TASTEE: Lethal Tactics profoundly disappointed me. From strange technical issues to an overly complicated introduction, what really did me in was the core gameplay that absolutely made no sense to me. In this strategy game, you move units around while planning your actions in order to complete missions and ‘play’ your turns at your own pace. In theory, this is really cool - and the game’s tutorial made the whole process seem really interesting with the many ways you could watch turns play out before picking the right one. In practice, the actual game uses fog of war in a very aggressive way that turns any odds of having fun into a trial-and-error slog.
The tutorial starts simple and clear enough; You select your units and give them orders for a turn. These orders range from moving, pointing in specific directions, shooting, using special abilities, running and ducking. You can preview your turn and tweak your actions as many time as you’d like and when you ‘commit’ them, the real turn happens. The tutorial gave pretty good instructions of how to use these mechanics to defeat enemies located in different scenarios and I thought this game could be interesting.
Then I got thrown into the main game UI, which is a mess full of menus and boxes like if it was a HUB for something more; I just wanted to play the game’s story, which is almost the smallest thing on-screen. You can select a team from four classes for each mission, with more characters becoming available as you go through the story. The first mission seemed simple enough; Gather some money and escape. The map had a few bonus objectives, which all looked like possible things to do, such as having no casualties and completing the map under a certain number of turns.
Then the game broke. On a technical level I had to kill it and restart it multiple times to actually play it. It would just prevent me from selecting any action or character and I almost thought I would quit then and there, but after restarting it a few times, I could actually play and the experience wasn’t great. The fact that the tutorial shows you where the enemies are and gives you perfect information at all times is a little misleading because during the actual game you don’t know where anyone is and your turn ‘previews’ do not take into account actions from enemies you aren’t actively looking at. My team got wiped out incredibly quickly.
The game’s tutorial didn’t prepare me for turn ‘previews’ that actually didn’t preview anything at all. Walking in certain directions to try and catch bad guys before they could shoot me just made other foes shoot at me beforehand, enemies that spawn away from my vision and just destroy me from positions unknown…
I couldn’t get past that. I really wonder how the tutorial would’ve went if they had been honest about how the game is actually played. Something like “Take a few turns to learn where the enemies are, mark them on a mental map, then restart the mission and win only because of your prior knowledge of the puzzle?” Something of the sort. If there was a trick of the game that I missed, it wasn’t for lack of looking around and trying to grasp the whole thing, I swear.
