Acaratus Preview

Acaratus, a new Medieval Steampunk Turn-based strategy game, hitting the Early Access stage of Steam like many other games. Developed by Nodbrim Interactive, Acaratus is one of their first games but with the style behind it you wouldn’t really think as much. Fitting in with a multitude of other Indie titles, the old style of turn-based combat might feel a bit out of place against all the other free flowing games coming out.

Story

Since the story hasn’t been released in full just yet there isn’t much to say in this part, the synopsis is pretty much all we have. You are charged with leading a rebellion force against the Emperor Helios, putting the slaves to work making your machines of war to combat the Emperor’s forces.

There will be a campaign mode but that wasn’t currently available in the versions I played.

Gameplay

The skirmish and multiplayer modes come in 2 parts, the first is setting up your “Hero” and your squad of robots the second being the actual battles. While the setting up stage is rather simple it isn’t explained enough just yet, giving you plenty of options but not really showing how they benefit you beyond numbers and percentages. Once you get everything setup you can then just go between matches, only having to return if you feel a robot could be better.

The hero side of things is rather straight forward, choosing an avatar and from 3 different buffs they give, along with that you can also make up a deck of cards to buff your robots during battle. Making the robots is a whole other story, from selecting a Core that changes what slots are available to build on, the specialisation the robot has and their capabilities. From the core you will move onto mobility, legs or propeller wings, then weapons like swords, fists or ranged weaponry, along with shields and booster parts to affect the overall performance of the robot.

Once all the setting up is done all that is left is to select up to 4 robots to take with you and then choose a map with difficulty setting. When you get into the battlefield you will see all your hard work put to use, facing between 2-6 robots depending on difficulty setting on the opposite side of the map. You select a robot, then move them and use their weapons to hit the enemies, melee, ranged or explosive in design. The map is set on a square grid, with speed depicted by how fast you made your robots in the setup stage.

Overall Thoughts and Feelings

It’s hard to draw a full feeling about this game due to being so very early in development, not even being in Early Access upon time of playing. Having only really an access to the Skirmish mode doesn’t tell a bit enough picture about the game as a whole, with only 4 cores to choose from with no tutorial or “Leading hand” through the building phases. I feel as if a lot of the decisions I made were wrong as at higher levels of difficulty the AI were throwing techniques and strategies at me that I would never think of.

When it boils down to it I did not have a lot of fun with what I played, the game was either too easy or too hard, however that could be up to me not fully understanding how to play and creating robots vastly different in power or suitability to the enemy’s setup. Each match lasted between 3 and 6 turns, I was hoping for some longer matches when it came to higher difficulties or maps but they all stayed the same size. Higher ground and vantage points could add a lot to this game, in the areas it really seems to lack, the actual battles.

The robot building is the only real fun part of the game for me, finding out the different combinations and trying out the varied weapons. Although it is the only fun part it isn’t too in-depth when pitted against other games that have similar mechanics. When it gets to the battles the ranged weapons win a lot more than any melee units do, due to some of them dishing out a lot more damage than the enemies can survive. With cover only really blocking direct shots it is hard to position your troops in strategic spots, bombardments will still hit you and the AI likes to keep at least one of those on their team.

Hopefully when the campaign mode launches the game will improve, but right now there isn’t much to keep me playing. The multiplayer doesn’t really add much on its own, due to the game still feeling dull for the most part and too quick in the battles.