In recent years the gaming industry has changed considerably, becoming, compared to the beginning, much more similar to all other entertainment industries. On the one hand there are the mainstream productions: solid, anchored to very high product standards, but also aseptic and detached in their being intimately serial and designed for a very
large number of people, which cancels any possibility of taking any risk; on the other, there is the independent scene which, despite the fact that it is also now closing in gender enclosures, is the only one that tries to really experiment, even when it relies on
apparently more traditional products. Obviously in the pile we do not consider all those junk video games that now crowd digital stores and make history to itself.
Tooth and Tail by Pocketwatch Games, the study of the eccentric stealth Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, is describable as a strategic in real time, despite trying to rework the genre to make it faster, diluting as much as possible all the mechanics that characterize it . It tells of mice in revolt for food that fight each other according to a logic of rich against the poor, or better yet powerful against the people, not without some irony and baseness in the representation.
All this translates into a single player campaign in which four factions descend on the battlefield for very different reasons: who for idealism, who to try to survive and who wants to restore order while maintaining absolute power. We immediately point out a point:during the campaign you can not choose which faction to use, but you have to control them all, following a precise narrative thread.
Of course, each faction has its missions and its shelter, its motivations and its objectives, but to follow the story you have to play with everyone. At most, you can repeat missions already played to try to improve the result (each mission has a basic objective to be achieved and a
secondary completely optional, often very difficult). In multiplayer, local or online that is (you can play together with a friend with the split screen), there is obviously this obligation and you can limit yourself to select the preferred faction, equipping it with troops that best suit us.
REVOLUTIONARY SORCERIES
The mechanics of Tooth and Tail are very simple to describe: each faction has its own commander, who has the task of finding food for the troops and moving them on the battlefield … literally.
Unlike normal strategic real-time, in the title of Pocketwatch Games you do not select units with the mouse, then directing them with a click, but you directly control the commander who calls them to collect.What do you mean? Easy: bring the commander in a certain area, then press the call button to move the army in that direction. If you want you can move one type of unit at a time, after having selected the icon at the bottom of the screen; useful option if you
want to bring a more targeted attack (for example to buildings, or a specific kind of units), or you can follow the movements by holding down the call button (useful for raids). The collection of resources to generate and support the army is equally simple, both conceptually and in practice.
In many maps there are mills that, once conquered or occupied, unlock eight boxes that can be processed by peasant pigs, which can be purchased in turn by spending food.Each box worked in more speed the production of food, giving us resources to build the dens of the units,
from which our army is generated (each lair has a maximum number of generable troops, so we must always build more than one). Wanting the mills can be defended by building turrets of various kinds or placing barbed wire to slow down the attackers.
