The Storm Guard: Darkness is Coming Reviews

This is a tough one to review properly. The game is really quite basic and the graphics are horrendous. But somehow... I enjoyed it enjough to play to the end. Hrm. Compare this game with Legend of Eisenwald. Legend of Eisenwald is better made in just about every way. Graphics, story, tactical battles, voice acting, Legend of Eisenwald is leagues above this title. However, I couldn't bring myself to complete Legends of Eisenwald due to the game removing my troops my troops every other map thus wasting my efforts in levelling them up. (I detest grinding) And yet I played this game through to the end? Doesn't that say something? So I'm giving this game a begrudging recommendation. It's really unpolished and many aspects are more of the same with not much variation. So once you've completed it (IF you complete it), don't expect to want another playthrough or to spend more time on it. I enjoyed my time with it and even defeated the extremely cheap final boss, but I probably won't pick it up again. And don't listen to the singing in the ending credits. You were warned.

I don't play a lot of these turn based RPG games.. but decided to give this one a try.. It's pretty fun overall, and I sat and played it for three hours the first play. I enjoyed being able to hire new heroes at the town tavern and learned a lot about these turn based games in my first time playing this game. After a while the battles seem to get a little repetitive as you find yourself making the same patterns of movements and attackss every battle. I think i'd like to see a little more variation in terrain and rocks and things to help change up the battles a little, but maybe I just haven't played enough yet to see more variation. As you complete missions, your town opens up new buildings where you can buy potions of all sorts to take in your adventures, a shop where you can buy a few armor items per for each character with different attribues for different prices and a training hall where you can advance and upgrade each characters skills as they level up. Pretty standard RPG stuff that any RPG fan will feel at home with here. Missions are the main way you level up and advance through the game, and each mission is a procedurally generated block grid that you can move your group through, each block having an random even happen, which could be an opportunity to help someone for gold (easy gold obtained just by clicking the right choice, etc) or it could be a battle. Once you move through all blocks in a mission you can return to town to rest, upgrade skills, and hire new heroes if one died in your mission. The main goal of completing each mission is to lower the "panic" level of your towns citizens and keep them safe and happy it seems, and I found that you can rest your group for a day at a time to collect taxes and easy money to spend but at the cost of your towns citizens panic level increasing due to the outside dangers that exist. My biggest complaint with this game after my first three hours of play is that in the turn based battles, sometimes there are lag spikes that make the game feel far too sluggish, but then again that might have just been an isolated issue with my 5 year old gaming pc suffering my trying to play on the 3rd best graphics settings available. Overall, a fun game.. but because I haven't played enough of these turn based RPGs.. it's hard for me to compare this game to others of a similar price and style. If I had to give this game an early grade based on my first few hours, I'd probably give it around a 75-80 as I think it will offer a lot of RPG gameplay hours for the price tag. I feel that there is plenty of content here to give RPG fans a good bang for their buck even if there might be better options available. This game gets my thumbs up as despite my few gripes, I think it offers far more positives then negatives.. and that's a great sign for the first day of its early access launch!

This is a hybrid RPG-manager with small-scale tactical combat where decisions matter and everything is turn-based. There are strategic elements as well, all wrapped up nicely in a fantasy world. The UI is very intuitive and graphics/sounds are quite pleasing. Most of the game will be spent in the tactical combat view, and I find myself going "one more turn" until 1:30 in the morning. So you are the commander of the Storm Guard and from the town view you have a number of strategic choises to make. Who to train, who to send on missions, who to recruit and such. Nothing too complex, unfortunately. Once you've selected your mission (could have been a bigger variety here), you send your forces out in a map that resembles a dungeon crawl. On each room you enter (doesn't have to be a room, but the map looks that way) you get an event, some are fights while some are choises to make. The choises aren't too complex either, but they do affect your gameplay so they do matter more than they do in most game that claim that choises matter. Each character has a race and class and you get the usual bunch here with dwarven berzerkers and warriors, elven hunters and magicians and human warriors and healers to mention a few. Each class has skills to learn and train, and most can be used in different ways. I personally don't like games with class systems, but Storm Guard manages it well and gives each class at least 2 different viable ways of using each character. Which character you bring will also affect events on the missions - if you have a dwarf with you, you'll be better at negotiating with random encounters with other dwarves. Still, the system feels a bit static to me. The enemies are nicely varied with scaling difficulty, at first you'll encounter mostly melee enemies but soon you get deadly skeleton archers backing up werewolves or goblin skirmishers and trolls. Simply put, the enemies are the usual supsects in a fantasy game - zombies, orcs and a dragon as boss. The AI is good enough to use different units with different skills in an acceptable manner. There's some nice voice acting in the game, where the narrator gives descriptions about new enemies and generally inspiring words upon completion of actions. Sounds in general are good, and graphics are pleasing as well as clear - you never have to squint your eyes and set up gamma to see what's actually there. Most things about the UI and visuals are very well functional. If I'd complain about anything here, then it's that ESC doesn't bring up menu by default and SPACE doesn't switch to the next character by default. It's also a bit too easy to accidently reorganize the roster while assigning tasks. A minor complaint would be the difficulty settings, as I find the options too narrow and static. I'd prefer more options available, preferably full customization. All in all, the Storm Guard combines a number of different features. It doesn't really excell at any of them, but the combination is really appealing to me. Well worth the pricetag and deserving of more attention.

