Think of it like a top-tier tactical RPG or even a light wargame, where everything matters. The world really does seem to react based on what your little band is doing, from bandit raids to saving refugees, with effects from good to ill.Īnd part of it is the tactical battles on maps with terrain and breakable things and abilities that can influence movement, raise and lower stats, heal, and all the usual RPG abilities paired with basically everything having some kind of status effect, so your carefully constructed defensive line can get Feared and then your order breaks and oh god there are gibs everywhere.
Think Darkest Dungeon but less over the top gothic.īut part of it is also contract management, figuring out what jobs you want to do, reacting to events on the world map, which may stem from choices you’ve made to save this person or do this thing instead. It’s like a sports management game but people are actually trying to kill each other. On the other hand, everyone can take injuries or get worn down, sometimes they get killed, so you have to balance who is alive and capable with the bodies you need to throw into each run. The temptation is always to go Bill Belichick and ditch the veterans as soon as they become expensive, but there is a marked difference in power and capability between a rookie and your veterans. Part of the game is roster management: You only have so much money, people won’t fight for free, so you have to balance the give and take of your mercenaries, the damage they take, the fatigue they endure, and whether they get sick of your shit with the salary cost. Usually, lots of violence is involved in this, because this is a medieval fantasy world with monsters and bandits and dungeons and dragons that sometimes appear and wipe out a town. You can hire some people in the tavern or rest your current crew or buy some stuff at the market to gear people out, then head out to try and do the job you were hired to do. “Work” can range from anything from hunting bandits to fighting monsters to dungeon crawls.
The game loop as such is: You get to a town and see if they have work.
Early on, one of your guys betrays you and kills basically everyone, so you’re starting from the ground up. The gimmick is: You run a mercenary company. The graphics make it feel like some half-remembered title from the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis (Genesis being the superior platform, as if that needs said) days, but with a bunch of modern systems at work. Sometimes games like this can run aground on the shoals of their ambitions, but The Iron Oath actually makes it work. The Iron Oath is sort of an RPG tactics game set in a medieval fantasy world, but it’s also sort of a roster management sim but it’s also sort of a choice-making game where decisions you make as you adventure through the world shape the world and then there’s a bunch of other moving parts.
0 kommentar(er)
