Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire

It's cute. If you like the combat from Banner Saga, then yeah, you'll enjoy a direct rip off.

Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire is an interesting game. A tactical strategy game with the story of an RPG and a unique artstyle, it's a game that clearly aimed a little bit higher than it could deliver. Not that there isn't quality in what's there, however; overall, it actually plays very well, with fun abilities and above all great encounter design. The game has a tendency to always give you a new problem to chew on, and that makes it fill out its 10 hour run time nicely. So, with all of that, what's the problem? Why is it so unknown and (at time of writing) badly reviewed? Well, there is one big and one small reason, I think. Let's start with the small one: The non-combat sequences. While the story sequences are quite good, the moments where you're running around talking to people is too bare and empty. The game clearly takes inspiration from Banner Saga in its combat (which I'm fine with, it's a good system) and I wish they would have snatched its approach to dialogue as well. Having an entire WASD-based movement system in a mouse-driven tactics game, just to walk up to people and press Space for at most a handful of lines is pretty poor. I can't help but feel like the ef…

It's a pretty nice game, despite the mixed rating it has at the time I write this, so I kept looking for flaws in the game, but did not find much that was bad. The rotoscoped animation is well done, as is the soundtrack and story; visuals are old-school 2D and I encountered no bugs. (I have not played the Banner Saga, which I see this title is getting compared to.) The story takes place mostly in one night with several battles and the final one the next day; the "levels" are at each location the characters flee to or make a stand at, while being pursued by the enemy. At the beginning and between combat levels, there is a little bit of in-game narrative exposition. Combat levels are split in different "stages", which are battles in the game. The combat is not that different from other turn-based games and the battles present different configurations to deal with, so I did not find it any more repetitive than other turn-based games, but YMMV. It has an autosave feature (no manual save and reload), but gameplay restarts at the beginning of each stage if you encounter a game over situation -- maybe why it might appear repetitive, from a certain point of view, but it encouraged me t…

Overall it's fine and impressive for how small the dev team is, but that does not change the fact that Tahira severely lacks something motivating me to play it. The story has a nice atmosphere and premise but is held back by cringey attempts at humor that feel out of place. The setting is a little off since it uses real place names with seemingly little connection to them. Music and sound are the strongest suits of the artistic side of things. The combat is overall good but is similar enough to Banner Saga's that it makes me miss things Banner Saga has and Tahira doesn't, such as agency over attacking health versus armour. The combat does have interesting innovations, but nothing I can say I miss. From what I can tell, difficulty is primarily just the number of units the game throws at you. There could also be better instructions for what your objectives are. A strong suit of the combat is it has a much larger scale than other tactics games. The devs were so close to making an amazing game, it honestly hurts to give Tahira a negative review. While I can point to good things, there's just nothing compelling enough to make me think my money was well spent. Tahira is a gamble whi…

Great game made by three people.

It echoed.