Loved this game. The only thing I wish was different is having some kind of passive visual indication that a unit is affected by another unit's buff, i.e. when placing the crow or hero.
Reviews for "Winter Falling: Price of Life"
Rarykos responds:
Mhm you're absolutely right, I need to work on that. The full game should be more clear. Thank you for playing!
that was pretty cool very well done
Rarykos responds:
Thank you! Glad you had fun
gold
This felt like a marked improvement on the first iteration, which was already super fun and challenging. Great design, can't wait to see more from ya!
Alright, so, I'm going to tell you from the outset that if this game DIDN'T have the cheats, I would have rated near zero outright, mostly due to frustration with the game itself.
In fact, I'm still frustrated; but this kind of player consideration is a very good thing, so I feel it should be rewarded. Onto the critique. Keep in mind, that I will be judging it as if it had cheats off, the way it was meant to be played.
It is a strategy game indeed, but the crux of the strategy involved seems to be placed on forward thinking and planning rather than tactics or management. This in itself is fine; there is nothing wrong with a game that uses planning and forward thinking as part of its strategy; but most of your features are counterproductive toward this end.
Despite having to use forward thinking and planning (things like troop positioning, the troops used, and the use of group auras being key to victory), there is no restart button once a battle is started. This means that if something unexpected happens, or you made a slight misstep in troop placement/orders, you risk the deaths of multiple troops and a decrease in future funding. There have been three separate occasions where troops have died simply because I clicked an order, realized I didn't want to do it, cancelled, and the troop was slain in the space it took to click a second order.
What this means is that you force a player into a position of defense and caution; where they will take the safest routes rather than risk over-extending and having to pay to heal troops. Again, this is fine, except you ALSO have limited funding, meaning that players must either be cautious and risk not having enough funds later in the game, essentially dooming the campaign, OR try their utmost to conserve funds, end with many more troop deaths, and end up having less money regardless with the need to constantly heal them.
This is felt most heavily as the battles drag along, BECAUSE you cannot restart, the only information you can use to plan your formation is what you see at the beginning of the battle. Since even ordering troops to move or reform can have a dreadfully long cooldown; it's safe to assume that what you place at the start is where they'll be all the way through the battle. Again, this would be more or less fine if A.I reacted better, but it doesn't. My infantry, for example, never moves to assist my cavalry despite being right next to a foe where they could take some pressure off.
All this, again, brings you back around to a place of defense and caution, which is further hampered by the fact that you have a general that NEEDS to survive each fight; because not only are you forced to worry about protecting troops, but you ALSO need to babysit one unit in particular, which means you either have to place the general in the far back line, reducing your overall unit availability by one and having to reposition your units to make up for it (again, further inducing you to either buy more units OR over-extend), OR risk the general just straight up dying because you tried to use it to defend your catapult and it suddenly got swamped.
So, to reiterate in a less rambly way.
1. The strategy relies on forethought and planning
2. Forethought and planning you cannot rely on because you cannot restart a game and thus just have to assume where enemies will go/what they'll do/any special events
3. Which puts an emphasis on defensive and cautious playing, reducing overall funds a player has available in healing lost troops and hiring new ones.
4. Which threatens to doom a campaign if you end up spending too much money and cannot support a force as it draws on.
You seemed to have realized this was a potential problem, and partially solved it by adding time crystals that allow you to restart a battle in case you die; but that doesn't do as much as it should, because 1. Your money is your money, you don't get any more. And 2. You still have to split your attention between protecting your general, so you don't die prematurely, and protecting your troops, so you don't have to waste more funding.
Please don't mistake my frustration as dissatisfaction. This is a GOOD game, there's a TON of potential here and I'm sure I'll grow to love it as I get deeper into the flow, but these are problems to consider nonetheless.
The best way to fix it that I can see is just by making the funds come from battles won rather than upgrades (or, rather, you can ALSO upgrade the amount of funds you GET from these battles), and then just allow the player to fight an infinite number of randomized battles. If they could do this, then there is less emphasis on perfection during the core campaign since they can always come back and farm a bit more as necessary, and the player can take more risks and try out different positions/maneuvers that they wouldn't have considered in an overly cautious mindset.
This also makes the campaign artificially longer, letting people battle as much as they like on an escalating difficulty (and reward), allows the player to have a greater feeling of relaxation and reward for their skill as they get better at the game with the battles they fight, and doesn't diminish the challenge at all so long as you include a higher scoring for fighting less battles to get to the end boss, thus prompting the player to challenge themselves and fight as little as necessary regardless. You also don't have to change anything about the core gameplay or strategy design, since players are no longer pressured to have as much foreknowledge as they otherwise would need, and even if troops died in the grind battles, the reward from said grind would just balance it out anyways, and it would depend upon them to get good enough to profit from it in the first place.