acceleration of combat round by round, rewarding aggressive, focused tactics with even more killing power while still maintaining the inherent fragility of your units and allowing for disastrous mis-steps.
Remains to be seen whether Urtuk's developer will make something of this. Its visual art style is refreshing in its dark age pox-ridden, gap-toothed, hunchbacked, knobbly, disfigured, macabre refusal to bow before the current fad of bland prettiness in games. I'll never get tired of seeing the vampire vanquisher hammering foes literally into the ground with his flail. Ah, the simple pleasures of leading a supernaturally mutated scavenger army. Its descriptions and encounter prompts... are surprisingly legible given the lead developer is Slovakian leading an apparently minuscule local team, but one would hope they'll collaborate with a competent writer at some point. Its quests could really use more variety beyond protecting neutral NPCs or attacking featureless "villages". The real test, however, is whether Urtuk will acquire a more consistent framework or will resign itself to a "fart around on the bus" stand-in for Fruit Ninja.
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Darkest Dungeon is the one example I thought I'd end up panning at first glance yet turned into the only overall pleasant surprise.
It's a 2D sidescroller, a simple dungeon crawl with a group of four heroes, reiterated through endless dungeons. Again, the concession to phones and tablets is both unmistakable and unwelcome (and odd to see presumably younger gamers gush about the side view as somehow innovative when it's just bringin' back the '80s) but if the devil's in the details this game exorcised quite a few of them.
Though one-dimensional, your heroes' formation matters, allowing most abilities to be used from only two or three of the four places in line and similarly affecting a limited number of enemy spots. Granted shifting ranks doesn't add anything which a top-down hex grid wouldn't, so I can't really justify it as a design choice, but it loses less than I expected in the 2D transformation. The big bruisers still go up front and the squishy casters in back, weapons still have minimum and maximum ranges, etc. Teammates can still interfere with each other's firing line by dashing ahead or cowardly hiding. Maybe the real lesson learned is that we need a less linear concept of formations for top-down strategy.
DD most obviously shines in its various playable classes. Take the houndmaster as an example, most commonly useful as a back row equivalent of artillery capable of slapping bleed DoT on an entire party of biological enemies every round. However, he can also synergize with other heroes utilizing the "mark target" skill or can fill the second slot as a stunning and morale boosting general support. Each of the 17 classes carries its own flavor, and as you can only slot four of their seven skills for a particular mission also a decent amount of flexibility and customization. Meaningful choice is as thoughtfully worked into every aspect here as it was lacking in BB.
You get a town as a base of operations, with fairly steep upgrade costs for the buildings you'll be using to equip and bandage your heroes (back) into fighting shape, decreasing their accumulated stress and persistent wounds (a.k.a. diseases or quirks) acquired during missions.
Despite lacking an overland map, you actually get more choice of destination than in the previous two examples, as each of the four main dungeons comes with its own set of enemies (undead vs. Lovecraftian fish monsters vs. fleshy abominations vs. witches and forest beasts) and its own set of rewards and supply requirements. Again, the lesson learned by comparison is not that an overland map wouldn't open up more options, but that it's not being fully utilized in games that offer it as a selling point.
I couldn't figure out how to keep my town's economy out of the red until an online comment helpfully pointed out recruitment is free but upgrades and maintenance aren't. You're absolutely meant to run a draconian cost / benefit summation for all your new recruits and toss them out the door (as shellshocked husks of their former selves) after a single mission if treating their ailments would prove less profitable than replacing them.
Equipment is unfortunately fixed as in Urtuk (which was likely heavily inspired by DD) though at least it's up to you when and whether to pay for upgrades. Trinkets modifying your stats help with creating theme groups like bleed/blight-stacking combos or heal/protection-heavy endurance fighters.
Being vaguely Lovecraftian-themed, DD of course includes a sanity (a.k.a. stress) meter. As heroes are driven above their stress limit they begin to act erratically, refuse heals, swap places randomly and eventually suffer heart attacks, losing all their hit points.
