There's this, and there's Tactical Breach Wizards (which I've only played the demo of) where a strategy game basically gears itself toward being more a puzzle game than what is usually meant when one says "strategy" or "tactics" game. Demonschool is more dynamic than TBW's demo suggested it was, being more about spawning continous waves of enemies that you need to account for in your strategy.
The problem is Demonschool just doesn't have much of a spark to it. 8 hours in, three in-game weeks of 12 down, and even with different enemies being introduced hither and thither, the moment-to-moment of the gameplay doesn't really change at all. The general strategies are the same (Knute buffs Faye/Destin/both and they slam into as many enemies as possible, Namako flies across the arena to disable the most problematic foes) almost regardless of enemy configuration, but also, honestly, I can barely tell most battles apart because the enemy configs are often very samey - the story ones, in particular, have leant super-hard on functionally identical gangsters and zombies most of the time.
It would probably help if it had more going on outside that, but it doesn't, really. The cast occasionally have fun lines but everyone is basically a flat character with one core trait and despite getting a fifth party member, she hasn't had a line in cutscenes past her appearance. The story is barely existent, each week is just a parade of fighting gangster swarms while chasing a way to get an artefact that makes demons happen, with a foretold apocalypse coming at the turn of the new year (the year 2000, of course) that no-one really gives a remote shit about, even Faye who explicitly has trained to prepare for it. Plot progression is just Go To X, see a scene where nothing lines are spat, some gangsters or demons show up, mouth off, beat their ass, no-one acts like anything actually happened and off you fuck to Point Y until you've arbitrarily been given the pass to fight the weekly boss.
There's a "time system" ever present on the HUD but you don't have to give a shit because only main plot advances it, you can fit in every relationship scene, sidequest and piles of pablum fishing without giving a shit. The system for learning equippable skills has a time requirement but that time requirement isn't "spend your current day", it's "the selected characters can't study for X time slots). The thing is entirely aesthetic, and doesn't add much of anything, not even an impending sense of doom or concern because no-one gives a shit.
There's a relationship system but outside of occasional cutscene choices that give you a +1 to a character, the only way to boost it is to play the same short and kind of tedious minigames over and over each time slot, then rank them up by seeing a very short scene that gives barely fucking any sort of characterisation and invariably ends in another battle against the same heaps of identical mobs the story is also shoving you through. The puzzle-strategy nature of fights with an emphasis on rewinding, restarting and having to consider across turns means good performance in fights also takes a while per fight, so you're staring at these identical piles of gangsters for quite some time.
I don't even know if ranking up relationships does anything; it doesn't make characters more powerful because this isn't an RPG, there's no levelling or stats, and it doesn't give you any story incentive to follow along because of how thin it is.
It's all just very dry and flat, despite the presentation flourishes like the battle transitions, or the genuinely cool way your planned actions are strung together in the "action phase" showing it all play out, which is why I say the problem is "spark". It has no zest, no real character of its own, you just kind of trundle along through uninteresting fights and uninteresting story scenes doing uninteresting quests that invariably loop back to more uninteresting fights.
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
