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Othercide – this is chess in the style of Sin City in the conditions of Gothic Ragnarok. Like any plot of any bagel, this one is presented in scattered pieces and is revealed gradually. But it begins with the fact that a certain Mother to fight with a certain entity named "Other" begins to create fighting daughters. Over the course of a week, the daughters engage in routine landings in places of bad activity, and at the end they attack the next leader of the enemy forces.
Moreover, a variety of tasks is not immediately encountered – 90% of them are simple "kill everyone". A little later you will be pampered with an escort, survival, bomb with a timer, and so on. The daughters themselves can be trained in one of three specializations –
1) Lots of damage, little defense, sword in hand
2) Lots of protection, but average damage, holding a spear and shield
3) The damage is low, there is no protection, but it fires in ranged combat with two pistols.
The first thing that captivates Othercide – this is the appearance of the game, its style. Black and white with bright red splashes, it looks incredibly beautiful and makes you fall in love from the very first frames. And the picture is complemented by gothic surroundings, well-drawn design of monsters, spectacular animation, great attention to detail and water, which floods everything around, and which gives colorful reflections, saturating the picture with dynamics. I assure you, in dynamics everything looks even cooler than on the screenshots, thanks to the water! And this is the case when not very outstanding graphics are more than enhanced by style and the ability to “present coolly”.
The second thing that captivates us is, of course, the gameplay. As I said above, this is chess. You walk through the squares, calculate tactics, guess on the coffee grounds where the enemy will go. On your side is information, brains and abilities, and on the enemy’s side is a numerical advantage and also abilities. This seemingly trite sauce is infused with two unique seasonings.
The first one may have been encountered somewhere, but I don’t immediately remember it (at least not in this form): all participants in the battle have a two-stage line of initiative and a reserve of stamina. Initiative determines the order of action, and stamina is gradually spent on movements and abilities. Moreover, if a character spends less than half of his stamina, he moves only half of the initiative bar back. If he spends more than half, then go to the very end.
This adds amazing depth to the https://won66casino.co.uk/mobile-app/ gameplay because each time you have to decide whether you want to perform more actions in a turn, but then the heroine will be vulnerable to attack for the entire initiative phase, and there is a good chance that they will get to her during this time. Or do fewer actions, but maintain mobility in case the situation gets out of control.
But this problem would not be so acute for the player if it weren’t for the second seasoning, which is unique to the genre: the only way to heal one daughter is to sacrifice another, with the same level of pumping or higher. That is, follow the thought, if your daughter, whom you have been training for several tasks in a row, who is almost as cool as her mother’s friend’s daughter, if she is suddenly wounded, then with this wound she will continue to fight further in all subsequent tasks. Or you will have to sacrifice another similarly pumped up daughter to heal this one. As a result, in every battle you literally feel every missed blow on yourself. Because now she is even more vulnerable, and the risk of losing the most powerful character is higher. And the closest boss, I assure you, will beat the crap out of you.
Option to throw your daughter into the embrasures with a thought “I’ll heal somehow later, as long as I survive the battle” doesn’t work because treatment in this game is very expensive. (unless you are a fucking casual who bombarded the authors with letters whining about the unbearable difficulty, and for the sake of which the authors introduced child difficulty, which completely erases the second spice, because there the characters are healed after each battle). By the way, I said that the game has awesome abilities that require your daughter’s blood? So, there are also incredible abilities that require the daughter’s blood, and every time there is a desire to use any of them, you have to take into account the fact that this health will not be so easy to restore!
The gameplay feels especially vivid and exciting when the situation gets out of control. First of all, it’s your own fault. I mean that if the situation on the battlefield got out of control, then you, as a player, clearly understand where exactly you made a mistake, what exactly you didn’t take into account, or even took a conscious risk, which suddenly did not come true. And secondly, you begin to study the battlefield with renewed vigor and look for a way to solve problems with the least losses. Do you want to try to defeat the enemy faster and without the blood of your sisters, or play it safer, let someone get scratched, but everyone is guaranteed to survive to the end of the mission. It is for the sake of such brainstorming that I want to play Othercide.
However, it is worth mentioning some aspects of the game:
Firstly, Basically, you only worry about your vanguard. For the squad that you send on the most dangerous missions and prepare for the fight with the boss of the week. The rest of the daughters are just for reserve and for clearing easier levels. Moreover, they are not even suitable for healing the vanguard – they are too poorly pumped. But you really worry about the leaders.
