Hey folks! I've got a free demo of Together in Battle online as part of Steam Game Fest until the 22nd. Go ahead and grab it off the game's Steam page to give it a try; I'd love to hear what you think!
Played through it twice and here are my thoughts:
1) The main menu, backgrounds, and equips art are nice. However the portraits feel a little uncanny or just bland.
EDIT: Since it might not be clear, I do like the sprites.
2) Music is solid as usual!
3) Still same good old gameplay I enjoy. Kind of wish some of the new skills and unit classes were readily available to test though as a means of showing off new things for fans of your work.
4) My complaint from TT Special Edition still stands although maybe it will be adressed by full release. Quote from: Sythion on January 20, 2020, 02:02:48 AM
Camera zooms in whenever a character uses a skill. I can understand the reasoning for this but would like an option to disable it ,or have it match the current zoom level instead of getting close. This just slows things down.
EDIT: I feel silly now for missing the option. Bugfartboy's post helped me realize it exists!
I've only played through it once, but here are my notes:
Cutscenes
- The text feels a bit too big, at least in the introductory scene. The ability to scale that down would be nice.
- Still, it feels A LOT smoother than Telepath Tactics did, so props.
Recruitment/Character Management/Camping
- The ability to see what stats a physical attribute modifies would be extremely useful. I was able to piece together some of them (e.g. Migraine = lower mental resist) but a tooltip (even just the stat icons and the modifier) would be nice.
- My first instinct when trying to view the next page of recruits was to try scrolling down, much to my great sadness. If possible, it would be a subtle but impactful change to that screen.
- One evening, a Mechanic came by selling golems. I tried purchasing one, and the noise and animation played, but no aura was deducted from my total, no golem entered my roster, and the golem remained in the available list. Examining the same golem again, it had a cost of 0 aura, but still did the above instead of entering my roster when I clicked "Recruit". I wasn't able to afford any of the other golems, despite the UI showing I still had 1487 aura on hand. After dismissing the Mechanic, aura had been reduced as though I had purchased my new friend, but my new friend was nowhere to be found.
- I don't know that it's absolutely necessary, but it would be neat to be able to visibly sort the roster based on name and other stats listed.
- Less a bug and more a typo, two of my recruits were playing "Words Ablaze" before bed. The very last section of that description was "head off to bed./They conclude after hours of play, tired but happy.}" with all the odd punctuation present as well.
Battle
- Left-click and drag to pan felt super unintuitive compared to a lot of other strategy games I've played, where drag-left-clicking is usually used to select a group. Maybe think about using right
or middle click for panning? - The big selector square that follows the mouse around felt unnecessary when I wasn't actively targeting something like a skill or movement.
- I discovered (by accident) that you can cancel targeting a skill with a right click, which wasn't obvious at first (unless I just skipped reading it in the tutorial). A nice big cancel button might be handy here.
- I love the idea of characters giving little battle quips when they use a skill or fall in battle. I just wish the longer ones lingered a little bit more before dismissing themselves. I wasn't able to finish reading some.
- In the final combat of the demo, my spearman had learned Hold, and used it to keep a swordsman from getting to my healer. Only the swordsman ignored the blocked spaces, entered and ended in one, and used Sword diagonally to attack my healer. Ummm... what?
Other
- I loved the original music, and the new stuff here absolutely slaps.
- I agree with Sythion about graphics. Backgrounds and items look pretty nice, but character sprites and portraits felt out of place. It was nice to see a rest animation, though.
- Some attack animations (notably the photokineticist's light blast) felt a bit slow.
- I'm glad I found the option to disable Camera Zoom. That would have gotten old fast.
- The ability to change graphics settings mid-combat going forward will be a must. There were several times I wanted to take a screenclip, but couldn't because I couldn't downgrade from full screen to windowed mode
- Overall good things.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll look into this stuff. :)