Wintermoor Tactics Club Reviews

not good

I kept reading reviews trying to figure out why this has such a high rating. I didn't hate it; I'm going to suggest it to my (14 year-old) daughter; it might serve as an intro to RPG ... like a soft visual novel/RPG/point-and-click adventure. But there wasn't any challenge here for the 2 hours I spent (I think I paused it for a bit there too); the battles feel more like interludes ... or puzzles, as one review said. Not challenging - and rest of game is just dialogue and point-and-click adventure style. It's just ... the story is silly. I'm not going to write it up; it's cozy (in that anime-style omg-someone-is-taking-over-the-world-by-making-giant-pancakes kind of way) ... but I thought there was at least a good story there. But no - not for me at least. It's ok - but I'm going to leave it at my first attempt at it (3 battles in, I think).

(THIS REVIEW SPOILS MAJOR PARTS OF THE GAME. DO NOT READ BEYOND THE FIRST PARAGRAPH IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING BUYING THE GAME. JUST PLAY IT.) Let me start at the end with my verdict: I recommend you buy and play this game. I will be criticizing it severely, but for an asking price of not even 15€ it's very much worth it. It's a fun little game made by a cool dev team that gets you your money's worth in fun. HOWEVER. This is not a perfect game or honestly maybe even above par. The game's biggest sin is having no redeeming qualities. There are a number of issues, big and small, none of which ruin the game, but none of which are offset by something genuinely very good. The tactics segments are pretty fun, but not complex or spectacular enough to keep me invested through the entire game, let alone go for SSS ranks on all of the encounters. Some of the "walking around" optional dialogue from NPCs in the world is pretty fun, and some of the side quests are kinda funny, but never is the writing good enough for me to recommend the game based on just that. And those are the major 2 parts of the gameplay. The art is charming and I really like some of the character designs, all of the environments have clearly had a lot of love put into them. But the art is not exceptional enough that it stops the game from stagnating a little, especially in the tactics segments which are extremely central both to the actual gameplay structure and the plot of the game. The music is... fine? I imagine the devs just had different taste than me but as someone who loves both New Wave and Punk Rock, hearing both mentioned multiple times as part of multiple characters' plots, never really hearing either in the OST was a bit of a let-down. Most of the actual issues are small. The gameplay balance for the tactics portion is kind of poor, making some characters way stronger than others. Some sidequests truly just involve clicking on a couple objects putting no thought into it because your quest HUD tells you exactly what you need to do. But the biggest issues are major story problems. The writing of Colin and everyone's reaction to it in the last 20 minutes or so of the game falls completely flat, in my opinion. He's a jerk and he's been being a jerk to people at that point for a pretty long time, but he is forgiven because it was actually - major spoiler - just a cursed statue and so it's fine now! Even though it hadn't been the statue at any point before like 10 in-world minutes ago. And then there's the Animal Identification Club. I honestly don't even know where to start with them. The best summary I can give is that the writing around them feels like what would be a strangely period-accurate response to transgender people, given how relatively modern a lot of the rest of the writing is. I doubt the writers had any ill intentions with this club, it was supposed to be a silly-sounding thing about finding your identity through a club and having it be something that other people don't understand and ridicule - but. And this is a big but. It doesn't scan as that. It scans pretty close to the "I identify as an attack helicopter" jokes that were maybe funny to someone once 15 years ago. And honestly, the club achieves nothing in the story anyway that is specific to its theme. It could have been replaced just as well with the Origami Portrait Club or something and nothing would change, so why make something that was always going to skirt so close to offensive? That is kind of the problem with the game's writing in general: nothing has a real impact. The story feels secondary to the gameplay but the gameplay is not complex and developed enough to not also feel secondary to the story. Maybe the idea was to tie them both together and show storytelling through the medium of tabletop games (something that has become a lot more mainstream since the game released, nerds everywhere rejoice!), but if it was, it didn't work. This is a game that goes nowhere. It spends about 10ish hours spinning in circles (a lot of my "play"time comes from trouble shooting the game when it just wouldn't run, for which the devs provided excellent though futile support and which eventually fixed itself) and getting a little dizzy towards the end, not anywhere close to where you throw up, but to where you have to sit down and take a moment to breathe. However, the spinning around is often kind of fun and somewhat entertaining, and again, for an asking price this low and a playtime this short, a decent game is all it needs for me to recommend it. Never hurts to broaden your horizons, as the game itself wants to say.