Secondly, The overall leveling up in the game is quite fast, and with skillful management of resources you won’t have to start over too often. The game has a terribly balanced ending, and daughters fully pumped up to level 15 become overly strong, which is why not a single enemy is able to seriously oppose them. But at first the balance of power is perfect.
Thirdly, the game has coins that allow you to resurrect daughters, including those from the previous cycle. That is, the game allows you to return high-level daughters. At first, such things are very rare and are perceived not as the norm, but as a luxury. But by the end of the game, you begin to perceive them no longer as a means of reviving your daughter, but as a tool for even greater imbalance of the heroines.
Fourthly, it’s not really a roguelike. That is, yes, you fail in a battle with the boss, lose all resources for the birth of daughters, or press a specially trained button – and the whole conflict begins anew – forward to the first level. But when you manage to defeat the next boss, the game carefully throws in two bonuses, one of which allows you to skip the entire completed chapter, and the second pumps up your daughters to an acceptable level, because climbing into the second era with absolutely zero daughters is suicide, and no one in their right mind would agree to this. But when starting a new game, you can choose whether you want to upgrade your daughters from birth to a high level (of course you do), and whether you want to skip the era or whether you would prefer to steamroller through the available levels. Moreover, the game has protection indicators, which, on a hero that is too pumped up for the chapter, lead to the fact that enemy attacks simply do not cause damage. That is, yes, the second walk through the completed chapter will obviously be much easier and only allows you to collect numerous bonuses, pump up a couple more levels and gain new character traits.
Speaking of character traits, as the daughters go through difficult experiences and fight monsters, they may develop some characteristics. Not at all unique and often duplicated from one character to another. And these features do not make the characters brighter, but they can affect the gameplay. Let’s say, "pride", which increases critical hits but reduces experience gained, you won’t notice much. And even more so "5% damage against plague doctors". But you will also feel the increase in action points! This dilutes the gameplay and encourages you to start the week over again, but the game does not force you to do this and is overcome, even if you continue from the last era.
Of course, as in any roguelike, there is global leveling, which is expressed in the collection of “fragments». In a special menu, these fragments are spent on certain global perks like “More health to all daughters”, these fragments are fully returned with each return in time, and as they progress, they accumulate in a conditional bank, from which they can be taken by rebooting the time loop. Well, the fact that at each time loop I had enough fragments for all the available perks repeats the thesis that the authors do not intend to force the player to delay the gameplay for dozens and hundreds of replays.
The voice acting in the game is very charismatic, but it is a little flat, as a result of which it becomes boring quite quickly. I mean that the main accompanying voice in any battle is the voice Mothers. And he’s gorgeous! This is such an eternally trembling, half-crying tone that hides the worry about each daughter, about whether she will return from the mission alive or not. The voice that experiences every wound that enemies inflict. And when the daughters successfully win without damage, she exclaims something like “Oh, my worries were so in vain!».
But this is the only mood that a mother has. She cannot speak in a different voice, tone, or mood. She even experiences joy as if through tears. She has no anger, she has no laughter. Only grief and worry, and it’s just… it’s just boring in a game designed for a lot of hours of playthrough.
The same and other voices. Voice Surgeon always scientifically vile. Voice Deacon constantly savors the torment of heroines. By the way, daughters don’t have voices. They are faceless, even if they have different faces and names (which can be assigned at birth). Not only are the characters’ voice acting always in the same tone, but the range of lines heard during battle is limited to three to five for the antagonists, and ten or two for the mother. This might not be a drawback, after all, the studio is not rich, but replicas are heard from every sneeze, from every event on the battlefield. And when you hear repeated phrases already during the first battle, this is a sign of something unhealthy, because further phrases will be repeated even more often until they begin to irritate.
But the game has music. And whoever wrote the soundtrack absolutely accurately captured the mood of the game and wrote perfectly suitable melodies for both the menu and combat scenes. Therefore, you dissolve in the atmosphere, if not immediately, then quickly enough.
Overall, this roguelike is at least worth your time. It is not persistent, it has a great atmosphere, not hackneyed gameplay, and the idea of the expensive cost of treating the heroines adds amazing poignancy and excitement to what is happening. The main drawback of the game is its ending, which is devoid of balance, plus by that time the player will have found a dozen legal exploits that break the balance even more, and the monotony of tasks and voice acting begins to torment despite all the advantages. Well, you probably won’t like the final boss. But at the start of the game the most vivid positive impressions will await you.