RTS games were my favorite genre as a kid but they seem to have been basically abandoned by the game industry lately. I was excited about Tooth and Tail because it was an RTS, because it was an RTS that handles controller support very well, and especially because it's one of the only stories about anthropomorphic animals willing to bite the bullet on starvation and predation and build the profound brutality of real interspecies dynamics into its worldbuilding.

So I played far enough through T&T to get to play all four of its factions, and gave up shortly before the end. I enjoyed it well enough; the gameplay is unique, with a fast pace and challenges that feel fresh for the genre. The pixel art and dialogue between levels is far more than I expected to get, and it suggests a pretty deeply thought-out world. Lots of good flavor.

It's just that it feels like all of that should be in service of a coherent story that never really materializes. It's hard to follow what is even supposed to be happening across all the missions in a faction. That might not be a real problem if it weren't exacerbated by the sense that the levels vary in such a scattershot way. Each faction can use the same units and same playstyles as every other faction, given circumstances. Unique mission types mix things up sometimes but not in ways that have clear relationships with the broader story. My initial interest in the world and its compelling mix of ecology and historical aesthetic just felt totally unfulfilled.

It made me wish they had foregone the pixel art and just used the simple splash screens Age of Empires used to stitch its maps into a coherent narrative. The sense of progression in those campaigns seems much better in retrospect, even if the actual stories or level designs weren't anything special.