Tooth and Tail

Tooth and Tail is a game that asks the question “Should we, in fact, eat the rich?”

Tooth and Tail is a Real-Time Strategy game designed for console and controllers. Pocketwatch Games gave themselves this seemingly impossible task but succeeded admirably in my opinion.

In Tooth and Tail you control your flagbearer and through him or her you command your army. There are four factions/flagbearers but they are cosmetic differences. Instead you have a shared pool of units that you mix and match into a cohesive strategy. Innovative.

The RTS works very well. There are interesting strategies and even decent micro. Apparently you can do RTS with a controller.

The terrain is procedurally generated which for an RTS is unheard of. Unfortunately I think there’s good reason for that, and the randomized maps cause all sorts of issues. Competitively, it can just cause map losses, but even in the campaign it causes frustration. Sometimes the maps will work against you, and other times the map is drastically in your favor. This is probably the one thing where I thought the innovation didn’t work.

The aesthetics are amazing. It’s Les Miserables with Redwall with cannibalism. The four factions are essentially the lower, middle, upper classes and the police. Together with an awesome chamber music-focused soundtrack and it's a delight. You don’t hear much chamber music in soundtracks and this game has some great tracks.

I absolutely recommend Tooth and Tail. It's a blast, and demonstrates that there are RTS ideas that we have yet to explore.