Tails of Iron

Geralt of Rivia narrates Rat Souls. Perfect.

What a conundrum. It's very pretty, there's a lot of attention to detail, combat feels good, and the story is simple but engaging. And yet the latter half is a horrible drag and the difficulty and combat design cause frustration rather than fun. I did beat it in the end, and I'm happy I did; the game really makes you care about little Redgi and his rat people. And now I'm fully equipped to help you figure out if this is something you'd like to play. The Good Let's start with the obvious. It's so pretty. Feels like an old-timey fairy tale picture book. But that's not all - the environments constantly change as you turn the tide against the Frog invaders. Towns get repaired, NPCs come and do stuff, junk gets cleared, new structures show up. It's great, running through a town over and over seeing it look different every time. The story is grim. It might be a game about cute animals, but t

A bloody fairy tale that could have been short and dapper, but was dragged down by repetition ★ 7/10 — The art is excellent, the combat has ideas, but the progression is getting more and more tired ⊕ BEST FOR: Dark fairy tales with animal themes, medieval hand-painted art, observing moves and grasping the timing of counterattacks, and detailed sound effects. ⊖ NOT FOR: Flexible controls, reliable hit detection, varied combat, in-depth builds, free exploration, or players who are tired of running the map repeatedly. ▣ Critical Benchmarks: Metacritic PC 81/100 · OpenCritic 83/100 · Destructoid 7.5/10. ◆ Opening What attracted me most about Tails of Iron was the art: the rat wears armor and holds a sword. The medieval animal kingdom is like a hand-painted fairy tale, but it is not shy of blood when fighting. It is a linear 2D action RPG with the characteristics of Soulslike combat, e

If you ever wanted to play through a gruesome, yet oddly charming medieval children’s story narrated by Geralt of the Witcher fame, look no further than Tails of Iron, a much darker and gritty take on Redwall. Even with some repetitiveness, gameplay troubles and wonky combat, it manages to firmly grab your attention and make you cheer for the rats, but kind of bows out sheepishly with its humble running time of about 10-12 hours, depending on your skill. Redgi, a rat king in waiting, inherits a kingdom by winning it in a duel with his brother, but immediately loses it in a rampage of wild frogs slaughtering his citizens and leaving him for dead in the rubble. Rebuilding it awaits him, with plenty of weapons, armors, fetch quests, frog tongues and backtracking, but mainly with a feast of frog and other assorted kebabs since kingdoms are usually built on the blood, gore and bones of your

KILL-MURDER FROG THINGS YES-YES, GLORY TO SKAVEN CLAN

I'm a bit mixed on this one. On one hand, I love the artstyle, the story, the naration. It's just very.. redwall. I don't mind the repeating quests and the backtracking. The main problem here is the combat system. I've played a lot of souls games. When you get killed, it's usually "fair". Here that's not quite the case: * The knockback attacks can be very ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. No windup, they knock you back, and then hit you multiple times when you're down. You need to know when a boss can do knockback, and avoid those situations entirely. The final bosses second phase is especially ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in phase 2. * The hitboxes can be quite inconsistent * Some attacks are just very hard/impossible to block if you're badly positioned * The lack of i-framing does hurt here To beat some bosses, you have to "play" their AI. Invite certain attacks, position yourself so other attack types are rarer. This is just.