Vactics Reviews

Great example of "easy to learn, impossible to master" I think. Shockingly difficult and deep despite everything being very straight forward and easy to understand. I think the main issue is that it requires you to predict/understand how the enemy AI will react to moves which is not always what you'd think. Still great for the price so far.

Already a pretty polished mech turn-based tactical game with well done minimalist graphics. If you've ever played Hoplite, a lot of the stuff here will be familiar, including the hex-based movement, some interesting ways to augment your movement and offense, and the escalating level of complexity as you start to try to track what will happen with many, many enemies on screen. There's some mild meta-progression as well — you can unlock tech for your mech (teleports, grenades, shields, etc) as you keep taking another swing at putting together a great run. Really enjoying my time with this so far!

Enter the Breach Lite ™ Easy to learn gameplay and pleasing visual layout. This is a great game to pick up and play a few rounds.

I love Into The Breach and this game really got me hooked on my mobile device (that's why i don't have that much playtime here on steam). I think it fits just right for mobile, so you should probably just get it there as a nice daily tactics challenge for your pocket. The game is very well designed, everything important is always on screen. The game starts easy enough but grows harder with each district you save during your run, which lasts about 30 to 60 minutes. New weapons and different upgrades come to your aid but offer new challenges as well and if you find that all too easy you might opt in for different modifiers that make your run even harder. The daily offers a refreshingly different puzzle from day to day and I only wished that game had a wider audience so that there were more challengers on the leaderboard. ;-D So come all and play!

A fun, tactical game, recommended for fans of Hoplite or Into the Breach.

Good little mech game. Requires decent strategy and is easy to pick up and put down depending on how much time you have to game. Seems like a well thought out and stylized roguelike/puzzle game. For 10 dollars it is well worth the price.

Adorable little hex-based mech roguelike, in the style of mobile classic Hoplite. The design here seems just perfect - deterministic, puzzle-y combat in which you regularly find yourself in difficult situations, but it still feels 'fair' in the sense that taking damage always seems like a mistake which could have been avoided with smarter play. Many different kinds of equipment can be fitted to your mech and many upgrades for those equipment types keep each run feeling fresh. The difficultly seems somewhat easy for a traditional roguelike, but I've still only won once and lost several times since. Of course, there are a variety of unlockable difficulty modifiers which can be enabled at the start of a run to provide additional challenge, should the default settings prove to be too much of a pushover for an experienced player. I highly recommend Vactics for folks who enjoy challenging tactical games.

Beautifully minimalistic, easy to learn / hard to master rules. Amazing color palletes to unlock and just a very appeasing metaprogression system. Vactis is slowly becoming my "just one quick run" roguelite before work and I love it.

this is good! Inspired by the amazing Hoplite but lots of cool twists including friendly fire, a new way of using powerups to set up combos to replenish health, environmental cover / hazards, and more. In-game feeedback system in place for early access. I'm excited about this!

It is very easy to learn, but also very hard to master. The game mechanics are really simple to understand, which is good. But then you see how brutal it really. You have 100 health, which is not a lot as enemies do a lot of damage (so expect to die in just a few hits). Each turn also drains 1 health, so you effectively only have 100 turns to beat the game. And sometimes it takes several turns to get to one enemy as two enemies are on opposite sides of the map and the enemies are both long range fighters who run away from you. So you end up taking 3-10+ damage just trying to reach the other enemy at times. You can use abilities to mitigate this, but they take several turns to recharge and it gets repetitive needing to depend on the same really strong abilities while being forced to ignore weaker, but fun to use ones. And some maps get you stuck in a lose-lose situation because of the health drain per turn mechanic. You could get a bad map where if you rush in to kill a enemy quickly, you take damage. But if you take the time needed to not take a hit, you end up taking 3-5+ damage anyways as it moves in a way that makes you have to wait several turns to attack it. You can heal by killing more then one enemy in the same turn, but because of the health drain per turn mechanic, you can spend several turns setting up a combo...which effectively makes the heal very small. it means you have to really min-max and do things as perfectly as possible. Otherwise you will die because you just use too many turns as you are not given much wiggle room for mistakes at all. Ontop of this, the difficulty ramps up way too fast. So you may find yourself dying repeatedly over and over again in the first few zones with the same encounters with minor variance. Which gets old fast. Of course you could just get better at the game, but you will just fight the same few battles over and over again and that can be said for every game. It just is not interesting to do those same few battles over and over again. Especially since I could see it getting repetitive even when I get good at the game because of how this. There are literally only two enemy types in the first three battles and the next zone adds one new type. The game needs to reduce or outright remove the health drain per turn mechanic, offer more ways to heal or more variety in the first few rounds to keep it more engaging. If you want to reward the player for using as little turns as possible, just rank the player based on how many turns they used. This should make the game much more appealing to many more types of gamers. Even the youtubers I watched who played it (to try to get some tips) did not get that far before they quit because of how brutal it is. So I know it is not just me. I could see a niche group of gamers like this, but they would play the same min-max way to get as high of score as possible anyways. The game itself is fun, just these few things hold it back and suck the fun out of it.