At last, the Queen has given you power and freedom! The cost? You must rebuild her Empire. Will you? In this epic, indie fantasy adventure, you are free to explore, fight for fame and power, and shape the world as you choose. Escape into an unpredictable open-ended story and cunning tactical combat.
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Was such a letdown from Spiderweb software after their Geneforge and Avadon series. Game was funded on Kickstarter and was hyped in development but it was really not fun.
went back and actually finished it. it left me with a worse impression? so much stuff is non-obvious ("curses" are never explained anywhere I found), easy to miss, or just janky (I bought more buildings than are actually possible to build). There's auto-scaling but not for the loot you get so you will fight for your life to get a shitty tier 1 unique when you're on tier 3. and the ending did not satisfy me at all.
I like the concept of like "hey you're in the perspective of a Prince not just a murderhobo" and there is legitimately good roleplaying in there. there are interesting design decisions. they just don't work over the whole course of the game. the good news is that the core tactics RPG fighting is still pretty OK? it's relatively quick. it's interesting. managing your meagre resources is good, wiping out a clustered group of enemies with a single fireball feels awesome. it's just the less-OK news is that the long term game makes that feel repetitive. by the end i was eager to click the "Yup, let's make a deal and get out of here" button.
I like the concept of like "hey you're in the perspective of a Prince not just a murderhobo" and there is legitimately good roleplaying in there. there are interesting design decisions. they just don't work over the whole course of the game. the good news is that the core tactics RPG fighting is still pretty OK? it's relatively quick. it's interesting. managing your meagre resources is good, wiping out a clustered group of enemies with a single fireball feels awesome. it's just the less-OK news is that the long term game makes that feel repetitive. by the end i was eager to click the "Yup, let's make a deal and get out of here" button.
the first like 5 hours, i was totally into it. i liked a lot of changes from the previous Spiderweb formula, especially no more fiddling with trash in fear of missing a magical set of boots, and i'm always up for some city building in my RPGs.
going into dungeons to get the right resource for my fort, building shops, and earning new equipment as i built more forts was really fun! battles felt tough but fair.
and then i hit a wall. i lost too much to theft, and building the anti-theft buildings took too much upkeep for me to build new buildings. i cranked down the difficulty so i could proceed through more of the story and through some truly ridiculous gauntlets. my goals for my fort started feeling more abstract, the skill trees on my characters seemed limited, and i couldn't keep half the factions straight.
it's not that the game is bad, it's just the interesting, new stuff didn't quite work and so the old formula took over.
side note: there's an author's statement about how this game represents how he feels about relationships and politics and how he wants to express the inner lives of his characters and, uh, that goal was not achieved. the writing isn't bad - it is compact and evocative - but your family treats you mostly with contempt. the politics are the same "easy immoral choice to allow slavery vs hard pro-moral choice to stop slavery" you can find in literally any other fantasy RPG. i found that disconnect between what the author intended and what was achieved deeply weird.
going into dungeons to get the right resource for my fort, building shops, and earning new equipment as i built more forts was really fun! battles felt tough but fair.
and then i hit a wall. i lost too much to theft, and building the anti-theft buildings took too much upkeep for me to build new buildings. i cranked down the difficulty so i could proceed through more of the story and through some truly ridiculous gauntlets. my goals for my fort started feeling more abstract, the skill trees on my characters seemed limited, and i couldn't keep half the factions straight.
it's not that the game is bad, it's just the interesting, new stuff didn't quite work and so the old formula took over.
side note: there's an author's statement about how this game represents how he feels about relationships and politics and how he wants to express the inner lives of his characters and, uh, that goal was not achieved. the writing isn't bad - it is compact and evocative - but your family treats you mostly with contempt. the politics are the same "easy immoral choice to allow slavery vs hard pro-moral choice to stop slavery" you can find in literally any other fantasy RPG. i found that disconnect between what the author intended and what was achieved deeply weird.
Disclaimer: I Kickstarted this game.
This is the first Spiderweb Software game I have really put any time into. It is a pretty decent indie tactics game with some interesting ideas and good writing, but doesn't have enough to it to keep my interest.
The writing stands out. It is very well done and though it has a lot of dialog, the individual conversations don't have a ton of extraneous prose, so it flows very well. The story is fairly unique, putting you in the position of a princess sent to take control of a colony that has drifted from your family's control. It presents the themes in an up front way and doesn't shy away from having you make decisions (both positive and negative) about how to handle the native people.
My one complaint about the narrative is that there isn't quite enough different in each scenario to hold my interest. Individual quests and scenarios end up being formulaic and the game would be better served by just cutting out about half of them.
The tactical combat in the game is serviceable, but fairly uninteresting. There are some unique abilities, but there isn't a ton of reason to use them. Combat ends up feeling repetitive because there are really only a couple of different enemy types and your means to handle them remain pretty static. There are a couple of scenarios that take a bit more strategy, but mostly they boil down to some variation of "Cross dangerous area to kill an enemy who is attacking you."
Queen's Wish isn't attempting to win any visual awards, but the sprites themselves look perfectly fine for what it is. The effects and animation are really what hold it back, in my opinion. Essentially every facet of the game needs to be more reactive and dynamic.
The sheer size of this game is impressive for this 1-2 person studio, but heavy editing to make this a more streamlined experience would have gone a long way for me. Overall, it is ok for what it is, but I didn't end up sticking with it.
This is the first Spiderweb Software game I have really put any time into. It is a pretty decent indie tactics game with some interesting ideas and good writing, but doesn't have enough to it to keep my interest.
The writing stands out. It is very well done and though it has a lot of dialog, the individual conversations don't have a ton of extraneous prose, so it flows very well. The story is fairly unique, putting you in the position of a princess sent to take control of a colony that has drifted from your family's control. It presents the themes in an up front way and doesn't shy away from having you make decisions (both positive and negative) about how to handle the native people.
My one complaint about the narrative is that there isn't quite enough different in each scenario to hold my interest. Individual quests and scenarios end up being formulaic and the game would be better served by just cutting out about half of them.
The tactical combat in the game is serviceable, but fairly uninteresting. There are some unique abilities, but there isn't a ton of reason to use them. Combat ends up feeling repetitive because there are really only a couple of different enemy types and your means to handle them remain pretty static. There are a couple of scenarios that take a bit more strategy, but mostly they boil down to some variation of "Cross dangerous area to kill an enemy who is attacking you."
Queen's Wish isn't attempting to win any visual awards, but the sprites themselves look perfectly fine for what it is. The effects and animation are really what hold it back, in my opinion. Essentially every facet of the game needs to be more reactive and dynamic.
The sheer size of this game is impressive for this 1-2 person studio, but heavy editing to make this a more streamlined experience would have gone a long way for me. Overall, it is ok for what it is, but I didn't end up sticking with it.