One of DD's most charming features, and one I don't see mentioned much in reviews, is its encouragement of brinksmanship. Severely limited inventory space, costly hero maintenance financed by massive loot hauls and improved loot drops in dangerous conditions will constantly tempt you to risk your mooks' lives to maximize profit. Usually, it results in some degree of tragedy. Sometimes...
Aside from that, I'm impressed by the stentorious yet erudite voiceovers which elevate the atmosphere from cheesy low-fidelity Halloween children's party to moderately engaging Gothic horror.
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So what do these little team-building exercises have in common?
1)
They're luck-based games. DD comes closest to "taming the randomizer" as the '90s saying went, by at least categorizing its randomness and limiting the impact of individual fights, allowing you to recover. There's a lot to be said for the little thrill of pushing a stand-off to the brink, repeatedly doubling down not knowing the final outcome, and especially not knowing exactly you'll find around the corner. Nevertheless, if we're being honest, success comes more often from beating the odds than beating the AI (with the odds occasionally being skewed ever so slightly in our favor to create the illusion of personal success, as with Urtuk's weapon/armor drops.) What's the point of chiding players for "ignorance of your enemy" in DD when said enemy popped up randomly? Yes, I am ignorant of events yet to be determined. It's called the human condition. Sue me.
I was wondering why this tendency toward randomization should be so pronounced in squad management games, but that's not necessarily true. The WH40K-inspired ones I've tried like Final Liberation, Chaos Gate, Armageddon, have tended instead toward strict level design with deliberately distributed and timed enemy waves - to the point of overdoing it. Is it the medieval precept that prompts randomness? The lack of a direct tabletop reference? Being marketed to casual phone-twiddlers? (- but BB wasn't) Is it that they're marketed as rebellious in their denial of the game industry's "kill ten rats" fixation on gratuitous victories? This seems the most likely, overcompensating in creating a chance of loss by instituting loss by chance.
2)
All include some blatantly overextended interface timesinks. That ghoul's attack in the screenshot above consists of all of one frame stretched to two seconds, subverting its otherwise welcome gothic visuals into trudging through a cheap low-frame anime. In all three cases you're made to sit through overextended interface confirmations for various actions: a single frame wobbling about, upcoming unit turns gradually sliding over the bottom of the screen, ability activation icons slowwwwwwwly sliding upwards even when you're the one who gave the damn order, and every single grand interface event plays out separately, making you wait for them to cycle through every damn detail of every damn turn of every damn round, because as noted in the case of BattleTech, apparently nobody told these people that voiceovers should be voiced over actual gameplay.
OK, we get it, you're a low-budget project and you needed to fake some bells by whistling, but if you'd put more thought into actual entertainment instead of padding you'd qualify as a higher-budget project!
3)
These are not RPGs, despite either advertising themselves as such or being listed in that category in stores and review sites. Last year I called for RPGs to rediscover their roots as strategic war games and that "The central question of an RPG is not how to add strategic value to good/evil 20-level wizard/fighter/thief archetypes, but how to add moral and stylistic roleplaying choices to chess." Conversely, leaving out those stylistic and moral choices still leaves you short of the mark. In a role-playing game, the player selects or cobbles together a role, a mentality, a set of guiding principles, interweaving the entire campaign. Squad management games instead rely on replaceable redshirts, and regardless of what classes or interactions these may have, the squad's high mutability erases the player's personality.
This ain't nothin' - to reiterate an old principle, the difference between simple voluntary action and long-term decision-making is the difference between dumb animals and thinking beings. In all three cases here, the player largely just reacts to the next randomized problem thrown his way, shuffling the available pieces without regard to a larger pattern, making no meaningful large-scale, long-term decisions. They rely on reaction and not action, which despite their charm limits them to trivial proofs of concept or practice runs when compared to a true role-playing campaign.
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