Massive Chalice - Review @ Ars Technica

Steven Strom reviewed Massive Chalice for Ars Technica - some snippets:

Massive Chalice review: Penning a smaller, simpler strategic legend
A lighter, more forgiving translation of a XCOM's familiar strategy formula.

It's unfortunate that Massive Chalice was released in the very same week that a sequel to Firaxis Games' XCOM reboot was announced. The game’s commercial prospects might improve a little, gaining extra attention from tactical strategy fans searching for something to play as they wait for an XCOM follow-up later this year. But thinking about XCOM doesn’t really make Massive Chalice look very good in comparison.

Massive Chalice should of course be judged on its own merits. But considered alone, Double Fine's latest and possibly greatest Kickstarter success already draws many drastic comparisons to its sci-fi counterpart. So with the latter game's announcement trailer fresh in one's mind, it's damn near impossible to separate the two.

(…)

Personal stories within the game form not over the course of a single character's military career, but over decades of lineage within a great house. Your armies are mostly populated by the offspring of a region's regents. If said couple is a pair of nearsighted drunkards, for example, yours will be the legend of some very clumsy heroes who protected the last vestiges of humanity in spite of themselves. You'll just never remember any of their names or specific deeds.

If the game does determine that an individual has done well for themselves, it commemorates their achievements with a "relic." These stat-boosting items can only be equipped by other members of that soldier's house, and they gain in power over time. It's certainly useful, but it's also just another example of how Massive Chalice smelts a legacy of moments into cold numbers.

Not that the combat leaves room for any terribly memorable moments anyway. Combat is a solid simulacrum of XCOM but a fair sight simpler. It's turn-based, as you'd expect, with each unit having two chances to move, sprinting, attacking, or using class-specific abilities. Hunters have a percentage chance to miss their target based on their range, while Caberjacks will always hit with at least a glancing blow.

Alchemists (the third starting class) have a limited supply of bombs to throw per encounter. They can hit multiple enemies in the blast, but there's a chance they'll throw wide or too close, missing their target completely, or even hitting your allies. Classes and their capabilities tie back to regents too. Marry an Alchemist to a reigning Hunter, for instance, and their minnows will be raised as Trickshots, with explosives-tipped arrows in their bow-zookas.

(…)

Verdict: Massive Chalice doesn't surpass XCOM: Enemy Unknown as the tactical strategy RPG of note, but it does offer a bit of the same satisfaction with a great deal less frustration. Try it.

More information.

Massive Chalice at Metacritic.

Just finished my playthrough on Brutal-Ironman, I wasn’t able to beat the final battle, but had a lot of fun playing the game.

The Bad:
-Interface is bad in the strategy view. No good overview and important information is missing at several places so external sources are required. Interface in the tactics view works well though.
-The game has 3 difficulties which is fine. But in normal mode it allows you to save everywhere including combat which makes the game ridiculously easy. But there is also an ironman mode, which isn’t the best combination with a game of a 30h length. But without it, the game is trivial. So I’d recommend for everyone to play it on Ironman with maybe a lower difficulty than you would normally chose.
-The order in which you encounter the different types enemies isn’t perfectly balanced. You may experience a big bump in difficulty around half of the game when suddenly your hit chance on one type of enemy drops to 60%, making it very luck dependent for a short while.
-The final battle doesn’t support a cautious playstyle which you could use during the rest of the game. This also leads to characters which aren’t suited well for the final combat.

The Good:
-While the game uses a similar simplified 2 action-point-system as XCom, it doesn’t cripple connected systems like cover, angle calculations, obstacles, interruptions. Massive Chalice simply removes them. On the first look that makes the game simpler and the first levels actually are. But once you encounter different enemy types and have more skills, it makes up for that.
The consequence is, that XCom tries to appear realistic by implementing cornerstones of a realistic games, but implements them with abstract mechanics, leading to non-intuitive gameplay. Massive Chalice follows a “what you see is what you get” approach. Making it easier and more intuitive to learn and less frustrating while shifting the complexity to other areas.
-The game doesn’t have a downward spiral as XCom does. Worst case in XCom would be that Character A dies, Character B goes to Panic and shoots Character C. You have one or two characters left who don’t stand a chance, you lose the mission, cannot go forward in your campaign and lose that one as well. That cannot happen in Massive Chalice. If you lose one character that is unfortunate, but you still have 4 characters left, which work just as well even though your tactical possibilities get crippled. But even though if you lose all characters and the mission it is not the end of the world. At some point your characters die of age anyways, and a lost mission is bad, but hardly ever the end. The implications are that your long term power is sinking. But you can recuperate if you are doing well with the following missions which you can do almost just as well as the one your lost. No need to switch to a newbie “B Team” who doesn’t hit a thing.
-You start out with 5 characters. In general you have so many tactical possibilities and your hit chances are so high, that luck for the most part does not play a role in comparison to XCom where one critical hit can easily kill one of your soldiers if you are out of luck. In massive Chalice you can limit the randomness to an absolute minimum, also because enemies cannot crit.
-The game has 3 base classes and 6 sub classes, each with slightly different skills, giving you a big range of versatility. You can also alter them by other things like researches, your bloodline genes and so on. This is basically on par with the XCom games, but less character focused and the base building comes in a different form.
-The game adds some light humor into the mix. It doesn’t really play a role in the long run, but it makes you smile the one time or another, especially in the beginning.
-All in all I can’t remember any other recent tactics game where (after the first couple of battles) each battle was so challenging and tactical without allowing you to let your guard down.

