Recent reviews by Vitali

Super Earth has beaten back the bot menace. Truly, Democracy has prevailed

Fantastic game. Helps me as a newbie get into the game while also letting me feel like I have the space to experiment and actually develop skills rather than jsut throwing me to the deep end

This game is good. It's completely unrecognizable from the RPG maker box that it comes from and combines this really fascinating mix of Fire Emblem as well as Advanced Wars.

If you don't know the difference, Fire Emblem focuses around controlling individual units while advanced wars strives for more an RTS feel (building armies, capturing resources, etc). Each game tends to have their weaknesses and strengths and Symphony of War doesn't JUST try to take the best of both worlds and mash things together willy nilly.

They take strengths and CERTAIN weaknesses to provide a completely fresh experience since, realistically, both games have their own feels and rather than haphazardly combining things OR simply copying without improving/iterating on the past, they decide to create something new. Gone are single units per "stack" and in their place are ever evolving squads of units. Your main character is one of two characters in this game with unique classes with other story units turned into beefed up versions of existing classes.

Typically, you usually make each story unit their own squad, but you can additionally create squads of non-story important units either from mercenaries you train/hire or sometimes units that are given to you throughout the campaign. There's a couple of them, but not going to say what they are because they might be spoilers.

With this system, you get this sort of interesting usage of units since rather than singular units, you are managing a squad. This means that you can build some squads to be completely all out offensive or have a mix of healers, defenders, and attackers. Because of this, the game forgoes the weapon triangle. Instead, they have a more ambiguous advantage and disadvantage system like how magic ignores armored class defenses (aside from the paladin class) and how ranged units are vulnerable in close range.

This also means that as squads take damage and units die, the squad that loses combat effectiveness in a much more satisfying way than either Fire Emblem or Advanced Wars. In Fire Emblem, a 1 hp unit dealt the same amount of damage as a 100 hp unit, thus forcing developers to create systems of chance to determine the success of an attack. In Advanced wars, the entirety of the squad's hp is considered a singular whole and when the squad takes damage, you lose units in terms of the percentage of hp (20 percent hp lost = 20 percent of squad lost = 20 percent of squad fire power lost). Symphony of war lets you play something more satisfying than both systems where you CAN create situations where you cripple your opponent while also having defensive minded squads that can even out damage and heal against poke - rewarding both Offensive squad building and defensive squad building.

Now, aside from the great gameplay, there's also the fantastic story. What a rollercoaster - classic war epic with lots of drama, high stakes, and great characters. While the main character is a bit flat, I do at least want to KICK THE LIVING ♥♥♥♥ OUT OF THAT MOTHA-♥♥♥♥♥♥' GARBAGE THAT TRIES TO ♥♥♥♥ WITH HIM/ME. It's simple, it's sweet, and it's a whole lotta fun. I do feel there are some cutscenes that are missing towards the 3rd or 4th last mission, but it nothing world breaking.



Now, if only there were a way to ask to get one's hands on their source code because holy hell, I wanna make a game with this system now.

You have to get into a mind set when you decide to play Hitman 2. When you play this game, you need to look at each level as a playbox/playground. The fun is checking out every nook and cranny of that playbox and pushing it to its limits.

The second level alone took me 15 hours to completely finish.

The problem with this story is that it runs like a typical game with bland plot points. While the choices seem interesting at first, you'll come to realize that the game has a fairly set path with barely noticable diviations. I would not recommend this choose-your-own-adventure novel over "Choice of Robots" and the like

As lengthy as this game seems, the biggest problem I find here is that the progression seems to always keep me on the same points. I almost feel as though I can't change any part of the story save for details in the ending. Even when I try to roleplay as a heartless monster, all the choices were relatively the same.

Very disappointed