One question I see a lot is: Why get this one instead of Battle Brothers or Warbanners? TSG: Darkness is coming is very different from both. It focuses on a few heroes, that you cannot really afford to lose (well, you can, and try to grind some new ones instead, but the opponents get stronger over time, and some missions offered unique opportunity that would be missed forever if you failed at the time I played). Battle Brothers is an open ended "endless" game about minimizing risks, and coping with losses in a way. Warbanners is about leading a small elite force through a campaign. TSG: DC is about managing a small group of adventurers, and improving their HQ while facing increasingly dangerous foes. It is semi open (in that you get a lot of mission opportunities, but there is also an ending). In a way, it feels closer to XCOM (except that I would not recommend playing it ironman at all). Most of the classes (I say most because I didn't play all of them) have intgeresting abilities and synergies. Almost all of the battles (all of them maybe?) are 4 vs 4, so it can get a bit old, but the opponents are very varied, and require different approaches to neutralize them. As you can see on the screenshots, the game uses generic Unity assets, which is a shame, but it is its main weakness. Overall, I think this game is really good, even if you have a ton of similar games like I do. It really scratches a slightly different itch.

Do you know that feeling? Keep playing games, extend your library and hoping for that one game that brings all your gaming wishes together? I have that often. Sometimes I see myself browsing the Steam library for hours just to find that one game that fits all my demands. Last year I discovered just a few of those hidden gems. I mention Thea: The Awakening because of the small team who managed to freshening a stale genre of countless 4x games around the same fantasy setting and around the same game mechanism. And more recently I discovered, while less complete yet and still in EA, Last Days of Old Earth. Like Thea it has some fresh new ideas and combinations of different genres (card game, tactical battles, turn based strategy) that fits well together. While browsing a Steam friend's library and wishlist searching for more of these hidden gems I discovered the store front picture of The Storm Guard: Darkness is Coming. I clicked the picture expecting some casual indie title on the same pixelated hex grid like the other thousands of rogue-like, dungeon crawlers etc that reach the Steam store because of fanatic Greenlight clickers. How wrongly I was when I decide to buy the game despite the ugly, embossed, unalligned font on the store front picture. Steam must be punished for hiding this game so long from my recommondations and hide it from my store page. Why they hide a title like this in a cellar beneath thousands of casual tablet games? So what exactly is this game doing right? First of all, and that is exactly why I compare it to Thea, the game is made to entertain you. That is clear from the very first run. An intro movie a la Blizzard style (when Blizzard was making games instead of pleasing stockholders). Fully animated artwork with dragons and a story told by a professional narrative. Next screen. A paper with a short story to make some ambience. Next screen. A little town with some heroes in front of a questboard. Tooltips all over to tell the player what all those buttons do. In a few minutes you understand how the game works and the town looks like a small town you wish you should visit it yourself in your dreams. Ambience is there. Music is fit totally in the setting and the artwork in Unity engine is high resolution and detailed. On the right side of the screen you have your hero/unit raster from where you can select a group of heroes you want to start questing. On the left side you can start your first quest within a minute. The quest generated is different everytime you play. You start on a kind of grid map with a random or procedural generated dungeon where every block you can walk into triggers an encounter. That can bring you some treasure, a monster encounter or just a short little story where you have to make a choice in the end. This alone already spoil some of the details you can find in this game. While in a few hundred of RPG, TBS games the last twenty years you can find a magic or a healing potion with only one effect, you find a potion with some effects AND some side effects. Why I did not see that in any other game? In turn one and two the potion is doing Y and in turn three and four the potion is doing X. Right. And so you continue to find so much detail in this game when you start your first turn based battle with your heroes against the monster army. While in every RPG or TBS game from the last twenty years you see skeletons, 2D skeletons, 3D skeletons, animated, pixels, sprites etc etc in this game you have skeletons as well. But what is different? The skeleton is really a skeleton. It raise from the ground before it even moves. It's animated not only after an attack but it's