There rarely are games where you control obviously French Canadian lumberjacks fighting werewolves, especially with tower defence elements thrown in there for good measure. Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves has a neat concept and some interesting elements surrounding the core gameplay, but the act of actually playing it feels clunky and not very fun, so I couldn’t get very far into it.
The skill system is fairly neat, passive bonuses to different aspects of your character, traps and miscellaneous things - like the cash you make from chopping lumber - and I also liked that you could buy better gear - axes and guns - and bullets, as you went through the game. As the days went by, so did the complexity of the game - and I wasn’t quite ready, I feel like more and more things were pushed onto me faster than I could handle the ones I already had.
Each night you have to protect buildings from waves of enemies using traps and your character. I feel like the game ramps up quite fast the number of buildings you have to defend at once, and while the number of enemies is always small, your character isn’t very mobile and the traps either cost money, don’t work against certain types of enemies, or need you to interact with them. I feel that this game should’ve gone farther into the tower defence side or into the third person action game side, because I didn’t feel like I had good options to protect my buildings in the tower defence phase and couldn’t properly manage my character in the action phase.
Some clunkiness with certain systems - like you can see in the above screenshot where I was clearly aiming at one net but shot the other - had me restart the same levels a couple of times. Trying to kill a werewolf without a net trap too way too much time rolling around, clumsily avoiding claw swipes and the like, so I just restarted. It’s of course, not all bad, I liked the way you reload your gun, or the system where you see how likely enemies are to attack you, they are neat things, I just wish the core game handled better and the tower defence parts were more straightforward.