#Othercide until the end series

It worked in Grandia and it works here, ratcheting up the tension as you sweat out interrupts while trying to gain the initiative. In a clever touch, Othercide implements a turn-based timeline similar to what you might find in Grandia, and a huge part of the strategy is bound up in manipulating that timeline to your advantage. In the right circumstances you can wreak absolute havoc on your enemies, abusing interrupt abilities and counters to great effect. The three initial classes-which broadly fall under the attack, defense, and support archetypes-all bring something unique to the battlefield, whether it's the raw speed and power of the Blademaster class, or the ability to shut down enemies at range with a Soulslinger. Othercide only lets you bring three characters to the battlefield at any given time, but that's fine because at higher levels it's a little like having three different John Wicks under your command. With a couple exceptions, Othercide pretty much shows you all of its tricks right from the start, leaving little room to further develop its concept. Oh sure, there were more abilities to unlock, more bosses to fight, and even a whole new class to discover, but the mission archetypes remained much the same, and so did the overall flow. Having finished the first 'Era,' I was left with the distinct sense that I had seen everything there was to see in Othercide, and to a great extent I had. It was also pretty much where I wanted to stop. In the end, it was a thrilling battle, demanding that I use every trick at my disposal to survive the Surgeon's crushing attacks. Half the fun of Othercide is wreaking utter havoc with just a tiny handful of characters | Focus Home Interactive Even with that team, it still came down to the very last shot. I wasn't able to beat the Surgeon, a nasty character wielding giant blades who has a penchant for area attacks, until I had spent a good deal of time leveling up a powerful party. Even if you make it to the end of the week, your team will be cut down with ease. Your ultimate goal is to get three characters to the confrontation with the boss relatively unscathed-no easy feat given that the only way to heal is to sacrifice a character of equal level.īy the nature of Othercide's format, you're pretty much guaranteed to fail in your first few attempts to take down the first boss.

#Othercide until the end series

Each day offers a handful of randomized missions that fall into a series of buckets-Rescue, Hunt, and so forth-in which you can build up your 'Daughters.' When you complete a mission, the day is finished and your team rests. That last point is exemplified by the first real 'level,' which is divided into a handful of days ending with a boss. Maybe my only criticism-and it's not a small one-is that it's almost too tight, making it feel more like a proof-of-concept than a full-blooded game in some ways. It's tightly-designed, with layers of mechanics that tie in nicely to its mixture of genres. In a year rich with excellent strategy games like Gear Tactics, Othercide stands out thanks to its wide array of clever systems, smartly-considered roguelite format, and general atmosphere. The emphasis is much more on the tactics, which manage to rise above even the overwrought, but still charming, art. The story of a mysterious plague-conveyed mainly through ambient dialogue and moody narration-is sparse.

In Othercide, you control an army of women who are created, fully-formed, from a birthing pool, assigned one of four classes, and marched out onto an isometric battlefield to battle an army of evil doctors. This is a tactics game that revels in wearing Corpse Bride T-shirts and writing very long LiveJournal posts. The villains bear a strong resemblance to the villains of The Dark Crystal, renowned for being perhaps the darkest story in the Jim Henson oeuvre. It's colored mainly in black and white, the only accents being the occasional flecks of red from blood. Othercide, a new tactics game launching today on PS4, Steam, and Xbox One, captures that feeling well, and not just because of its goth-pop soundtrack, which is straight out of a mid-2000s Hot Topic. Songs like 'My Immortal' soundtracked a steamy summer spent working security and subsisting on ramen noodles, nodding along to lyrics like 'These wounds won't seem to heal / this pain is just too real / there's just too much that time cannot erase.' I was an embarrassingly big fan of Evanescence when they made their debut back in 2003.