Eldritch Lands: The Witch Queen's Eternal War

I am blown away by the writing in this game. These characters are people. Not pure heroes or villains that can just be boxed up and put on a side. The main character does objectively horrible things for an objectively noble goal. The units in this game are constructs, copies of people who once lived, with all their memories, skills, and personality. The spearman is a noble soul who understandably refuses to save the world from abject horror if it means serving the woman who killed him and his people. The cheerful bomb created from scratch to love blowing itself up eventually gains sapience and names itself, so that it can live on it's own terms before it's cheerful death. The near-silent [autistic] shieldmaster eventually opens up and moves from one-word sentences to profound criticisms of the nature of the player character and the world they've made. The lore is fantastic, and paints a colorful and lurid world that I can't help but become invested in. It's a fascinating setting, and told with just enough info to be engaging without inundating the player with exposition. The gameplay? Basically filler. It's a method to moving the story along. That said, it is pretty fun, if sim…

"Eldritch Lands: The Witch Queen's Eternal War" is a genuinely made narrative driven Flash-tier kingdom management-meets-soldier attack/defense game. The mid tier narrative has a witch queen fighting off a "Necroshroom" necromancer and undead minions. What do you do in the game? Well, you manage your kingdom, click through poor narrative... it's a bit of resource juggling to grow/upgrade your homonculus army, but then all of that lands flat with an incredibly weak technical implementation that's on par with an Adobe Flash game. The actual combat, a 3 lane "clicker" like soldier buying mess is totally underwhelming after all that. It's just not a winner... heck, Plants vs Zombies is ancient, free, and yet has better graphics and gameplay. It's a waste of creative effort building a narrative and wrapping it around what would have been rejected as a free browser game in the 1990s... and it's not the 1990s. The technical implementation here is unfortunately woefully poor quality... genuine and interesting game concepts don't survive if the technical implementation, visuals and so on are phoned in over a weekend. PC gamers expect games that look like PC games in the 20's, not …

Score: 3/5 It isn't bad, but also not good enough to recommend. I hope the dev(s) continue to improve and make more games, as there is clearly effort and talent at play here. Strategies are simple, and require grinding very repetitive content. Not much room for creative expression or exploration/novelty, key reasons I play these kinds of games. There are a moderate amount of choices for units in combat, but most of them feel very similar and all of them require grinding to keep up with the difficulty, so experimentation will be an uphill battle. The activities between combat encounters feel unpolished/unnecessarily time-intensive. They are necessary for mechanical progression, but are pretty mind-numbing without much strategy/consequence for different choices. Artwork/style is okay. Animations are lacking. Audio/SFX are good. Writing is good, but the overall storyline and story beats are sparse. It's not enough to keep me engaged through the repetition.

Very interesting concept, was a fun diversion. I like the slot system - by having both mana and cooldowns, it pushes you into using multiple unit types instead of spamming one like in similar games I recall. I really like the characters. I like playing as a villain protagonist who's rational but someitmes cruel - a lot of the time villain protagonists can just be edgy and not compelling, but she just casually drops "yeah I killed god" and might be the indirect cause of most or all of these problems, but we're still rooting for her. I like how the units have strong personalities. Seeing that the Queen likes her so much (and their dialogues are a deeper connection than most) I used Claymore a lot despite her stats being...I want to sugar coat it but she seems pretty bad. Slow attacks, low range and little hp are a very dangerous combination, meaning she can often be killed off before doing much, but she's not slow enough that it's easy to get someone to tank for her either. The AOE would be good if she did more damage or if she could live long enough to do that damage. A few constructive criticisms: * Essence processing seems unnecessarily convoluted and repetitive. Instead …

addicting game loop, fun dialogue. clearly made with a lot of heart.

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