Line Of Defense Tactics - Tactical Advantage Reviews

Terrible controls render this game virtually unplayable.

As the only person who has played this game in all of 2021 may I just say I am honored to be likely the last of the people who will ever purchase and play this game. I purchased this game with the intent of playing it as an April Fools day prank for my own social media channels, but outside of that I decided to give this thing a fair shake to see if this might've been a diamond in the rough. It's not. At all. Ignoring the context of "outside influences" I am 100% confident that this game fails entirely on its own merits. - The controls are simultaneously over-complicated and over-simplified to the point where getting your troops to the other side of the map is difficult. The only way to move around without wanting to blow your brains out is to use Move All, which causes the enemy to spot you out in the open so they can blow my brains out for me. For a game that seems to prioritize touch controls they work horribly in that context. Don't see why this game has controller support either - it is the worst approach to play. - Progression is horribly unsatisfying and only adds a large element of grind to what likely is a 2 hour game at most, sans grind. While I wasn't able to stomach more than 3 levels I had manage to die quite a few times. This is due to issues above as well as enemies just being able to stomp ya without a fair bit of prep. The fact that you gain a pittance of XP/Creds from completing a level as well as the levels being overall a chore to go through makes wanting to grind out a few levels to move on a non-option. -Presentation-wise, graphically the game is fine. Most stuff meshes together artistic wise even though it's heavily dated. The main issue are animations and sounds. The animations are absolutely stiff and unsatisfying. I get more life out of a rock-em sock-em robot match than these lifeless things trying to melee. I also can get better gun sounds from shaking a single TicTac in its case. If I can't get decent visuals, at least have a sound design that allows me to fill in the gaps in my head. -Story is as engaging as the review you're reading, which in my opinion is best summarized as drawn out, disorganized, and full of fluff that you barely read in order to get to the point. Yeah so game pretty bad. Can't wait for Line of Defense!

Nice try. But it's trash.

Game is actually very smoothly, well put together with controls/UI that seemed to have been brainstormed beforehand, for the most efficient way possible to make the controls easy. You simply select a character and drag to a target or location and icons with descriptions of the actions each will do pops-up. The game plays in real-time but anytime you go to select a character to control them, it auto-pauses for you. Let's take a further look at that. In many tactical games, you have to hit "space" to pause the game all the time. Or, it's already hard-coded as turn-based, and you have to setup all the moves manually, then press "go" type button. Here, it acts out in real-time, and you can pause or simply select the character to issue orders and it does all that pausing and stuff for you. Ingenious. Why don't more games bother do to this? With your squad, you travail through different missions and scenarios, the goal? Complete the laid out objective. The graphics are smooth, they do the job well. There's a ton of fine-tuning. Whereas some games can be "rough around the edges", this doesn't come close to suffering from that but surpasses it well, which is a treat vs. similar games, or rather, those with otherwise jank on the market. Instead, here, it's well thought-out and quite dandy for it. The UI is incredibly efficient. Not only that, it's incredibly informative as to what each option/action does. On top of that, new players are literally given pop-ups to advise to help further explain how it works - which is already easy. What a shame more games don't make such things so easy as we see here.

For this price, I really expected a more sophisticated game. Instead, it's less deep and well thought out than other mobile games I paid five dollars for. The story is not very developed, actions have very little motivation, and the whole thing just feel disjointed. It seems more like a coffee break game, in bite size. And even at the current 50% off it is way over priced.

To put this game in to one word, I'd say it's obnoxious. The control scheme is novel, but appauling and awquward. There are all ready better control schemes designed for this kind of thing, and they work. If you hold the "order bar" in one spot for one second, literally one second, I get some rotory options wheel that i can't back out of without having to start over my order. Also, theres no restarting a checkpoint, or even restarting the entire mission. If you mess up something, the only option is to back out of the mission entirely, and go through 5 menus to start up again, and half of them are basically a "are you sure you want to start this level?" kind of selection. Theres no real cover in this game either. There are little areas marked by dots that provide a half damage factor, but that's all you get. The "cover" works in all angles around it too, so there's no real purpose for tactical moving in order to flank, or prevent flanking. Theres no suppressive fire, no smoke grenade to mask movements, no higher ground advantage, Nothing that really even incorporates tactics besides not making your squad run too far into the map and getting overwhelmed by guys that you couldnt see because of the lame ass fog of war. Theres no real tactic necessity when playing. Which hardly makes sense, seeing that "tactics" is the biggest part of the title. This game blows. I'm incredibly dissapointed because it looked like it'd be super fun

