Mana good points.
By Jonathan Garrett
03/09/23
Previewed on PC.
Early access provided by Yogscast Games.

Tales and Tactics blends the swift pacing of autobattlers with the depth of tabletop RPG mechanics. As an Early Access title, we’ve decided to produce Hands On coverage instead of a formal review, but despite its present release status, developer Table 9 have polished up the core experience into a decent state. As much as there’s some presentation elements that could be tighter, including an obtusely laid out default UI that attempts to cram too much information on screen at one time, there’s a foundation and a future here that is worth investigating.

Most striking of all is the character designs; the art style meshes the best of Wind Waker and Rare’s golden era to make ghastly but beautifully concepted creatures. Grundy’s and Tinker’s are both particular highlights, with the formers absurdly dislocated jaw and the latters heroic mane standing out. As you select your units, combine abilities to upgrade them, and then proceed into combat, you’ll have opportunities to reroll the available units for your next turn, reconfigure class priorities, and tweak things as needed.

Each run features your chosen main character, with an elaborate skill tree of unlocks that can modify the base experience to heighten the difficulty, unlock new characters, and increase the percentage chance of particular rewards making an appearance. Certain moments throughout each turn are occasionally narrated by an omniscient DM, but these are few and far between. In fact, given the volume of text and density of the lore, an expanded palette of voice acting could have helped with accessibility.

The combat animation is also tremendously repetitive, which in a sense can be a limitation of the genre, but it does suck the intensity out of combat. There’s a lack of weight to your actions, and the whole experience ends up feeling a bit passive. Thankfully, the pacing ensures you’re quickly moving on to your next decision.

With a recently unveiled roadmap that introduces fresh campaign acts, characters, and much appreciated additions like controller support and deeper customisation, there is plenty ahead for the next six months of its Early Access journey. What Tales and Tactics may lack in presentational streamlining, it more than compensates by ensuring you can get cracking without many barriers to entry.

Peek a boo! Said the strange side burn imp.

TARPS?

At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.