Developer: Cardboard Utopia
Publisher: Square Enix
Rrp: £13.59 (Steam and Humblebundle), $17.99 (Gog.com)
Released: 18th July 2018
Available on: Steam, Humblebundle and Gog.com
Played Using: An Xbox 360 Control Pad
Approximate game length: 20 Hours
I think this game has got to have one of the most complicated genre descriptions I’ve ever heard, it’s a deck and dice building jrpg tactics game. Sometimes I swear that developers are just trying to see how many genres they can blend… Still, if it results in unique and interesting games why not. It was also a Kickstarter success and had support (of the non-monetary variety) from the Square Enix Collective.
Children of Zodiarcs is a tactics game where you build a deck of cards to suit your playstyle and customise the dice to try and maximise the results. Through most of the game you’ll control a young thief by the name of Nahmi and her team as they battle their way through the city of Torus.
As its a tactics style game combat is of course a major focus. Where and how you decide to strike can make as much of a difference as what cards you play and what the dice roll. An attack upon an enemies unprotected back will always cause more damage and giving a character with a ranged ability a high vantage point is always advantageous.
There isn’t a set battle order, on your turn you get to pick anyone on your team to move and perform actions. However you have to move that specific character and then perform their action, you can’t choose to move one of your characters and postpone taking an action to move another. Once you perform an action, such as healing or attacking, that specific characters turn will be over (apart from selecting a direction to defend in). There is one exception to this, which is earning yourself a free action which allows you to perform another action but not move.
The game is quite forgiving in that it allows you to move and even select an card to perform and still allow you to back out and try something different, just so long as you haven’t rolled any dice or drawn cards.
The cards you play dictate what move you make and the dice rolls determine its effectiveness plus other bonus effects. Your hand limit is seven, if you go over that at any point excess cards will be discarded immediately. These discarded cards are always taken from the leftmost side.
Each time you roll the die you get the opportunity to reroll two of them, however they must be rolled at the same time, so you can’t reroll one and then another. Dice that are being re-rolling can knock into other previously rolled die, if this knock causes that die to change its face then that new face is now the one that gets counted toward your final result.
Every action your character performs (with exception of moving) earns them XP which in turn levels up your characters. As your characters level not only do their stats increase but so do their cards. Sometimes new ones will be unlocked but more often existing cards will become more effective or gain new special abilities. Another thing that occasionally occurs when you level is that new ‘dice slots’ become available. This increases the number of die you can roll when you perform actions.
The die you roll are D6 (meaning they have six sides), however there are far more than six types of ‘face’ available. The shard face increases the amount of damage your card will perform, shields grant protection from counter attacks, stars grant access to special abilities, lightning bolts give a free action, cards draw extra cards and hearts heal. However that isn’t all the types of faces, there are bad faces that can be inflicted that will remove damage, stars, cards or health. All of these also have their ‘numbered’ version that is more potent than the standard one.
As you play and increase in level you get to use better dice, that have more favorable faces. You can also alter the dice, meaning that you can change the faces of the die for different ones. This comes at the cost of using up other die as crafting components.
This means that if you wanted to create a single die that will nearly always roll the ‘free action’ face you can, although it might be a bit expensive. I also say almost because all the die I have encountered have at least one of their faces with a small lock upon them meaning that that specific face can’t be changed.
You can go back to previously completed missions and replay them as ‘Skirmishes’. This is very useful as it allows you to grind for levels, cards and better dice because unfortunately grinding is a necessary evil of this game. I played on the ‘normal’ difficulty (as I do for most games to get a feel for its balancing) and this game doesn’t mess around. By the fifth or sixth mission I had lost no less than seven times.
Thankfully you can manually save mid battle meaning that I was able to reload the game and reroll again and again until I got the results I wanted.
So my overall thoughts? I quite like this game, its story isn’t really anything to write home about and is quite short, however its very challenging and I never found myself actually bored while playing. The AI very much kept me on my toes and I had a lot of close calls, and that’s with me abusing the save system. If you’re looking for a good tactical game I dare say you could do much worse than this.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Armello
Guild of Dungeoneering
Wargroove
