Groovy! I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, the graphics and animations are GORGEOUS. I love this game’s aesthetic, it’s well done and well suited to the genre. I really missed the tiny sprite art dudes when I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and playing this was like, ooh baby, the tiny dudes are back. There’s just so much character to how each unit type attacks and defends. I love how much flavor each faction’s units have even though they’re mechanically identical, for example the dogs:
Did I mention the scout units are all dogs? It’s great.
I haven’t gotten in to this aspect of Wargroove but my understanding is that it’s very moddable, with a lot of room for stuff like custom maps and campaigns, and I think that is really cool. You can sort of feel how the extensibility is reflected in the game design. Maps are made up of tiles with a discrete and defined set of properties and each opponent has the same set of units with the same set of capabilities (other than the unique commanders). As far as I can tell, there isn’t a ton of AI rule-breaking to serve the story and I think that’s neat, it makes it feel fair and kind of chess-like relative to something like Fire Emblem.
Wargroove’s gameplay does kind of annoy me though. It’s a pretty hard game, which is fine in itself, but the punishment for failure is just rough, because these levels can get long and you have to start them all over if you lose. There are times where I felt like I’d maybe screwed up badly enough to soft-lock myself, but then thought maybe I could pull it off, and then the next twenty minutes of game would confirm I really should have quit and not wasted my time. I think I might be playing too recklessly, personally, but playing sufficiently safely seems like it would be tedious. I have a lot of room to improve so I intend to revisit this game, eventually. For now I am too tilted to keep going.
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