Based on a hit comic book series from the late ’90s, Battle Chasers: Nightwar successfully translates the look and feel of a comic into a video game. The mesmerizing animated intro shows exactly what you’re in for: a wild world where steampunk meets Dungeons & Dragons, rendered in beautiful, deep-shaded colors. It’s only when the turn-based RPG gets down to business that its greatest spell wears off.
The premise of Battle Chasers is that a girl named Gully has taken a pair of magic gauntlets, along with a motley crew consisting of a sellsword, a wizard, and a kindly robot, on a journey to find her missing father. The Nightwar chapter, however, is a minor sidetrack from that journey Come from malaysia online casino . The crew gets shot down from their airship over a mysterious island with serious problems of its own. Supposedly, the island is home to a motherlode of mana, which has prompted something of a magic-based gold rush. Mercenaries, thieves, unsavory merchants and, most worrisome of all, the attention of an evil sorceress named Destra, are drawn to the island. The crew’s plans to depart dissolve into a trek that goes deep into the island’s darkest regions.
Everything is captivating and breezy early on. The game’s overworld is dotted with opportunities to battle oozing slimes, vicious wolf men, and surly prospectors. Dilapidated little shanty towns pop up along the way, as well as the occasional side quest, which usually impart a bit of lore before asking your band to thwart a high-ranking enemy in a dangerous place. The bread and butter of the game, however, is its major dungeons. Eight in total, the dungeons are procedurally generated, but each room and its layout is so impressively detailed, the puzzles so smoothly executed, that most of the time it’s impossible to tell every dungeon wasn’t meticulously laid out until you reset one, and re-enter to find an unrecognizable location.
From the outset, combat is fairly standard turn-based fare, though every character also has a special skill to affect enemies within dungeons–pro-actively stunning, ambushing, or igniting them–just before a fight kicks off. But the big gimmick is the Overcharge system. Basic attacks contribute to a special pool of red mana points that can be used to cast magic and tech attacks, rather than actual mana points. Even as the game progresses, MP remains in short supply, so you’re forced to be mindful about whether to build Overcharge or expend mana when using abilities. This gets increasingly tricky, but in a way that keeps you engaged in every battle no matter how small.
Battle Chasers endears you in the process of establishing its world, characters, and combat systems. Garrison, the mercenary, is exactly what you might expect from a square-jawed warrior with a tragic backstory: his terse personality keeps him at arm’s length from his cohorts. On the flipside, the hulking mech, Calibretto, is a gentle soul who acts more as the defacto healer, and the beating heart of the story as it goes along. The cast at large brings infectious personality and energy to every scene, and all of this is underscored by a delightfully diverse soundtrack, flavoring typical medieval adventure anthems with everything from Chinese string instruments to bassy, trip-hop backbeats.
The sour notes start to hit around the third dungeon. Where just minutes prior an enemy could barely manage 100 points of damage per hit, suddenly you find multiple basic enemies hitting for 200-plus points in the same wave, leaving debuff effects like Poison and Bleeding in their wake. And then, as if to cut you some slack, you meet a dungeon boss shortly after who struggles to make a dent in your party.
