Othercide Review PC

Most tactical games allow you to avoid failure. In XCOM, when a character dies, they are gone. The same goes for Fire Emblem (at least in Classic mode) and others like it. Othercide is not like that. Playing othercide means rewiring your brain to tolerate and even detect mistakes. Death comes swift and brutal and repeats itself to infinity. Good thing you are rewarded for it.

The story Playable on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 since July but just released for Switch on Friday, Othercide is a visually striking tactical role-playing game with deep roguelike elements. You control an army of daughters, semi-immortal creatures whose gothic getups make them a perfect fit for an underground heavy metal bar. Led by a divine entity called the Red Mother, the daughters are engaged in a war against the ubiquitous, alien forces of suffering. It's all very dramatic and smacks of mid-2000s Hot Topic, even though the story begins in the twilight of the 19th century. ! [othericde 2] (// images.ctfassets.net/0gq1kjcq6c0k/3tf7rd3LhUoU8r1z3KTnpH/e196c6a2c6b8bc910bafc709c2e028d5/othericde_2.jpg)

Daughters can be assigned one of three classes. Shield bearers are rock-hard, have high defense and health, and are effective at controlling crowds. Leaf masters are relatively more brittle, but can do massive amounts of damage up close. Soul slings are ranged fighters wielding dual pistols with deadly precision and will instantly familiarize players of tactical shooters. They level up as you'd expect: by killing enemies and winning battles.

The game is divided into five different sections, which culminate in a boss fight. Each battle is set up like battles you would find in many other tactical games. There is a tiled sign. You order your units from place to place like murderous chess pieces. Their action points limit how far they can move and how many actions they can take per turn. Your goal is to take out all enemy units strategically before they can take you out. When you complete sections, you earn currency that you can eventually spend to give a significant bonus to all daughters in your group, usually a health or stat boost.

The gameplay It is technically a turn-based game, in the sense that you and your enemies eliminate who can make a move. But it is not a fixed your-turn / my-turn structure. Instead, Othercide makes use of something called a 'dynamic timeline system'. At the bottom of the screen there is a bar that shows each unit on the board. As the rounds progress and characters make movements, the units shift to the left across the bar. When a unit reaches the farthest left point of the bar, it is their turn to attack. If you only use 50 percent (or less) of a daughter's cue points, they can jump anywhere in the middle of the bar instead of going all the way back to the end of the queue.

The timeline matters because, for the most part, attacks are divided into two different categories: immediate actions and delayed actions. Instant actions are simple: you command a Blademaster to walk up to an enemy and cut them with her sword, or have a Soulslinger line up a gunshot and fire it away. Delayed actions, on the other hand, are more powerful, but they push a unit back in the queue a bit. They do not perform the attack until they reach the left side of the timeline again. Daughters as well as the forces of suffering can prepare for delayed action, but in so doing, they are open to interruption or, more often, premature death. If a delayed action is successfully performed, it can turn the tide of the battle. To emerge victorious, you need to juggle all of this in your head, actively review the timeline, and judge when it is best to be cautious or aggressive.

It is not surprising to hear that Othercide punishes mercilessly. If all your daughters have been killed, start over from the beginning. There is no way to heal your daughters - at least not without killing another. The only way to restore a daughter's health bar is to sacrifice another of the same or higher level. As a bonus, whoever is healed also gets a stat boosting benefit. Since any health lost in one battle is lost in the next, you have to make tough decisions. Sacrifice one daughter to patch up another? Or start the next fight with your best soldier on the brink?

The good news is that when daughters are killed - either in action or by sacrifice - they are not dead forever. They go to an area called the Cemetery, where you can revive them by spending something called a "Resurrection Token." Any daughters revived will keep their experience points, stats, skills and levels, although they will lose any skill mods they have built up. Since resurrection tokens are initially rare, you need to decide who to revive.

For example, I have had a reliable Soulslinger named Constance with me from the very first mission. Constance first joined my team alongside a Shieldbreaker called Temperance and a Blademaster called Blanche. They've been in the cemetery since their first run, but Constance has been a cornerstone of my team. She has died and has come back to life more times than the trigger-happy character of Tom Cruise from Edge of Tomorrow. Daughters are procedurally generated, wear nearly identical outfits, and are all assigned the same Victorian names (which, to be fair, you can customize). It doesn't take long to populate the grid with 32! [OTHERCIDE 3] (// images.ctfassets.net/0gq1kjcq6c0k/TwmVwzuYOwQtHGAfah0dY/540c2be6c8cde859e3c49cd9e54eb620/OTHERCIDE_3.jpg) slots with essentially clones of group members. My decision to revive Constance as a phoenix doesn't stem from an affinity for her as a character. It's purely rooted in the fact that she has proven to be a more effective soldier than her sisters. Doing this repeatedly taught me one thing: in Othercide, death is not the end.

I started my first run and, with what I now realize, wanted a laughable blob of hubris, to keep all my characters alive to the end. Now I start running with the intention of losing, instead I decide to focus on polishing Constance as much as possible, using everyone else in the party as pawns for that purpose. You can also unlock essential stat buffs for the entire group by reaching certain milestones, such as reaching a certain level or killing a certain number of a certain enemy. I often start chasing these milestones with the full knowledge that I will eventually lose. If it takes me one step closer to my goal of getting another nice stat boost, then I call it a worthy effort. Othercide, different from years of conditioning, taught me to chase failure.

The conclusion Othercide is an extremely good game with a lot of potential. The dark atmosphere attracts us enormously and also fits well with the game. It gives that mysterious fearful feeling. In addition, this is probably the best tactical game on the market right now. It is by far better than XCOM, it offers much more depth, opponents, and the difficulty is extremely higher. That is why it gets a 9.5 from us