Massive Chalice
Another kickstarter game, Massive Chalice is a turn-based tactics game. The premise is that the game takes place over 300 years, with you as an immortal king. Your heroes will age and die, so you have to manage noble lineages to birth heroes to last the game.
This creates a strategy game layered on top of the tactical game. Between missions (which are every 20 years or so) you are building bloodlines, mixing your bloodlines for correct classes and traits, and doing research for strategic and tactical advantages. It’s a lot of fun. Both layers are interesting and work well together. I've never seen a game quite like it.
The dual layer nature changes the way you value your heroes. Unlike most games in this genre, it's not too big a deal to lose a hero, especially if they are old. However, losing too many, or losing a mission outright is very difficult to recover from.
The game adds replayability due to the random lineages, heritable traits, and classes. With 3 base classes and 6 hybrid classes, there's a lot of variety to what you can do throughout the game.
On harder difficulties, the game gets way tougher. The harder difficulties of this game made me not like "% Chance to Hit" in Turn-Based Tactics games. It's just turns the game into a slog, and losing a hero due to a miss is frustrating. However, on Normal difficulty, the game is still pretty fun and challenging, and the Chance to Hit is far more reasonable.
One major issue with the game is its lack of enemy variety. There's only seven kinds of enemies in the game. They clearly wanted enemies that were interesting, like the Wrinklers which age your heroes or the Lapses which take away experience. But there's just not enough stuff. Halfway through, you have to fight "Advanced" versions of all the different enemies, but there are no new enemies past that point. This unfortunately drastically reduces the replayability of the game, as there just aren't that many combinations of enemies. After a certain point, the missions feel too same-y.
The aesthetics are this low poly 3D look with kind of weird music. It didn't really work for me. The low poly makes the monsters just look like abstract shapes rather than cool monsters. Hard to get a sense of what I'm looking at.
Massive Chalice is pretty cool. The idea is awesome and it's executed well. With a sequel or expansion pack adding features and enemies, it could be genuinely great. Though it looks pretty unlikely, so it's just pretty cool. It's pretty cheap, under $10 frequently, so check it out!
