Battle of Tiles

Battle of Tiles was Gametunnel's Strategy Game of the Year for '08, which is a little like Robert Parker deciding that the wine of the year was a $15 Malbec from Mendoza. (As I may be the only gamer / wine snob mutant in existence, let me explain that some really good “value” wines come out of Argentina's Mendoza valley, but no-one expects them to compete with $200+ bottles from Napa or Bordeaux.) Gametunnel's review of the game says: “I had about four hours of fun and at $5 that seems more than reasonable.”

Four hours of fun for $5 isn't bad, but that's not game of the year criteria.

So, is Battle of Tiles awards material, or is it an afternoon's cheap diversion? With respect to Gametunnel and its contributors, I think their starting assumptions about the game led them to the wrong conclusions, or, at least, away from the most interesting aspects of the game. The original review says that it “Deconstruct[s] the CRPG to its raw basics,” and the Game of the Year description finds its main flaw to be a lack of production values: “the game is ugly. I mean UGLY.” In my judgment, the CRPG elements are where the game goes wrong, and I flatly disagree with the claim that Battle of Tiles is ugly. The tiles are reminiscent of Scrabble tiles and chess pieces, and start to crack when they're low on HP, while the attack animations are colorful and mercifully short: just long enough to tell you who is hitting who with what.

The demo left me wanting more, but so did the full version, which still feels like a demo – a “proof of concept,” rather than a finished, let alone commercial, product. The mechanics of the game are original and interesting: every “turn” you select some or all of your tiles and give them a movement order (move one square in any of the 8 “joypad” directions), or tell them to hold still. Then, all computer-controlled tiles move independently. This puts the player at a disadvantage relative to the computer, similar in effect to ASP, as the player must strategize better to overcome the computer's superior ability to adapt to the immediate situation.

The game is at its best when things get really tight and you have to perform calculations like: if I move my Knights up, that Goblin will get a chance to finish off the Archer that it flanked, but if I have my Archer retreat, my Cleric will be exposed. Unfortunately, these kind of challenges account for maybe 5% of gameplay, as the game's AI is functionally nonexistent. There are some nasty surprises in store for the first-time player, mainly in the form of ambushes (scattered about the screen or appearing from behind the player's formations), but replay diminishes this as what hostiles appear where is entirely scripted, only differing between difficulty levels.

I admit to having a weakness for RPG-strategy hybrids even though the progressive power gain of the RPG element tends to eventually kill the strategy. In Battle of Tiles, the CRPG element is entirely unfortunate. It's cool, at first, to watch one's tiles level up, and the first time one of my tiles hit level 10 and changed color, I thought that was it. You can buy hostile tiles with the money you earn from killing them, and they're almost all “monsters,” so I thought that the game dynamic was that, as you progress, you have to recruit monsters in order to fill the ranks of your increasingly feeble humans. “That which does not kill us makes us stranger” - thank you Peter Chung (after Nietzsche). However, level advancement is uncapped, and as units reach higher levels, they not only gain HP and do more damage, they acquire abilities like double attack and, most useful, extra range or area effect for archers and mages.

This makes it most advantageous to keep your starting tiles alive, and the only unit you really need to by are Clerics, which appear on the 1st level. A basic archer who reaches level 50 (where range increases from 2 to 3) is much more powerful than any unit you can buy, even the Chaos Knights of the final level. Mages initially seem superior to archers, but are undone by one of the game's most frustrating wrinkles. At level 50, mages either gain extra range or area effect - at random, making it impossible to plan a strategy around them, and making the harder-to-kill and more predictable archers preferable.

Furthermore, the best additional units are also humans – the samurai and samurai archers who appear late on the second level can come to rival “Arthur,” your best starting unit – so the game easily remains humans versus monsters, undercutting the theme of “battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster” (Nietzsche again). And the need to “level up” before the tough encounters means literally hours of just holding down the “move forward” button while your well-organized ranks mow down wave after wave of slimes, skeletons and zombies. The monotony this produces makes it easy to miss the real challenges when they come up and, rather than analyzing it and taking appropriate action, just moving on and letting the Goblin kill your priceless Archer.

There are moments of sheer brilliance, like when one realizes that one can buy the little slimes summoned every round by the huge slime that is the level one boss, and let them duke it out without risking your knights, but they are too far inbetweeen. Other game elements suggest that Battle of Tiles was released unfinished. For example, every unit has protection against seven types of damage: Slash, Pierce, Blow, Arrow, Fire, Thunder, and Ice, but there's little variety in their stats: tiles are either resistant to "physical" (the first four), "magical" (the last three) or have no resistances. Other differences are marginal (Nota Bene: hold down left shift and mouse over tiles to see their stats - this crucial feature is mentioned in the tutorial but not in the game's manual).

If the CRPG level-grinding were eliminated (or reduced to, say, three or even ten levels of experience) and more effort put into AI and/or level design, Battle of Tiles could be really compelling. A versus mode on a timer would be interesting, though Zatikon has that niche pretty well covered . As it is, Battle of Tiles the game feels incomplete and unbalanced, and while it is interesting and a “good value,” it is not yet a “great game.”