Recent reviews by Moji

PROS:
+ Fantastic gameplay that feels like a real RTS
+ Challenging campaign with good difficulty curve
+ Engrossing story and memorable characters
+ Incredible OST
+ Fast, fun multiplayer
+ Steady updates from the developers

CONS:
- RNG maps can make some campaign missions nigh impossible
- Some Heroic objectives are almost entirely luck
- Lack of control over micro can be frustrating

Generally, when a game's premise is that it's a simplified, streamlined version of a genre I love, the end result is something that feels like it's been watered down, like there was a good game and things got taken away from it.

Tooth and Tail turns that expectation around. It feels like it was built from the ground up to be a solid RTS, rather than from the top down to be "an RTS with less things". The gameplay is smooth, intuitive, and most importantly it hits a lot of the small elements of what makes playing an RTS game fun.

Beyond just gameplay, Tooth and Tail has an incredible setting. From the first words in the cinematic opening to the last note in the end credits music, you'll feel pulled in to the grimdark humour of an extremely twisted version of Redwall. The story has enough little twists and turns to keep you interested, and plenty of big moments, without suffering from the convoluted plots and often plodding pace RTS stories tend to suffer from. As your armies starve and loyalties constantly shift and falter, every mission has a clear purpose to drive you to complete it. The cipher-language Vyehsal and leitmotif heavy soundtrack help to tie everything together to create an immersive world that's easy to get invested in.

That said, the game is not without faults. The biggest problem by far is the randomly-seeded maps. While the maps are a main feature of the game, and the seeding generally keeps them to a fixed theme, there are some campaign missions that are completely reliant on whether you're unlucky enough for your first mill to be right next an enemy base, or which unit campfires spawn near you, or where the meat pickups are. Especially with how challenging later levels can be, it gets frustrating when your biggest challenge is getting a reasonable map to play on.

Micro also feels frustrating at times. While the streamlined controls are generally easy to work with, there are few things more irritating than positioning your army exactly how you want it, only for it to be destroyed by one accidental tap of "rally all". Not being able to cancel orders or group unit types feels like a missing feature.

All in all, whether you've sunk countless weeks of gameplay into Brood War or your only interacting with the genre was an accidental purchase of Brutal Legend, Tooth and Tail is a fantastic RTS game you owe it to yourself to play.

Human Resource Machine is all the fun of coding in Assembly, only instead of a text editor you have a cute/odd cartoon character.

Nothing captures the feeling of starting at compiler errors quite like having a tiny cartoon avatar literally throw away the data you're trying to output, causing it to shatter on the ground. And like an actual computer, your miniscule tormentor will follow your instructions down to the letter, causing you to curse at your own stupidity while they infinitely add two numbers together because you forgot to include a way to break out of the loop.

I'd recommend this game, but I feel like the difficulty ramps up a little too quickly, and it's very easy to become frustrated with, although that's honestly part of the charm. I imagine it would be a fun way to get introduced to computer logic.