PLATFORM: PC, PS4, SWITCH, XBOX ONE (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Othercide is a very tactical turn-based strategy game which casts players as Mother, humanity’s last hope in a war against all manner of occult manifestations. By creating Daughters, you’ll be able to amass an army of warriors to battle against the forces of suffering in grid-based battles that take place in a mysterious land between dimensions…

Players of similar games like X-Com or the recent Gears Tactics will be most comfortable here, as most of the genre’s mechanics are present and correct. Move your soldiers around the battlefield, prepare them to attack, then watch the carnage unfold. In the early going, your abilities are fairly limited, but you’ll soon be ganging up on enemies with crazy combos, knocking enemies into each other’s attacks, setting traps and all that good stuff. Things get even more intricate when the game’s “dynamic timeline system” comes into play – this allows players to control what, when and where anything happens. Each character’s turn is represented by an icon on a bar along the bottom of the screen, and any moves that span multiple turns can be interrupted by well-timed counterattacks.

Your Daughters evolve based on how they’re used in battle, and will gain handy customisable skills that will enable them to add status effects, delay moves on the timeline and so on. Each failed run through the game sees the permanent death of your Daughters, but you’re given a helping hand back into action as, with each restart, the game offers a variety of abilities that can be assigned to new characters – fighting your way through the demonic hordes is never easy, but at least you never feel like you’re fighting a losing battle.

With an extremely eye-catching style, well-designed monsters and involved gameplay, Othercide is a worthy addition to any tactically-minded Starburst reader’s game library.