A Decidedly Average Action Strategy Game Gameplay Wise That I Couldn’t Really Get Into, Too Much Running Around And Not Enough Action.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Strategy, RTS, Action
Developer: Tower Five
Publisher: Tower Five
Release date: 23 October, 2019
Intro
Lornsword Winter Chronicle is an RTS game that puts you right in the heat of battle as you lead your men to fight various enemies across the game world. You play as a General in the Empire’s army and your travels take you far and wide to do battle against your foes. It plays very much like an action RPG, just without the leveling up. If any of this is interesting to you so far, read on to find out what else the game has to offer!
Story
The story puts you in the role of a character named Corun Lan Ka, a Lornsword for the Empire. After a few battles, he is quickly promoted to the rank of General and is sent on increasingly more dangerous missions. He eventually becomes suspicious of the way the Empire is acting towards him, like having sent him to the far north by himself, which is pretty suspicious of them.
To be completely honest, this is as far as I’d managed to get in the game, largely because I found it difficult to continue the game after this point. It’s an interesting game, but I wound up not enjoying it as much as I had hoped I would. The fact that missions took at least 30 minutes to complete each one you do, and that you have to restart the battle completely if you die, left me tired, and I couldn’t continue, as much as I wanted to. It’s a long-winded game and story elements go by pretty quickly, leaving you with nothing but endless running around a battlefield.
Gameplay
To be honest, like 85% of this game consists of running around the battlefield almost non-stop as you collect your soldiers and lead them to where you want them to attack, and then order them to attack. You rinse and repeat this step so many times during one battle that it gets incredibly boring, incredibly quickly due to how weak your units are.
To recruit units you must first construct either a fort, scout camp, or an alliance academy. These buildings allow you to recruit new units which will collect at the flag next to them. If you turn the flag orange they will move off on their own but without any real coordination, they simply follow a path and attack things that enter their path, they’re quite dumb. These buildings can be upgraded to allow for stronger units to be recruited but even they die incredibly quickly against the enemies they face.
There is also some resource gathering elements where you can take control of gold mines in order to generate gold every few seconds. Farms are also located on the map and allow you to construct more buildings. Both of these can be upgraded to grant them protection against raiders, like turrets and defenders.
Many of your objectives revolve around simply destroying enemy camps, another reason why I got bored quickly. There was also a defense mission that I absolutely hated where you had to defend a small town for 30 minutes straight, was ridiculous.
My Displeasure With The Game: A Rant
This game’s story was pretty interesting but it’s gameplay was… really… boring. Like, it could have been awesome but it felt like they padded the missions to the point where each one takes at least 30 minutes to complete. Which would be fine if the game didn’t revolve around running back and forth between your base and the enemy base, guiding your units who have no AI besides following a path when their flag changes, and telling them: “Go attack” and sometimes if you weren’t close enough to the enemy camp, they’d walk away. Also, you can’t personally do any of the fighting because your character dies incredibly easy and anytime you summon things to help, you have to run back to camp to collect orbs to heal and return your stamina to full in order to summon more, and to get more units to bring to the camp, again, because by the time you head back to your camp your units already died. It’s a mess.
Verdict
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure if I was going to like this game going into it but I can definitely confirm now that I didn’t like it at all after playing it for a while. That said, I may not have enjoyed the game much but I know some people might instead. If you enjoy isometric RTS games that have you lead your armies directly then this game is for you. On the other hand, if you dislike running around the battlefield, going back and forth between your camp and the enemy camp as you distribute your army while not fighting anything because you die quickly, then you’re like me and will likely hate the game quite a bit. Still, different strokes for different folks. Personally though, I’m going to quit this one pretty quickly, at least it’s not a rage quit, but it’s nowhere near that bad, it’s just a conflict of interest.
