City of the Shroud is probably one of the oddest Tactical/Strategy RPGs I’ve played. And it’s not just for any one reason, either. But, perhaps I get ahead of myself.
The story is one of the big things for this game. Because it isn’t finished yet. Rather, the decisions of the players decide how the story will solidify for future players. As each chapter comes out, the players will have new choices to make that affect the balance of power in Iskendrun.
After a certain amount of time has passed, the aggregate of those decisions gets locked in for the next chapter (and anyone catching up). It makes for an interesting mechanic, but it makes the whole very difficult to really evaluate.
The graphics are fine, and I have no problem with how they look. Rather, the real issue I see is one of style, really. The models for battles have a very modern, MOBA sort of look to them.
And that’s not the issue; it’s a perfectly valid style. The problem is that it’s completely removed from the Arabian fantasy style pretty much everything else in the game seems to have.
And even there, the style isn’t a problem; very few things of late actually use it. It’s the clash between the two that leaves me wondering.
As far as other issues, a lot of the generic portraits are a bit overused. An example would be that they use the same portrait for a noble as they do for a foppish dandy, among other things.
I’d imagine upping the number of generic portraits so as to make more accurate matches would help for characterization. Doubly so, as the portraits aren’t the sort of thing that seems quite as laborious to add onto as, say, pixel art would’ve been.
Here’s the meat of it all –the gameplay. For its overall genre, City of the Shroud has a very odd combat system. Because it’s focused on wheel combos, in part. But primarily due to the fact that it’s a real time system. Everything that happens in combat is in real time and, aside from standing around, costs AP.
Granted, there’s a wait mode to make things less like issuing movement orders less hectic, but that’s pretty much all I felt it was really suited for. Especially for attacks, as freezing time limits how much you can string together. Because your AP regenerates over time, and there aren’t really any turns.
This all happens as fast as you can issue commands and switch to the next character. Needless to say, regardless of whether you use the wait mode or not, you’re eventually going to have to deal with too many things happening at once.
Combat is controlled by the combo wheel. By removing your stick or mouse to the center of the wheel, you cancel commands. Which means that there’s really only two directions on that wheel: left or right.
There’s no crazy down-to-up or left-to-right moves on this, at least as far as I saw, because of that. You get link gems which allow a given character class to use abilities, like a stronger punch or magic, by inputting the right directional combos.
And since AP bottlenecks that, you’ll never actually want to do combat commands in wait mode. Speaking of, at the very least wait mode is engaged and disengaged by the press of a single button.
As for classes, you’ve got the usual assortment by different names. Brawlers are baseline fighters, duelists are agile fighter with some range i.e. Rangers/Monks/Lancers/etc. Defenders are tanks, Machinists/healers, and mages are pretty much self explanatory.
Once you finish the tutorial, you can set up a team of generics, allowing you toolthem as you like. You can equip link gems to give them more options, or stat gems to give them a bit of a boost.
There aren’t levels; it’s entirely equipment-based. And, I should add, it doesn’t matter if a few of them drop in battle. You only lose if you get wiped out. There’s no penalty to, say,your mage dying mid battle, other than not having him around to help.
If I had one real nitpick about how the game plays, it would be that, due to a lack of ability to rotate the map, enemies sometimes become difficult to target. Specifically, if you have two of your characters on the X axis on either side of an enemy you want to target.
You can waste a large amount of time trying to click on the enemy, and instead hitting your ally, which causes you to switch to them.
Other than that, the game is a lot of text, you start a quest, talk to someone, maybe make a choice, get into a fight, more talk/choices, and then lather, rinse, repeat.
You have your choice of controller of mouse+keyboard. I went with the latter due to my controller having analog stick issues, and I feel it’s the better of the two. Keeping combos going is easier with the mouse, and you can switch characters really quickly with the number keys.
In all honesty, I really quickly found City of the Shroud to not be my cup of tea. That’s not to say it’s bad, or that there’s no good ideas there; there are. But when it comes to these types of games, I’m almost stupidly picky, and this game just didn’t suit me. If it sounds like something you’d love, give it a shot.
“City of the Shroud offers some interesting mechanics to go with its story-by-vote; but it may not be your type of game.”
Final Score:
3.5/5
Title: City of the Shroud
Platform: PC
Genre: Strategy RPG; Tactical RPG
Developer: Abyssal Arts Ltd.
Publisher: Abyssal Arts Ltd.
Release Date: August 9, 2018
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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