Kuro Tactics Reviews

This game is very very bad

A quick but enjoyable turn-based tactics game. I would recommend anyone who is a fan of the Fire Emblem series, particularly the Gameboy Advance entries, to give this game a go. FE fans will already feel familiar with the grid-based tactical gameplay Kuro Tactics has to offer. You have your units on the map, move them next to an enemy unit, commence combat, and rinse and repeat until the map is cleared. Speaking of units, you control only three of them in this game from beginning to end: Kuro the knight, Arufa the wizard, and Shiro the healer. They each serve their respective purposes as the tank, damage dealer, and healer for the group. The game's campaign has ten maps to go through and if all of the maps are the same size and shape, each one is designed in a way that prevents them from feeling monotonous and samey. One element of the map design I enjoyed is the way parts of the maps are split into areas locked behind doors that need to be destroyed in order to progress. This makes it so that the enemy units don't all just rush you down from the first turn, meaning you control the pace and speed of your playthrough. The controls for the game are basic yet serviceable. WASD keys are for camera control while the mouse handles the rest such as selecting/moving units, attacking, equipping items, etc. One thing I will note is that because the mouse does everything, a common mistake I made was selecting Shiro and then clicking on another party member thinking I was just switching between them when that makes Shiro heal someone instead. Clicking anywhere on the map is enough of an easy workaround to prevent this. Now to really enjoy this game, the two most important things to keep in mind are experience point distribution and item management. EXP should be spread evenly between the three party members as just one of them dying is enough to cause a map defeat, so it's vital that all three level up so they can hold their own. Item management is equally if not more important. Every map objective is to open every treasure chests, so your inventory will fill up with new equipment as you progress. Each character has three slots for equipment (weapon/armor/accessory) and these items effect stats like health, attack, defense, action points, range, and movement. Items that give you more actions points are especially powerful as by the endgame, Kuro can hit enemies up for four times. TL;DR: If you like GBA tactics games, give this game a shot.

This game reminds me of playing Fire Emblem Sacred Stones on Game Boy Advance!!! I love the art style. I like how the items actually matter a lot. I like that the plot didn't take itself too seriously, which made it fun. My favorite level was actually the final level, it was a unique mechanic and a challenge. This is a great tactics game that only took me a few hours to beat!

The game seems too easy, with very bareboned "strategy," if you can even call it that. You only control 3 units, none of whom have any depth; their only commands are move, attack, and heal (which only your healer can do). It's a snoozefest. One gamebreaking problem I encountered is with the resolution. Character portraits take up too much space, to the point that I can't even view what any of them are saying. In battle, when I go to my inventory, I cannot view 75% of the inventory interface, so I cannot equip or use items. Battle 3 throws a huge difficulty spike at me, and I suspect I am supposed to be equipping the items I have been finding; however, because I can't, I am stuck at a standstill, with no way to progress. It's not the worst $3 you can possibly spend, but the developer should have made a lot more of an effort before releasing this game. Yes, I understand that it's a 1-man effort, but so is the Touhou Project, and so was Telepath Tactics Liberated, yet those games turned out great.

A very bare-bones game. No sound effects at all. It is very confusing as to how my character died because it seemed that it happened for no reason. Was it a ranged attack, a spell or something? It came out of nowhere. No sound effects may have heavily contributed to this. I requested a refund.

Very short (as in, I finished in an hour and a half) and way too easy tactics RPG with only three characters and very narrow chokepoints that mean you can generally just let everything hit Kuro, your fighter, ineffectually while Shiro, your healer, heals him occasionally. Decent and seemingly custom graphics were the only strong point, but no real battle animations or anything like that, and no sound effects, just a background music. The writing was silly and needed some proofreading, the gameplay was basically just straightforward and easy as long as you get all of the items, which are in clearly-marked chests, and properly distribute XP from enemy kills across your party. I hit max level on everyone well before the end of the campaign, which made everything after that even faster as I no longer had to balance XP gains, possibly the one tedious thing. The item system is a bit interesting, though also exploitable since you can switch items between characters' actions and pass your strongest attack bonus items around the party or whatnot. This is pretty useful at the start before you have basic items on every character, but falls off after a while since the gains are smaller once everyone has at least something equipped. Not recommended, on account of it doesn't have enough depth to appeal in basically any way.