Vagrus: The Review Riven Realm

There are not enough brutal strategy games on the management of a mercenary business. There, I said it. It s been years and years that the last good Jagged Alliance and the intermediary years brought us Battle Brothers and ... not so much that is notable. But a number of developing titles give different turns to the idea, I can not wait to get their hands on Vagrus: The Riven Realms.

The first thing that strikes you when you start Vagrus is the tradition. There is a beautiful fantastic card, a mythical story and a lot of vocabulary words to learn. I guess for some people, it sounds like homework, but I know I m not the only one to love reading fantastic novels. Vagrus has the richness and depth of something like that. It s not a generic medieval fantasy. It s strange. It s dusty. There are nice things about the dinosaurs and frightening pacts of old magic and sacred caravan. The story is something that Vagrus does well, which ends up being a good thing.

Vagrus does not play like these games I mentioned above. The fight in turn at the different sides aligned like a JRPG and chosen from a set of unique class movements. The economy is deep, but you are not looking for better equipment. Most of the game is played on visual novel style text menus. I was a little surprised by that. Where I saw talking about Vagrus, people seem more interested in this strategy management game. In reality, Vagrus will use a completely different part of your brain.

So wait to do a lot of reading when you start Vagrus. Huge text paragraphs. This is not a chore to read, because the writing team of Lost Pilgrims has written live descriptions. They sometimes pull a black and irony humor that I think a lot of games are looking, but few manage to land. You will have trouble choosing between your dialogue choices, while all would be a good thing to say, and you are often on an uncertain basis with NPCs in cities, other factions and creeps that you will encounter along the way .

You will manage your caravan via animated menus, dragging and depositing supplies from one box to another, creating schedules, things like that. Your real mercenaries have personality, and assign them jobs a lot reminded me king of dragon pass and his more recent, six ages. It is a balance of balance of having the right skills for the good jobs and to develop your heroes as masters of a specific skill, or competent with some.

The key to engaging in a small team management game is to invest emotionally in your guys. XCOM and Fire Emblem come through permanent death. For Vagrus, it goes mainly by good writing. Although there are many ways to put your guys at level, I have never had the specific feeling of refining specific masters, but rather to spread a lot of tasks in our small camping team. Of course, I knew what type was using an arc and what kind was fighting from the front lines, but what they did never really match who they were.

This is the field where the ludonarrative dissonance of Vagrus prevented me from engaging myself fully. There was the game of the game where I chose my words and negotiated my path through a fantastic dangerous world. Then it was like going to the arcade and playing a game on mercenary fights. Although battles are not immersive, they stay pretty fun. But you do not lose there in the same way as you do it in the story, so you will play the game in a single mode for having changed completely. It s not so different from random encounters in some old JRPGs, but it s a play mechanism that I thought I had exceeded, and I was a little surprised to feel so invaded by the fighting.

The trick is that there are not many games in the style of King of Dragon Pass. There are not many games like the Vagrus period. Even in the world of independent RPGs, it is rare to meet with such rich writing, or an original world. Vagrus is exactly what I hope to get from my independent games, so original ideas that I can not really express what they could have done better. With immersive music, an elegant art, creative fights and a sometimes confusing interface, Vagrus: The Riven Realms is what you are looking for if you have enough versions of the same game, again and again.