And so we come to the end, which is just as well for my page view stats. Here's my advice for anyone who wants to keep their traffic to a minimum without actually making their blog private: review game demos. Still, for the handful of people with literally nothing better to do than read a verbose description of a small part of a game that isn't available yet and which they almost certainly won't want to play when it is, here we go!
WILD Tactics 33 minutes - Not wishlisted...yet. Oh, wait... now it is!
Of all the demos this time around, Wild Tactics gave me the closest match between expectation and execution. I thought I was going to get an XCom clone with funny animals and that's what I got. I could leave it at that but then I'd have to think of something else to post about today so I'll go into a little more detail.
First off, all the indicators are firmly in the green. Wild Tactics looks great, as you can see from the screenshots. The characters are all very characterful, the backgrounds are as stylized as the flats in a professional production of Guys and Dolls, the dialog is snappy and sharp, the voice acting is energetic and engaging, the UI is clean, the gameplay is crisp and everything works like clockwork.
If you're looking for a tactical, turn-based strategy game featuring anthropomorphic animals and you've already finished Mutant Year Zero, relax. You've found what you're after. Speaking of which, excuse me while I just go wishlist that one. I said I'd get it if it ever went on sale but then I forgot all about it.
And while I'm at it, I guess I might as well wishlist WILD Tactics, too. Wishlisting isn't a commitment after all. If something strikes you as decent when you play the demo, it's only polite to give it the nod. It's like leaving a tip.
It's also worth adding games to the list just so I don't forget abnout them altogether, like I did with Mutant Year Zero. I know I won't want to play that or Wild Tactics at the moment, partly because, as I keep saying, summer isn't really my favorite time to play video games but also because I have an innate sense that certain genres are better enjoyed on long, dark evenings.
For me, Winter games tend to come in three sizes: Long, Medium and Short. Big RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 take me away from the miserable, cold, wet world outside for weeks or even months on end. Point and click adventures with strong narratives and compelling plots take up all my attention for a week or two. Tactical strategy games work well in short, discrete sessions, where I finish a battle or two each evening, often as a palette-cleanser from the more story-driven games, when you just wish they'd all stop talking and kill something already!
I am quite fussy about tactical titles, though. They all play much the same on the surface but something as simple as one awkward key-binding or a clumsy camera can put me off completely. I also don't much go for being yelled at by the game, which was one of the main reasons I couldn't get on with XCom itself.
And I do prefer some humor with my massacres. All these games, or at least all the ones I've played, involve pro-actively murdering everyone who gets in your way. Generally, the writers try to set things up so it seems like a reasonable response: the world is under attack by aliens and they don't subscribe to the Geneva Convention or you're a persecuted minority the authorities are trying to exterminate. Still, it can get a bit uncomfortable, the "shoot first, ask questions never" routine.
Wild Tactics is moderately light-hearted, if not actually a comedy. The demo gets the set-up out of the way very quickly, letting you know there's a crisis happening and the rule of law has to be put to one side for the moment just to stop everything descending into anarchy. Yeah, That's what all the fascists say, isn't it?
The nature of the crisis intrigued me a little, not least because it seems to be more than a little reminiscent of the basic premise of Beastars, a show I really ought to finish watching. The gist is, all the animals of Clawville live together in harmony except that carnivores aren't allowed to eat meat. It's illegal. But they wants it! THEY WANTS IT!!
Beastars is about a dozen orders of magnitude more subtle and nuanced about it. In Wild Tactics, it's basically Prohibition only meat not booze and supposedly with a " '50s aesthetic" although it looks pretty goddam '20s to me. And instead of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables you have the WILD squad (Is it an acronym? If it is, I missed the explanation of what it stands for.), which is pretty much DC's Suicide Squad only without the superpowers.
OK, they're not all sociopathic criminals pulled out of prison and given a chance to be useful for a change. Only some of them. Some of them are brutal ex-cops or cynical ex-spies. The usual suspects in other words. And they all have personality defects and catchphrases and attitude problems and some of them can't stand each other and like that.
The banter keeps things tripping along so you forget just what you're doing. Not that it hasn't been explained to you. Your handler back at HQ specifically tells you to shoot first and forget the body count. Which is exactly what I did.
Not that I had any option. Do any of these games ever let you take prisoners? Maybe once or twice, if it's for the plot...
In the demo at least, WILD Tactics has just about the shortest tutorial I can remember. You have to move your three-animal squad across a car park to a highlighted area. It takes two or three turns, during which you have to defeat precisely one enemy. He got clubbed to death with a baseball bat in one turn by my tank and that was that.
After that, there's a full mission in which you have to go into a night club, where The Golden Fang Clan is stashing... erm... something bad... maybe meat? I wasn't paying attention. You have to find the storage area, destroy whatever it is they're storing there and get out in one piece. Bonus points if you kill everyone in the club!
It was fun. Also easy, which might be why it was fun. It wasn't a walkover, though. The difficulty felt just right. No-one died but I had to use use several of the various healing options available. My tank, doing his job, took a lot of damage and everyone caught a bullet or got stomped. Most of the baddies were rhinos and they like to charge.
Crucially, I found both movement and combat to be intuitive and straightforward, something that's very much not always the case in games of this kind. Cover was clearly marked and easy to understand, targeting wasn't at all fiddly and everything felt logical. There's clear on-screen instruction when anything new comes up - missions are a form of ongoing tutorial as they often are in these games, so you're coming across new tactics all the time - but I rarely needed the help. It was usually quite clear what was happening.
After the first mission you get to choose what you do next, as again is typical of the genre. You can also buy consumables or upgrades from the store at HQ and send injured team-mates to the medical center, although all my team were extremely unimpressed with the medical facilities and didn't hesitate to say so. I'm guessing upgrading those might be an option at some point.
About the only thing in WILD Tactics I can't remember having seen in a game like this before is the relationship element between the characters. When you select your team there's a diagram that tells you who's friends with whom and which of them can't stand each other. I did notice a little tension in the chatter between my crew as they fought but it seemed like it was there for color. Maybe it has some gameplay implications further in.
All told, I really liked the WILD Tactics demo. If it hadn't been so freakishly hot, I'd have played for longer than half an a hour. (We're in the middle of a another heatwave, a proper one this time, with all-time heat records set to fall over the next few days and a red warning issued for temperatures likely to pose "a risk to life for even the healthy population".)
I've wishlisted it but there's no release date yet. With luck it'll come out just in time for winter.
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