animated when battle start, when attacking, when defending. It's real! It's not just a statue. So in the last 300+ TBS games you played you can move from A to B no? In this game you can move from A to B as well. But you can move the way you want because it use waypoints while in a tactical turn based battle. So you can move your unit around an enemy unit and positioning your archer without the AI decide for you that your archer first have to walk in the melee area of the enemy while moving from A to B. Smart. And so the game use morale and adrenaline. Not just to raise some static stats. No it's used to trigger some real unique traits and abilities. Not only in the battle fought or in the current turn. It's a system used for a whole battle at once. So for the first time you really fight a battle instead of watching it. Tired of those games you shoot and miss while the AI have a constant critical hit? Here your hit change is always 100%. So again the game is not designed to punish the player but to entertain and to let you play a game. So it's easy then? No it's not. Because there are threats that lowers your hit change, lowers your damage done to enemies and traits that buff you even more or makes you invunarable for attacks. It's just more detailed and entertaining then the last 100 TBS games I played. So I highly recommend this game. Not only because what I told you above but because all those ideas, original approaches of the genre are settled in a smart, clean and nicelooking playerfriendly UI. Helpfull tips around your run. You can't move or you can't shoot and you don't know why? A small tooltip warns you and even those are fully voice overed. Besides of that the replay value must be great because of random encounters, everything have voice overs, mouse overs, tips, and detailed info on right click menu's. WSAD keys work normal for moving the map and Q and E for turning and if you don't like it that oldskool way you just use the mouse. Press middle for pan, press left for move the map and right to rotate. This game just does it allright. Final verdict: The game is some combination between the tactical battles like in XCOM games and campaign progress, character building and dungeon crawling like in Darkest Dungeon.

TL;DR version: Great Turn-based Tactical RPG / Squad Building Game 9,(9)/10 Full Version: Build your party of (up to) 5 characters from 10 different classes and 3 playable races and embark on a mission. Missions present a grid of locations to explore, each location being an encounter - not necessarily a hostile encounter, you are usually given a set of choices via text that can modify the outcome of an encounter, where choosing "Ättack the dwarves" typically means you will fight (and lose reputation with) the dwarves. Each character has 8 skill slots and prior to starting a mission you can choose which skills (s)he will carry into battle (think Guild Wars). There is a good variety of skills available to each character class, most skills can be upgraded for stronger effects. Combat itself is really fun, your party/skill set setup really matters, and what you do on the battlefield actually matters too, you can kite melee enemies, you can flank your foes, most of the time you can use a lot of different approaches to handle a particular enemy depending on your party setup. Oh, and you are definitely NOT FORCED to use the typical (and ultra-boring) tank/healer/dps kind of setup, im generally doing pretty well with 4 dps and a hybrid healer/dps (on normal/ironman, which is the highest dificulty in game currently) Seeing a lot of other reviewers tend to compare this game to Darkest Dungeon (yes, these two games share a lot of similarities) i just have to throw in my 2 cents on the matter. Combat in SG is far more tactical and depending on what the player actually does on the battlefield. In DD you are basically pitched face to face with your opponent, spam your skills and PRAY to RNGesus and Lady Luck not to miss and not to get a fat Crit in your face. In SG you have a fairly large grid battle map you can use to outmaneuver and outsmart your enemies (the AI in SG is btw quite decent, far better than the AI in many AAA titles). Id say combatwise SG compares DD like Heroes of Might and Magic would compare to Disciples, whoever played those games would instantly know what i mean :P. While there is still RNG - you CAN miss or crit - it is very manageable, and you can eliminate the chances of missing by using certain abilities, flanking or disabling you enemy, or by just having a plan B (which you actually CAN have in SG). There is no stress and no randomly aquired negative perks in SG. Town management is more interesting in DD, you cant build or upgrade buildings in SG. In SG you generally spend your gold on buying/upgrading skills and buying gear for your heroes in the armory. To draw the line, both SG and DD are good games, and probably most ppl that like DD will like SG too and vice-versa. In my opinion however SG is by no means inferior to DD like other reviewers say, and is actually much better in many aspects.

