Fae Tactics is a surprisingly large and fully featured tactics game. It has a lot of charm, great pixel art, and some interesting mechanics. I abandoned it because the difficulty is a bit too spiky and a couple of bad gameplay choices started to get to me, but I still had a good time with it.
The game is visually striking. There is an impressive amount of pixel art here and all of it is really great. The main characters are all very expressive and have cool designs.
The narrative seems very twee and simple at first, but it does grow into something that hits a bit harder. There are some pretty dark moments here and the story pushes into some more mature territory. I think the world building is interesting as well, even if some of the factions and people are a bit cliche.
Fae Tactics plays like a classic tactics game, with a square grid and turn-based combat. Most of the strategy revolves around countering elemental weaknesses in a more complicated version of rock paper scissors. I like how this makes you think about levels before you try them out and encourages you to use different characters. The characters are also all meaningfully different and have interesting side stories once you put them in a few battles.
I did get pretty sick of the battles though. There isn't quite enough variety over the length of the game to sustain things. Like most games, if this was half as long it would be much better.
There are a couple of mechanics that drained a lot of the fun out of this game for me -- Apex and Multicast. Most later bosses have these. Apex means they ignore elemental type (which undermines the gameplay pretty extremely) and Multicast means they cast 2-3 extra spells on their turn (which means they output an insane amount of damage and can kill a character in one turn, which often means game over). This makes the last fights feel pretty arbitrary and random, unfortunately.
I like Fae Tactics and I think it does some interesting things with the tactics formula while still hewing pretty close to the Final Fantasy Tactics-style. There aren't many games that fill this particular niche, and this one is definitely worth checking out.
The game is visually striking. There is an impressive amount of pixel art here and all of it is really great. The main characters are all very expressive and have cool designs.
The narrative seems very twee and simple at first, but it does grow into something that hits a bit harder. There are some pretty dark moments here and the story pushes into some more mature territory. I think the world building is interesting as well, even if some of the factions and people are a bit cliche.
Fae Tactics plays like a classic tactics game, with a square grid and turn-based combat. Most of the strategy revolves around countering elemental weaknesses in a more complicated version of rock paper scissors. I like how this makes you think about levels before you try them out and encourages you to use different characters. The characters are also all meaningfully different and have interesting side stories once you put them in a few battles.
I did get pretty sick of the battles though. There isn't quite enough variety over the length of the game to sustain things. Like most games, if this was half as long it would be much better.
There are a couple of mechanics that drained a lot of the fun out of this game for me -- Apex and Multicast. Most later bosses have these. Apex means they ignore elemental type (which undermines the gameplay pretty extremely) and Multicast means they cast 2-3 extra spells on their turn (which means they output an insane amount of damage and can kill a character in one turn, which often means game over). This makes the last fights feel pretty arbitrary and random, unfortunately.
I like Fae Tactics and I think it does some interesting things with the tactics formula while still hewing pretty close to the Final Fantasy Tactics-style. There aren't many games that fill this particular niche, and this one is definitely worth checking out.