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(Guild Application, Subject: My GOTY 2024)
Hello and welcome! This article is part of a bigger ongoing project organized by Yousef, their idea was to gather writers through the forums to write and discuss their Game of the Year pick for 2024. So please, after reading this article, may I ask you, the reader, to give the other articles in the project a read, I’m sure my peers have put in just as much, if not more, work and passion into this project. With that out of the way, onto the article!
My GOTY for 2024 was a game that did appear on the TGA, but won nothing, hell it only had a single nomination on the “Best strategy game” section. I’m of course talking about Vanillaware’s newest release, Unicorn Overlord.
What can be said about this VERY honorable mention of the TGA, this game lost to Frostpunk 2 on its nomination, now I won’t judge a game that I haven’t played and for the ones reading this that did play it, can hopefully vouch for the game’s quality as a worthy winner for the category. But allow me then to tell you why this relatively small game (small compared to the broader games industry) is my GOTY for this year. Mind you, this is not a full-scale review, only an overview of an overlooked release that deserved more love than it received during this year, so without further ado, let me explain why Unicorn Overlord is my GOTY of 2024.
The game is a strategy game with light elements of RTS, that being all the actions take place while the game is still running, only being able to pause to choose your characters actions before unpausing to allow the game to run again. It offers a unique approach for strategy, since each mission has an enemy base and a player base, it becomes a race to see who conquers who first, spreading your units through the map to cover as much ground while taking minor structures placed in the map, such as small villages, reinforced bridges, small stone bastions and many other structures that gives you bonuses if a unit resides in there, either giving them more defense or a strategic position, like in the case of bridges making it into an enemy choke point.
Unit deployment can be done at the player base or at any other location that allows deployment, so if you wish to store your best units only later for the fight, then it’s recommended to find the nearest point of deployment adjacent to the enemy base.
And since we were talking about units, let me talk about them! The units of this game work very much like Tactics Ogre, where each unit is more like a company, that is units are composed of groups of different characters that fit different roles in the company, giving the player many options for gameplay and unit customization.
During unit building you should be very mindful of your character placement, since putting the characters on the back or front row can change their behavior in battle, and also be mindful of your enemy’s position since a front lancer can stab your front AND back characters since, you know, lances are pretty good at piercing things, so if an enemy infantry has lancer on their front row, maybe it’s best not to put anyone behind your Tank character, or else they’ll get the sting of the lance the Tank tried to protect them from.
The game does offer many story related characters that join the MC and his cause, and each character brings along a different class that gets unlocked so later if you so wish you can train faceless soldiers that same class and make more characters of that class to organize them on your different units, allowing you to mold your army to your desire.
Another point I wanted to touch based on character units is that many units break the stereotypical mold of their archetypes, like the Rogue class, in many other games the Rogue would be classified as a sneaky backstabber that swiftly disposed of enemy units from behind, in this game they are swift but are not the attacker, rather they function more like a evasion tank, yes you read it right, the swift and nimble Rogue acts like a tank thanks to its ability to dodge attacks, effectively making them untouchable… as long as they have passive skill actions.
And speaking of skills, every battle in this game is automated, meaning battles are less about spur of the moment decision making, and rather a delicate construction of units designed to play into each other’s strengths and covering their weakness. The battles still play out in “turn base” where the unit with the highest speed strikes first, but both still strike during contact, but the difference previously mentioned is that once a battle starts the units all do their thing automatically, meaning you must set their skills before each mission begins, since you can’t change their skill on the fly.
Each character has an “Active Skill” and a “Passive Skill” and each respective skill consumes a different skill point, so in combat all units, both player and enemy units, have a set “Action” and “Passive” point numbers that can increase with character equipment, which sadly is a point of contingency for the fact that the better units will be the ones that expand their number of moves they can make for battle, meaning that the equipment that give more movements per turn are objectively better than the ones that give different effects for the characters or plain stat boosts, but I would argue that you can play around a unit that doesn’t use that many moves but disposes of the enemies swiftly, but I digress.
Going back to the skills that each character has, many of the action skills are, well, “attack the enemy”, simple stuff, no? Well many of the Action Skills can be changed depending of the character class or the weapon they are using, so our aforementioned Rogue can have a simple dagger slash, or if they are equipped with a poison dagger, an attack that debilitates the enemy unit and leaves them poisoned, and while we are still talking about our elusive Rogue it’s worth mentioning his status as a “Tank” is thanks to their passive skill “Dodge” that makes them… Dodge the enemy attack, shocking I know, but you should be wary of this skill because each dodge uses a Passive Point, so if you run out of Passive Points during an onslaught of enemy attacks, then yeah they’re dead meat.
