Brawl Tactics: Origins Reviews

It keeps crashing for no reason

My first run the game got stuck after one of my units died to a bleed (i guess) or some other damage between rounds, then I got stuck on confirm defense for a unit that was already dead after the enemy turn started and they tried to attack the unit that is no longer there. So I'm going to have to not recommend it if I am finding game breaking bugs this fast.

It definitely doesn't feel like a 1.0 release. I was going to leave a positive review, mostly because I trust these dev and their continued work, but I convinced myself otherwise as I wrote this. The UI is a mess and sorely lacking in tooltips, the cards are unreadable unless you hover over them because their bottom half is off screen, so if you want to read them, you literally have to hover over them one by one. Same goes for readability. A lot of the time you can't see where enemies can move because their tooltip boxes will be on top of the grid, and when that doesn't happen, the box will clip outside of the game screen so you can't properly read it. There's a lot of low resolution art that looks placeholder for the cards, and they aren't the most intuitive for each card either, which again, doesn't help with the fact that none of the cards are particularly intuitive or easy to read. That all said, the concept is solid. And so is the implementation. However, it feels, at best, like good early access title, and not a 1.0 in the slightest.

I started with the developers' first game, Tower Tactics, and enjoyed it a lot. I was pretty excited hearing about another game, and so I got it pretty quick when it came out - and I don't regret it! Brawl Tactics is fun and engaging, sort of a mix of FFT or similar genres with a "Rogue-lite" feel and a card system that works pretty well. The map moves on a sort of slay-the-spire format, with location choices being battles, shops, upgrade centers, random events - e.t.c. Multiple gameplay modes (though Campaign is still my favorite) mean a lot of variety. The developer is also extremely responsive and quick to update/balance the game. I have more than the 3.2 hours displayed played, a lot of it was offline during a week of power outages and this game helped keep me sane. It reminds me of the certain charm that Nerdook offers in his games, which I definitely enjoy. What you see is what you're gonna get, so if you like what you see...get it! Its worth it.