Wargroove

The golden age of turn-based strategy games seems to have ended with fewer and fewer seeing the limelight in recent time. What’s nice to see is the attention that Chucklefish’s new Strategy game: Wargroove is receiving. The game harkens back to series such as Advance Wars, Age of Empires and Civilisation in the way that you command units across a map, capturing locations and resources along the way and how the environment tiles affect combat, all whilst wrapping itself in Chucklefish’s own brand of modernised pixel graphics. Wargroove released on the 1^st of February 2019 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PC, a PS4 edition is said to release soon. The multiplayer also has cross-play between its current release platforms meaning we can all play together!

tl;dr – rating: 8/10

Positives:

+ Easy to learn gameplay

+ Four charismatic factions with pixels of personality

+ Flexible Multiplayer

+ Creative map maker with online community

+ Commanders with powerful ‘grooves’ individual to each character

+ Turn-based tactical strategy that focuses on genre nostalgia

+ Dog unit’s don’t get killed, when defeated they flee

Negatives:

— No unique faction units other than commanders

— No research or building

— Not clear on how to use the save/resume feature

— Story is slightly weak in places

Wargroove itself is fairly easy to jump straight into. The campaign mode is the first single player gamemode available to the player and does a good job defining the core aspects of the game in an interactive and engaging way over the course of the first few missions. The story is set on a large continent called Aurania where the peaceful Cherrystone Kingdom has been plunged into war when the king (and father to our heroine) is assassinated by a neighbouring country. Mercia, grieved by the loss of her father, sets out on a quest with her two allies, Emeric the late king’s most trusted advisor, and Caesar, her lovable and loyal canine companion.

The story, whilst engaging enough to hold the missions and side missions together, is rather noticeably not the main focus of the game. Many of the interactions between the characters are short in places and normally distil down to “I’m bad, I want to kill you,” which will lead you to fight that character in combat. However, the variety of the different missions is refreshing with no two missions feeling alike. Some, for example, will be a straight up battle between you and an enemy but many of those also feature new mechanics such as integrating flying enemies into combat. Some of the other fun missions included a tactical retreat where you had to hold off waves of enemies whilst also transporting villagers to safety. Another one involved talking to a ghost at different locations on a map, but every time you spoke with the ghost it would alert hordes of undead soldiers who would surround your position each time. There is also the arcade gamemode which has you fight five opponents one after the other, and the puzzle gamemode which challenges you to win certain pre-made scenarios in one move.

In terms of saving and loading the game, when I was halfway through a mission I tried (and failed) to save the game and leave my progress where I was. So after turning off my Nintendo Switch and giving up with it I returned to the game later on to find I could resume my progress after all. I’m not completely sure how it happened and the feature itself isn’t clear on how to go about it but its nice that the save feature is implemented.

The true focus of the game is its gameplay, which it excels at. In true turn-based tactical strategy sense you have different factions, four of them in total which are: Cherrystone Kingdom (Standard medieval good-guys), Felheim Legion (Norse-inspired force of evil, skeletons, vampires, etc.) Floran Tribes (Race of plant-like people from Chucklefish’s other game Starbound) and Heavensong Empire (a dynasty with oriental designed units, Oni, Tengu, Kappa, Etc.).

Each faction has a different visual aesthetic to the units and commanders. The Felheim Legion for example features mainly skeletal and undead units. The Floran units are mainly organic and made of plants and flowers, their leader even rides into battle on a stag made from a shrub, so each faction definitely carries their own personality. Every faction has three commanders to choose from although throughout the campaign your given opportunities to try them all out. Each commander will attack in a slightly different way, it might be ranged, up close or even summoning lightning strikes on their foes. More importantly though they are all equally powerful units that can take more hits than the average soldier can, they also have ‘groove’ abilities that when used at the right moment can turn a losing match into a winning one. All of the abilities are different but all are just as good as the next, whether it’s allowing all of the surrounding units to make two turns in one or just straight up healing all your units in a wide area. each ‘groove’ makes a big impact, so much so that every ability has a charge up time that fills up when the commander battles.

Aside from the different appearances of the factions and the different commanders it seems that there aren’t any other differences. This felt a little odd to me as most games in this genre would normally have one or more unique units for each faction, normally making them play a little differently and making them stronger and weaker in areas. However the commanders themselves do have their unique ‘groove’ abilities and perhaps Chucklefish wanted to make sure that the game was balanced and fair to all players, which if I’m honest I think they’ve achieved. Still I would love to have seen at least a single unique unit from each faction, such as a unique skeletal unit for the Felheim Legion or a chivalrous knight for the Cherrystone Kingdom.