I want to love this game, there is so much potential. Its let down by an appaling interface. You cant pause without giving an order... Whats wrong with the spacebar to pause??? it works for every other game like this. Also why use radial menus? they are for console games. PC games use the mouse and keyboard. List the squad members across the bottom of the screen and place the order buttons for each one above their picture, that way you can see their status and what they have avaibable easily. Every time i play this my squad gets whiped out because i deliver an order to charge forward out of cover by accident. Anything more complex than move and shoot is too complex in the heat of battle... which defeats the point of this game.

Clunky. Difficult to understand why the controls weren't mapped for the PC. Short, lacks a good story. Most of all... the Dev has a track record for hating on his customers, and this time around is not any different.

-tl;dr Review: 4/10 DO NOT BUY- Overpriced even on sale, you'll get maybe 8 hours of gaming out of it. It's shallow, so when you do enjoy it, just know you won't get much more of it. A steal at a dollar, fairly priced at $5, neutral at $10, what are you gonna do/maybe if I'm rich at $15. At $25, go ahead and buy yourself two premium AAA titles that are a year old and do yourself a favor. (Also note -the forums are kinda hidden, (link http://steamcommunity.com/app/267220/discussions/ ) note that developer Derek Smart WILL ban you if you disagree (http://i.imgur.com/e1SZkWG.png), /posts against the game will be deleted. He hasn't changed from the Battlecruiser "THIS IS THE GREATEST GAME EVER AND YOU'RE ALL PLEBES!" Usenet days. :/ http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/14/3553620/the-redemption-of-derek-smart -Full Review- Graphics They're fine -maybe even cool - but space marines are pretty ubiquitus now. I get that this is art he's been using for years (though WH40k, Heinlein, Doom etc etc really made these settings so nobody gets credit) but I couldn't help thinking "blue mass effect." This game has a lot of blue and red, and if you play it on a mobile device at a mobile price that would be fine but on a PC the graphics just look... well, ported. Also $25 bucks feels high because he's basically just reusing assets from the MMO - (Not this game - just the same stuff. The MMO) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALg8Nzccbnw ) to make a game. They're fine, and probably the best part of the game, but if you've played Halo, Mass Effect, or anything else you've seen these designs, ships, locations, armors. It looks kinda like the aliens from the movie Battleship, honestly. Gameplay I'm going to seperate this from controls, so I'll say this is the best part. You can move dudes around, trick the ai to rush you, put down shit, use nades. The 16 levels you get are pretty fun (though if you're good at it they go by very quickly - especially if you don't fully explore them.) Ugrading equipment and leveling are satisfying - though this is part of the shallowness - not many levels, not many upgrades, etc. Just enough to wet your whistle. The big things are neat and genuinely scary, and the space combat is the most fun part (as would be expected of a D/S game.) And that's how the game-play would be if the next section of the review doesn't exist. Controls Here there be dragons... These might work on a tablet - I do not know. But the mouse and keyboard is radial menus and brokenness and confusion. There's no screen pause to catch your breath - instead it's the freemium mobile style right to menu (so you can't tactically advance ahead of the pay-to-play mechanic on tablet by stopping to think) BS that drives me nuts. Can I just get a moment to think in a clear screen, please? I paid 25 dollars. (And don't worry there's no Freemium pay to play nonsense in this, but at that price there had better not be - it's just the mechanic still exists in the game.) (Combat http://youtu.be/sU37J3JjXUA?t=6m43s) Everything moves faster than you can get the controls to work (unless you're really good at counter-intuitive controls - I moved through the game very quickly but I understood where the levels were trying to take me and I did that/moved VERY slowly.) I almost died a lot (but based on some other reviews I'm apparently very good - I got through many levels with 0 revives and one dude barely alive - so if you're all wiping a lot I'm not surprised. I may have gotten supernaturally lucky.) (You'll note that in their videos they use a ton of cuts - that's probably because doing a tutorial without screwing up has got to be difficult with the control scheme.