Originally Posted by Kordanor
Just finished my playthrough on Brutal-Ironman, I wasn’t able to beat the final battle, but had a lot of fun playing the game.

The Bad:
-Interface is bad in the strategy view. No good overview and important information is missing at several places so external sources are required. Interface in the tactics view works well though.
-The game has 3 difficulties which is fine. But in normal mode it allows you to save everywhere including combat which makes the game ridiculously easy. But there is also an ironman mode, which isn’t the best combination with a game of a 30h length. But without it, the game is trivial. So I’d recommend for everyone to play it on Ironman with maybe a lower difficulty than you would normally chose.
-The order in which you encounter the different types enemies isn’t perfectly balanced. You may experience a big bump in difficulty around half of the game when suddenly your hit chance on one type of enemy drops to 60%, making it very luck dependent for a short while.
-The final battle doesn’t support a cautious playstyle which you could use during the rest of the game. This also leads to characters which aren’t suited well for the final combat.

The Good:
-While the game uses a similar simplified 2 action-point-system as XCom, it doesn’t cripple connected systems like cover, angle calculations, obstacles, interruptions. Massive Chalice simply removes them. On the first look that makes the game simpler and the first levels actually are. But once you encounter different enemy types and have more skills, it makes up for that.
The consequence is, that XCom tries to appear realistic by implementing cornerstones of a realistic games, but implements them with abstract mechanics, leading to non-intuitive gameplay. Massive Chalice follows a “what you see is what you get” approach. Making it easier and more intuitive to learn and less frustrating while shifting the complexity to other areas.
-The game doesn’t have a downward spiral as XCom does. Worst case in XCom would be that Character A dies, Character B goes to Panic and shoots Character C. You have one or two characters left who don’t stand a chance, you lose the mission, cannot go forward in your campaign and lose that one as well. That cannot happen in Massive Chalice. If you lose one character that is unfortunate, but you still have 4 characters left, which work just as well even though your tactical possibilities get crippled. But even though if you lose all characters and the mission it is not the end of the world. At some point your characters die of age anyways, and a lost mission is bad, but hardly ever the end. The implications are that your long term power is sinking. But you can recuperate if you are doing well with the following missions which you can do almost just as well as the one your lost. No need to switch to a newbie “B Team” who doesn’t hit a thing.
-You start out with 5 characters. In general you have so many tactical possibilities and your hit chances are so high, that luck for the most part does not play a role in comparison to XCom where one critical hit can easily kill one of your soldiers if you are out of luck. In massive Chalice you can limit the randomness to an absolute minimum, also because enemies cannot crit.
-The game has 3 base classes and 6 sub classes, each with slightly different skills, giving you a big range of versatility. You can also alter them by other things like researches, your bloodline genes and so on. This is basically on par with the XCom games, but less character focused and the base building comes in a different form.
-The game adds some light humor into the mix. It doesn’t really play a role in the long run, but it makes you smile the one time or another, especially in the beginning.
-All in all I can’t remember any other recent tactics game where (after the first couple of battles) each battle was so challenging and tactical without allowing you to let your guard down.

Thank you for your point of view.

Get to know the members of the MASSIVE CHALICE development team and gain some insight on what it means to be working in the games industry with MASSIVE KNOWLEDGE, a new series from 2 Player Productions and Double Fine.

Episode 3 features designer John Bernhelm exploring the influences that helped shape the gameplay of MASSIVE CHALICE. Each episode will focus on a different member of the team, exploring their individual talents and contributions to the development of MASSIVE CHALICE.

-> video

Thanks for the mini-review Korandor.