I want to like this game more and give it the most slight of recommendations, but only if it is on a deep sale. If it were a more dynamic with class/race combos and had better pacing I'd like it enough to recommend it. Maybe a second game will take the lessons learned here. The good ---------------------- Combat is generally well implemented and very fun, it plays like a lot of games you have seen before. This is a formula that works great. For a low budget indie game the graphics are good. There are many skills for classes and you have to choose wisely what to choose and train in. The mission tree is a great addition. Lots of things to do in a mission and while it would be nice to have more rewards (e.g. gold) its procedurally generated so while so themes and encounters will be the same... the combinations are varied (a lesson that could have been applied elsewhere). There are some very challenging missions. Which is only hurt byt he fact sometimes you have to take a lot of damage to fulfil them. I like that the equipment is pretty deep and a motivation to gear up your soldiers. Only knock here is this gear is class locked. Maps are generally pretty, but could use more terrain to use for tactical advantage (for the player and the AI). The Bad ---------------------- Stamina and rest mechanics are not well implemented as to advance in the game you have to do increasingly difficult missions which you need to level up a core set of heroes. The bad news is you can only use them so much and go to your b and c teams. The pace of the game is really shoddy. The game plays out in days and way to many missions crop up and with the unrest type mechanic you have to get to missions fast. Which is aproblem as the rest mechanic is slow. It would be nice to be able to rest up, built stuff and manage your base. Locked races and classes. A huge miss and replayablity issue here. Classes and races are bound to each other so there is no opportunity to mix and match and that alone would have made for a much more interesting game. Low magic. Your best AOE caster is a later introduction and the gnome has to damage himself to cast spells. Never enough gold or an effective mechanism to make more. Leveling up could be more meaningful. Maybe a couple skills boosted for free then buy up the rest.

(Please note majority of my gameplay takes place offline, which Steam does not track) A must-have for fans of tactical turn-based games. The Storm Guard appears deceptively simple, but if you get past the one-man-studio Unity graphics, the production value is rock solid. Not that I find anything to hold against the graphical presentation. It does not have AAA polish (duh), but it is far beyond the "least amount of work required" some failed game attempts implement. In fact, watching your Guard members' appearance change as they slowly accumulate equipment pieces is one of the many small, but thoughtful, additions to the game, and certainly shows the love and care clearly put in this game. To the point, though - the game is NOT a "story-mode" RPG. The story is pretty generic and serves no other purpose than a window dressing on the real focus of the game - the tactical combat. And boy oh boy does the Storm Guard deliver. There are enough classes to run into (while you pick from a randomized recruit roster, the availability of specific classes is random) to give enough replayability for several runs if only to learn the strength and weaknesses of each class. Some combination (or just classes in general) are better than others, but the balance between them is mostly preserved well enough that you will can efficiently utilize most of them. There are more combat skills than you can "equip" for each mission, and figuring out the best combination of them for your personal playstyle is, for me, a large part of enjoyment of the game. Sooner or later you will realize the need for counters specific against particular enemies. It speaks of the intricacy of the combat system that you WILL need to plan ahead to handle any of the enemy archetypes - and there are enough of them that a single cookie-cutter approach, without tactical planning once you hit the map, will result in a party wipe. Another challenge comes from the more strategic layer of the game. There is a fine balance between improving your characters' skills and equipment and retaining sufficient funds to benefit from random events during missions (or just having enough food early on). Along with timed missions that expire if left unfulfilled, and a "panic" meter that decreases your funding if you fail to keep to your duty of protecting the imaginary kingdom, you end up with having to make constant decisions on priorities. It definitely adds to the "Bad Things™ are coming!" feeling of the game. As for specific mechanics, you have the full set available. You will recruit new members at the inn. You can assign those that do not go on missions to handle one of four base-specific tasks, or let them rest and recuperate. As soon as you clear appropriate early missions, you will train their skills and buy new pieces of equipment (and the ability to see the gear improve as more model elements are added is a really pleasing touch). In the end, though, all of it is merely accessory (albeit a very important one) to the core of the game - the tactical combat. And that part is fantastic. Do yourself a favor and do not skip on this one if you enjoy tactical turn-based games. It is definitely worth the asking price.

