Massive Chalice - Hands-On @ PC Gamer

It has been a while since I even looked for news about Double Fine's funded kickstarter Massive Chalice. I never even knew what it was about during the kickstarter.

Well the puzzle is solved now. Here is a new walkthrough video from Double Fine.

A tactical strategy game set on an epic timeline. As the immortal ruler of the nation, you'll take command of its heroes, forge marriages to to strengthen your bloodlines, and battle a mysterious enemy known as the cadence in a war lasting hundreds of years. Visit blog.massivechalice.com for more info!

PC Gamer also has a new hands-on preview from Pax Prime with some answers.

At first, Massive Chalice seems like a competent, post-XCOM, fantasy turn-based strategy game. That, on its own, wouldn't get me excited (especially since I always prefer lasers to swords), but Massive Chalice innovates on the parts of XCOM that got me hooked: my emotional and strategic investment in the characters I trained, equipped, and sent on missions. It raises the stakes with an intergenerational scope, where the heroes I take into battle age over time, mate with other heroes, and produce children who will fight on for the cause. When one of them dies, I'm not just losing a soldier, but a family member—or worse, an entire bloodline.

On the tactical layer it plays exactly like XCOM. The Cadence, an army of monsters, trade turns moving and attacking on a tile-grid with your forces, The Nation. Chalice even mixes some of XCOM's elite, special forces motifs into the fantasy setting. The Caberjack unit, a heavy melee character, carries a big battering ram like a medieval SWAT member. The Archers' crossbows are so big that they have to hoist them up on their shoulders and fire them like rocket launchers. The Alchemist unit serves as the explosives expert, tossing potent flasks that deal damage across an area.