Urtuk: The Desolation Reviews

Good

cool game

Brilliant and challenging turn-based tactical game. The variety of party construction, terrain, movement abilities and status effect blends into a thought provoking strategic experience. Glad to have picked this one up after so long!

Finally, tactical combat with complex mechanics and almost no RNG

This is a gem of a game!! Nice visuals and good sense of progression, nice soundtrack too! Buy it and play it!

challenging and addictive. a bit glitchy but doesn't really impact play

An entertaining turn-based combat game for those who have played Battle Brothers, X-Com, Gloomhaven and Divinity to death. Your party of 3-6 characters travels around a map, fighting battles, levelling up, getting loot and acquiring mutators which give added skills or bonuses. On each map you’re searching for the boss that you will have to defeat to move on to the next level. There’s no time pressure though, you can spend as long as you want on each level taking on fight after fight. There’s not much story to the game and only a few random events that influence combat. For the most part the entire game is about tactical combat on a grid of hexes. This is highly entertaining, with several neat tactical twists. For example if you have characters on both sides of an enemy your attacks are automatically critical hits. If you have ranged characters close by they’ll support your melee attacks with bonus attacks. You can also stun enemies by shoving them off high places or kill them outright by pushing them into pits. There’s a huge number of recruitable characters and scope for different builds, but each class is quite restricted in the gear they can carry. Your Bloodknight can only ever use a greatsword. If you find a cool axe or billhook, then you’ll need to recruit a berserker or footman to use it. The learning curve is steep and it’s not that friendly initially. I didn’t find the tutorial all that helpful past the basics of combat – there were a lot of ‘oh, that’s how that works’ moments when I was playing. Enemies have many different skills, even right from the start. Most enemies have 5 to 10 different skills so a lot of reading is required to be aware of what is happening. Still I can’t be the only one who lost missions after having my guys unexpectedly rammed off a cliff, pulled into a death pit or have a carefully planned shove fail because the enemy is immovable. It’s not that the game is being unfair, all the information is there, but there’s just a mental overload when faced with all the different enemy types with tonnes of skills, often with one crucial skill that you need to know about hidden among a dozen inconsequential ones. By the end of the game you’ve learned which enemies are which, which skills to fear, and which abilities are most dangerous, but there’s a rough learning curve. The first map of the game is pretty easy, but the difficulty spikes hard when you hit the second map. My unarmoured team of skirmishers was crushing everything and got ripped apart by the poisonous swampers. You tend to learn by dying in this game. There are enough positives to make this fun, but it isn’t up to the standard of the best games of this type. I can’t see myself playing run after run now I’ve finished it.

Thought this would be a slam dunk --- a simple, clean hex-based tactical squad game. Unfortunately, it was not. The graphics are great but the UI is frustrating. Relevant information and buttons are small and hard to quickly access. Font is difficult to read. Odd hero abilities. Why doesn't the Priest just have a... heal? Why am i sacrificing 25% of my HP to give an ally lifesteal? Makes no sense thematically. Suffers from options-itis. Too many ways to play. Too many features that add nothing to the game. Please, play Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon and discover the beauty of simplicity. The amount of gore is dumb and cringy.