It has it's moments, but suffers from being way too repetitive, with almost no tactics/strategy in combat. Almost every encounter plops you down right in front of the enemy group, and you just rush in and start using cooldowns. During my playtime I only saw 2 fights that didn't follow this formula, and in the end they didn't play all that differently due to being a long corridor rather than a giant square arena. The game feels like playing a turn based MMO, so if you're into that sort of thing, or if you're a huge GoT fan and want to RP as the Night's Watch, or if a nuXcom clone in a generic fantasy setting appeals to you, you may enjoy this. The game needs more combat zones, after awhile I felt like I was just going through the motions hoping for more depth or something more interesting. Combat is the meat of the game and it's far too simplistic, pretty much every fight is just tank n spank. The only real strategy is figuring out how to use your characters skills to synergize with each other, which anyone who's capable of reading a tooltip can do. It has potential, maybe a patch can add more unique encounters or something but right now it's just too repetitive.

The Storm Guard: Darkness is Coming is an interesting mixture of many ideas brought together in a single game, yet combining many good ideas is not always a good idea itself. I find myself conflicted, since I want to like this game, but I am considering to refund it while I still can. Nobody will see the screenshots and go in expecting good graphics, but I will say that the graphics and animations are actually quite decent. Though the screenshots featured put them in a good light, in game you will find that most models are less pleasing to look at close. That said, they aren't why I was considering refunding. The reason for that is that for everything this game does, there are other games who do it better. Nothing here is very bad bad, but nothing is exemplary or exceptionally good either. During most of my time playing this, I thought back to other games who did as this does but arguably better. Sure, none of those games combine all the features offered in The Storm Guard, but they focus on making those few that they do offer great. There is a village and narrator, Darkest Dungeon style. But less interesting to listen to, and the village appears less complex and with some interface quirks that are not very intuitive. The combat itself is interesting, but ultimately it just doesn't offer that much depth past 'Put the guy with a shield up front'. Maybe this will change further into the game, maybe not. I can't say I'll make it that far when it takes more than an hour to gain a single level on a hero, and with them potentially dying I would certainly hate to have to re-train them. Another thing you will quickly notice seems to be directly from Darkest Dungeon as well is the dungeon map system, except it simplifies it even further. Move from encounter tile to encounter tile, eat food along the way. Dungeons are simply encounters connected together through minimal narration- Like a DnD game ran by a newbie DM, rather than actual dungeons and a world full of story it feels like a string of random encounters, followed by a semi-random boss fight that often may as well be a regular random encounter. As a whole, and in individual parts, it just doesn't have the complexity to justify the overal average-ness of the game. It's certainly not bad, but I feel very much like there just isn't anything for me to do aside from positioning. Deciding what hero goes onto a mission didn't feel very important, and then there is no inventory for me to bother with either, nor complex armour or weapon management. The interface is slightly clumsy, that's not really an issue- You can learn the quirks. But one of the big things in a tactical combat game is that you need to see, at a glance, what's going on. You can't do that as there does not appear to be much of any indication that for example your hero's movement points are reduced until you get to his turn and find that he can't move as far. All the combats appear very similar, with no significant changes outside of scenery. Outside of combat the repetitiveness doesn't fare much better. All missions appear to be of the 'move to tile and kill stuff' variety, even if their description and reason for killing these things are different. In conclusion, I had expected a somewhat quirky turn based tactical combat game, one with interesting maps and a lot of interesting combat scenarios. In the end, I didn't get any of that. While I can see the potential, The Storm Guard is most alike a string of fights generated by a random encounter generator, with some narration about why this is happening and sometimes a choice which encounter you want to fight. Perhaps if it goes on a sale it's worth it, but there is no way I can recommend this for 20 euro. I think I just convinced myself to refund it.