This is not to say that there isn’t variety in the units available however. Each faction has one of each style of unit, they all handle the same meaning once you know how to use a unit type effectively you can repeat it no matter which faction you’re playing as. An example would be how Pikeman will do critical damage when they attack whilst standing next to another Pikeman, this is also the same for the other faction’s spearman units. Many units will also have different strengths and weaknesses, spearman for example are slower than the standard soldier unit and so cannot move as far in one turn, however they are much more powerful than soldier units so whist it takes them twice as long to get somewhere they hit twice as hard.

Some of the other units have other qualities such as archers being able to attack from range rather than up close but are relatively weak when attacked. Some flying enemies cannot be attacked by regular ground units however and as such need to be dealt with using ranged units or other flying units. On top of all this each unit type will have certain types that they deal more damage to and certain types they take more damaged from, an example being that dog units will deal more damage to soldiers but take more damage from spearman units.

A genre convention that is nice to see has returned is vision and fog of war. Each unit has a certain amount of vision that, when playing on a map with fog of war on, enables them to reveal that many tiles from their current position. If a unit wanders into fog of war and lands on an enemy as a result then they are ambushed and take damage without being able to counterattack. Environmental tiles such as forests or mountains also block vision allowing units to ‘hide’ behind a tile given the right angle.

Environmental tiles also affect combat and this is where a lot of the tactical elements come into play. Each type of tile offers an amount of defence points up to a total of four. A mountain for example negatively affects a unit’s movement but has a defence rating of four meaning units on the tile will take much less damage from attacks or counterattacks. This means that you’re going to want to balance your units between high mobility tiles like roads with zero defence rating to get your units into the battle zone and then move them to more defensive positions like forests that give three defence rating. Achieving this balance will help to keep your units in the heart of the battle and allow them to survive longer whilst there.

A unit surviving an attack takes more than just a good defensive tile however. Each unit’s attack power is based on how much health they have left, so a unit on full health will be at its most powerful and a unit that barely survives an attack will be at its weakest. This is important because it means a lot of the time your attacks will start to wear down on power after a while meaning you will need to try and keep them at full health for as long as possible. You can heal units with buildings but it then damages the building in return (though they heal one point every turn) or you can create units that have the ability to heal other units for a cost. This means that often it is better to have a damaged unit retreat temporarily to return healthier and stronger later on. What seems to be missing for me in terms of this mechanic however is a veterancy system of some sort. Wargroove reminds me a lot of the Nintendo DS game: Age of Empires: Age of Kings which featured similar combat mechanics with healthier units being stronger and its vision and terrain mechanics (not to mention it’s map making but I’ll get onto that in a moment). But Age of Empires had a veterancy system that meant the more battles a unit had experienced the better it’s stats were or the more powerful it would become. Wargroove sadly is missing any kind of incentive to keep units alive and as such I don’t feel particularly bothered when a unit dies because simply buying a new unit replaces the old one in its entirety. If there was a veterancy system in place more combat-experienced units could perhaps deal slightly more damage than a new unit or could recover some health per turn, just something to make the player want to save units, ultimately though I feel that this decision could be down to Wargroove’s combat pace.

Wargroove is a very fast paced game. Unlike other similar games Wargroove features no research options to slowly upgrade as the match progresses and somewhat more surprising for the genre has no building mechanics, which is what I initially thought the villager units were going to be for (as it happens they are purely objective based and cannot ‘do’ anything, i.e. get the villagers to safety.). This means that the pace of individual matches is a lot quicker than most other games in its genre. However there is an economy aspect of the game even without the building and research, namely in that you capture villages which then produce one-hundred gold per turn each. This means that there is an element of resource management as you can capture enemy villages to cripple their income which means they might not be able to get some of the higher costing units.

Lastly I wanted to talk about how brilliant a multiplayer mode this game has. The single player is great and engaging but the multiplayer for this game is perfectly acclimatised to the gameplay. You have a few different modes such as splitscreen multiplayer which can be done in ‘hotseat’ where each player takes turns or with separate controllers. The Nintendo Switch also has a unique handheld mode hotseat where players pass the console between them with fog of war hiding each player’s units. The online multiplayer has both quickplay mode and hosted mode. Quickplay puts you in a 1v1 match against a player of similar skill, hosted mode allows you to create a custom match where players can join via a passcode. You can also add AI computers into matches and can set teams or coop matches if you want to work together. The best mode by far however is the mapmaking section. This is where players can design their own maps or story focused campaign missions to do in coop or verses. This adds a whole other level of replayability to the game as levels can be uploaded to a community server and has a rating system for feedback.

All in all Wargroove is a charming nostalgic trip back to a genre that it has managed to capture the essence of and give a modern twist to. The gameplay is fun, easy to understand and yet has an incredible level of detail. Each of the factions has a lot of personality and the story is engaging with many of the missions being varied and entertaining. The multiplayer mapmaking means the community is active and there is an endless supply of campaigns and maps to play. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go give Caesar his bellyrub.

BcT Review Rating: 8/10

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch