Reconquista (2024)

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4.5/10 Board game with card deck building TLDR: the game is intriguing. Yet without an interactive tutorial you're left with myriads of overwhelming cryptic tooltips. Obviously, it's a product of love made by a few nerds for themselves. But it's not accessible for anyone else. Neutral vote Good: + free + there seems to be a hugely complex battle system here, with many stats, dice rolls, faction effects etc So-so: +/- graphics look pretty dull, as if this were a port of a board game (maybe it is?). Battles seem to use pencil-drawn soldiers which are animated - yet most of the time you see them at such small scale that they are reduced to just a few pixels (and I'm playing on a 4x monitor!). Battles are essentially 2 thin threads on a huge empty screen. If armies are long lines for historical reasons, maybe they should be horizontal, not vertical? Your army should then be at the bottom +/- auto-battles feel like a lost opportunity. After all, if battles happen on a turn-based basis, why not give the player control over the units? Maybe not the individual soldiers (since there are so many) but units of them, like in Rome Total War and other Total-War-like games, yet in turn-based m…

"Reconquista" is a boardgame for PC (this is a bad idea of course, taking the worst parts of a board game instead of using the more elegant interfaces a PC has to offer) set in the Spanish Reconquista period. Roll dice, move armies... the problem is this looks worse than a boardgame would (even though it's on PC where the developer could have, but chose not to, produce graphics like Total War: Medieval). I mean... games don't exist in a vacuum... did the developer not know that Total War: Medieval exists? Or they did, but thought what gamers wanted was Total War: Medieval, but worse in every respect? I guess that's academic... what matters is that this failed badly on Steam Direct for obvious reasons. So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs…