I appreciate that TT wants to be an Epic Quest Game as much as it does as Tight Tactics Game (and hey, maybe the mysterious Fire Emblem made bedfellows of All The Talking and All The Fighting), but I get too engrossed in the delicate balancing act of the battlefields to want quite so much wittering keeping that stuff at arm’s length.
It’s crying out for a mid-battle save function as well. I fear Telepath Tactics is trying to be all things to all roleplayers: an unforgiving perma-death affair with no takebacks and a grand timesink. For it to be the latter, the option to partition it into digestible pieces (for our busy modern lives/terrifyingly limited attention spans) needs to be there. I appreciate that quicksave/load risks ripping the heart out of what’s intended to be supremely tense and heavy with consequence, but even a sometime savescummer such as I knows that there’s infinitely more satisfaction to be had from winning The Right Way.
The UI is clunky and unattractive to the point of occasional irritation, but given TT’s humble origins I can’t get too hung up on the appearance side of it. However, little things like being able to double-click on an adjacent foe to perform a default attack would be wonderful time-savers, while having to watch over a dozen enemies take turns to slowly trek towards you is agony even on the so-called ‘instant’ movement speed. It’s fairly buggy at the moment too – the dev’s updating it almost daily, but right now expect to encounter random stuff like your units swapping inventories at the start of a match, the interface not loading, and all sorts. I’m very confident given the clear care (not to mention several years) that’s gone into the mechanics and the dev’s pro-active approach to community that the majority of tech gripes will get sorted out in time, but fair warning and all that.
The lack of online multiplayer – there’s local hotseat only – will be a disappointment to some, I guess. It’s not something I personally demand, but I am disappointed that there are limited maps and army setups for player vs CPU skirmish, which is the mode I’d otherwise be most likely to return to TT for. However, get me a skip dialogue/cutscene option and I’d be well up for jumping back to into the campaign and rolling with consequences of my terrible tactical thinking.
Telepath Tactics, appropriately, has a beautiful mind. The rest of it is harder to admire, but even so, this is a game that people who crave patience, precision and strategy from their roleplaying battles are going to take to their hearts. In its quiet way, this is a huge game – big fights, lethal consequences, wide array of combat possibilities… Fire Emblem fans would love it, probably. I wouldn’t know.
Telepath Tactics is out now, available
direct from the dev,
Steam or
GoG.