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TvRQYc6oUM Basically the controls are broken, and if you tell the dev that he'll accuse you of being bad at games, but I'd like to see a lets play of someone really rocking this control scheme when the shit goes down if it's as easy as the dev says, along with a shot of their hands moving on the mouse/keyboard. Pressing 1-4 to select dudes is helpful, but it's the menus and the inability to "clean pause" that ruins it. On top of that, there's no volume control (because it's a PORT and tablets have switches for that.) Replayability There is a horde map. You can replay it. It's got nowhere to hide, no choke points, and a lot of fences. Did you die? Play it again. There is a campaign. It's actually pretty fun. When you're done with it a few hours later, play it again. (not out of order though, you don't get to replay missions without replaying the whole shebang.) Play it more if you want equipment you don't need, or weaker versions of equipment you have. Done all that? Write a review and get banned from the forums forever. It's been about 5 hours and you're done. Happy 25$ Price I get that games cost money. But the constantly being taken down video of the game that this is based on uses all the same assets as this (a game that I believe is tardy, but don't quote me on that.) And on android it's much, much less {$4.99.} It's why I say this game would be a steal at a dollar and fair at five - when this is a five dollar game with the Dev not attacking players, it will be a solid effort and 6 out of 10, but when you charge a premium price you review against that. Try to point this out and this happens: http://i.imgur.com/K8dn30P.png Total: 4/10 DO NOT BUY. I can't recommend this - some of the additions below will show why, but it's mostly the game/price. The rest is just... very, very odd behavior. SCREENIES, LINKS * How the review WAS shaping up, and the nonsense that ended up tanking it http://steamcommunity.com/app/267220/discussions/0/558747921885310403/ and proof of my banning for "rude". http://i.imgur.com/sy2DLJS.png) * Yet more banning going on, and now he's editing other people's comments. http://i.imgur.com/QrbFxDY.png http://imgur.com/1qHnDoQ * "Derek Smart on why Line of Defense Tactics costs more on PC than on mobile devices" http://www.pcgamesn.com/indie/derek-smart-why-line-defense-tactics-costs-more-pc-mobile-devices * A hilariously fake review and the accompanying censurous legal threat: http://www.somethingawful.com/game-reviews/completely-libelous-review/1/ * More context. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic/E7q27JJGvJ4 * Metacritic score http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/line-of-defense-tactics---tactical-advantage * How Derek felt about deving for mobile (Before deving for mobile) http://youtu.be/ibCpjQRSSTs?t=4m21s * Derek accuses me of having multiple accounts and "teases" the word lawsuit while tl;dring http://steamcommunity.com/app/267220/discussions/0/558747922093449025/ EDIT: More veiled threats http://i.imgur.com/4aoy4ks.png My response: Derek, I don't have a mob, YOU have a mob. You have spent the better part of 30 years alienating and pissing people off with your behavior, aparently (see above.) As for multiple accounts, I am willing to work with Valve to prove you're lying again (PHD) (Coke Machine) (Neural Net) and as for the veiled lawsuit BS do what you must, but my father always said "don't threaten to sue, sue. Legal threats are toilet paper if they're not carried out" so feel free to friend me and I'll give you the address to serve your censurous legal threat at and I'll see if Popehat or Public Citizen will stick up for me. But again, I don't know these people, they're here because of *your* behavior here, or over the years. Please do not give me credit for people disliking you, you've worked so hard to make it so that I don't deseve the credit. This is a fair review of the game YOU created - if you dislike the reviews, change the price or fix the game (or both), don't try to run the messenger over with a steamroller. W. R. "Mob Troll" or whatever. P.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tIn1_9YvGds