Wintermoor Tactics Club – Review
Follow Genre: Turn Based Strategy
Developer: EVC
Publisher: Versus Evil
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC

Wintermoor Tactics Club – Review

Site Score
8.5
Good: Great story and soundtrack
Bad: Too easy for some players
User Score
10.0
(2 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)

Sometimes there are games that hit all the notes just right, making an entertaining experience without doing anything out of the ordinary. Wintermoor Tactics Club is one of such games. Its gameplay is nothing new, but it’s more than satisfactory to make anyone enjoy their time with it.

Story

The story of the game revolves around the aforementioned Tactics Club and their quest to win the snowball tournament started by Principal Enfield. To add stakes, all clubs defeated during the tournament will be disbanded.

After this initial setup, the story moves onto the protagonist, Alicia. As part of the Tactics Club she wants to preserve it, due to what it means to her. As the game progresses the club starts to expand, with members from some of the disbanded ones joining. Through C&C campaigns, the game’s version of Dungeons and Dragons, the stories of these characters are expanded upon and the relationships with the other club members developed.

Wintermoor Tactics Club’s story is overall one of the biggest hooks the game has to offer and one of its main focus. Every single character, even the secondary ones through optional conversations, is detailed and unique, making the academy feel lived in, albeit a bit small.

Every day, in-between story events, Alicia may go to the different areas of the campus and talk to the other students, some of whom will give Alicia quests. During these quests, a short side story is told, fleshing out their personalities even more.

Graphics

The graphics in the game are really good; every character portrait is detailed and unique, the main characters even have several of them with different emotions. Sadly, the same cannot be said about the static models. These look stiff and uncanny, at times looking different from the portraits or not matching the character’s personality at all.

Animations are a letdown though, besides the ones in combat and the falling snow they’re basically nonexistent. Other than those two mentioned, only the “flavor” animations for portraits and walking ones appear.

Sound

Wintermoor’s soundtrack and SFX are both of the highest quality. All tracks and sounds featured in the game are well made, without bugs or issues. The lack of voice acting for the characters is a shame though; instead the game opts for “emotion” noises such as exclamations etc.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Wintermoor is equal parts of visual novel and turn-based strategy. Whenever the player is not in one of the strategy sections they’ll be walking around the campus talking to other students, getting side quests and progressing through the story. It is even arguable that the strategy gameplay takes second place with respect to the story and the VN-like part of it.

As previously mentioned, the main plot point in the story is the snowball tournament. All of the battles in this tournament are played out like C&C campaigns, with every character being their character. Neither these battles nor the actual C&C campaigns are excessively difficult; while obtaining perfect scores in every one of them has some challenge just beating them is easy enough.  The game is accessible for any kind of player, from people new to the genre to old players; at least if they don’t expect a huge challenge to overcome.

The combat is pretty simple for the genre. Each character has two main abilities and some other unlockable ones, being able to use one per turn. This makes most battles pretty quick; all maps are generally over in 6 turns at most. This can be both good and bad, depending on how much the player enjoys it, though for those that want more there are several optional challenges featuring somewhat harder maps.

It is worth mentioning that none of the side quests add any combat gameplay, instead opting for making Alicia roam the campus to do one task or another. While this doesn’t particularly make the gameplay more enticing, all of them feature a short story that fleshes the characters out, making them entertaining enough.

Conclusion

Overall, Wintermoor Tactics Club is a really enjoyable game for any type of player, regardless of if they have previous experience with the genre or games as a whole. Even if more unique or innovative games exist, Wintermoor Tactics Club does everything right to bring the player a fun experience.

Personal Opinion

“I thoroughly enjoyed my time with WTC, it was a complete blast playing through it. After being used to playing every game on the hardest mode it was a more than welcome breather. While it was easy enough to beat, I still was able to find enough challenge to stay entertained by going for the max rating in all stages. I really enjoyed the story as well, especially the interactions between the characters. It’s clearly visible a lot of love has been put into both the story and game as a whole”

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
Wintermoor Tactics Club - Review, 10.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Noparg


No longer writing for the site, pursuing other things.

No Comments

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.