Floppy Knights Review (noe)
Interestingly balanced and surprisingly polished, the game offers a strong linear experience; especially at this price.
The turn-based gameplay is not particularly complicated, but offers a satisfactory amount of mechanical variety for players to interact with and customize. The player only being capable of performing actions relative to the cards they draw each turn can be occasionally limiting. Otherwise it mostly serves as a way to artificially diversify the experience from other turn-based combat systems. The system seems balanced more in favour of players investing heavily into one unit rather than using all of their units equally, difficulty to tell whether that is intentional or not.
The game maintains a decent amount of challenge, at least to the point where players have to actually think about their actions to some extent. But the levels where players can't see most of the map are absolutely awful. Not being able to see where enemy units are takes most of the strategy out of the game, turning it into a random chance simulator; which then becomes a trial and error simulator since you have to memorize all the enemy unit locations just to begin attempting a strategy at all. Certain ranged units literally can't even function because their attack range is outside of their sight range.
Keeping track of all the different statistics each unit has can be relatively tedious. Several crucial statistics are only visible while hovering over the unit, which forces players to do it over and over as a reminder. It would be nice if there was a more streamlined way of displaying such information.
Although the story does not seem to be especially unique it is at least fluent. Players experience a new string of dialogue between characters after and before every level, which helps to constantly freshen up the gameplay. The whole experience is wrapped in a very thorough art style that gives the game lots of visual polish, making it feel decently real.
The one thing that stands out in relation to the art is the artist's habit of drawing Xs on teeth. The Xs are meant to be a loose representation of the lines separating rows of teeth. Except having that represented by XXX instead of +++ implies that the character has short triangular teeth with diamond shaped chunks of tooth nestled inbetween their actual teeth. It just makes no sense visually. But then again having an X representing the hole in human ears doesn't make much sense either.
Between the story, the progression and the mechanics there's nothing especially unique about the game. But at the same time that lack of uniqueness isn't particularly shallow or bland either. From the look of it there's a solid amount of content to the experience, considering how thorough the graphical design is.
If you're interested in finding more games like this I've probably reviewed quite a few on my curator page here .