(End of Guild Application Draft)
Hello and welcome! This article is part of a bigger ongoing project organized by Yousef, their idea was to gather writers through the forums to write and discuss their Game of the Year pick for 2024. So please, after reading this article, may I ask you, the reader, to give the other articles in the project a read, I’m sure my peers have put in just as much, if not more, work and passion into this project. With that out of the way, onto the article!
My GOTY for 2024 was a game that did appear on the TGA, but won nothing, hell it only had a single nomination on the “Best strategy game” section. I’m of course talking about Vanillaware’s newest release, Unicorn Overlord.
What can be said about this VERY honorable mention of the TGA, this game lost to Frostpunk 2 on its nomination, now I won’t judge a game that I haven’t played and for the ones reading this that did play it, can hopefully vouch for the game’s quality as a worthy winner for the category. But allow me then to tell you why this relatively small game (small compared to the broader games industry) is my GOTY for this year. Mind you, this is not a full-scale review, only an overview of an overlooked release that deserved more love than it received during this year, so without further ado, let me explain why Unicorn Overlord is my GOTY of 2024.
The game is a strategy game with light elements of RTS, that being all the actions take place while the game is still running, only being able to pause to choose your characters actions before unpausing to allow the game to run again. It offers a unique approach for strategy, since each mission has an enemy base and a player base, it becomes a race to see who conquers who first, spreading your units through the map to cover as much ground while taking minor structures placed in the map, such as small villages, reinforced bridges, small stone bastions and many other structures that gives you bonuses if a unit resides in there, either giving them more defense or a strategic position, like in the case of bridges making it into an enemy choke point.
Unit deployment can be done at the player base or at any other location that allows deployment, so if you wish to store your best units only later for the fight, then it’s recommended to find the nearest point of deployment adjacent to the enemy base.
And since we were talking about units, let me talk about them! The units of this game work very much like Tactics Ogre, where each unit is more like a company, that is units are composed of groups of different characters that fit different roles in the company, giving the player many options for gameplay and unit customization.
During unit building you should be very mindful of your character placement, since putting the characters on the back or front row can change their behavior in battle, and also be mindful of your enemy’s position since a front lancer can stab your front AND back characters since, you know, lances are pretty good at piercing things, so if an enemy infantry has lancer on their front row, maybe it’s best not to put anyone behind your Tank character, or else they’ll get the sting of the lance the Tank tried to protect them from.
The game does offer many story related characters that join the MC and his cause, and each character brings along a different class that gets unlocked so later if you so wish you can train faceless soldiers that same class and make more characters of that class to organize them on your different units, allowing you to mold your army to your desire.
Another point I wanted to touch based on character units is that many units break the stereotypical mold of their archetypes, like the Rogue class, in many other games the Rogue would be classified as a sneaky backstabber that swiftly disposed of enemy units from behind, in this game they are swift but are not the attacker, rather they function more like a evasion tank, yes you read it right, the swift and nimble Rogue acts like a tank thanks to its ability to dodge attacks, effectively making them untouchable… as long as they have passive skill actions.
And speaking of skills, every battle in this game is automated, meaning battles are less about spur of the moment decision making, and rather a delicate construction of units designed to play into each other’s strengths and covering their weakness. The battles still play out in “turn base” where the unit with the highest speed strikes first, but both still strike during contact, but the difference previously mentioned is that once a battle starts the units all do their thing automatically, meaning you must set their skills before each mission begins, since you can’t change their skill on the fly.
Each character has an “Active Skill” and a “Passive Skill” and each respective skill consumes a different skill point, so in combat all units, both player and enemy units, have a set “Action” and “Passive” point numbers that can increase with character equipment, which sadly is a point of contingency for the fact that the better units will be the ones that expand their number of moves they can make for battle, meaning that the equipment that give more movements per turn are objectively better than the ones that give different effects for the characters or plain stat boosts, but I would argue that you can play around a unit that doesn’t use that many moves but disposes of the enemies swiftly, but I digress.
Going back to the skills that each character has, many of the action skills are, well, “attack the enemy”, simple stuff, no? Well many of the Action Skills can be changed depending of the character class or the weapon they are using, so our aforementioned Rogue can have a simple dagger slash, or if they are equipped with a poison dagger, an attack that debilitates the enemy unit and leaves them poisoned, and while we are still talking about our elusive Rogue it’s worth mentioning his status as a “Tank” is thanks to their passive skill “Dodge” that makes them… Dodge the enemy attack, shocking I know, but you should be wary of this skill because each dodge uses a Passive Point, so if you run out of Passive Points during an onslaught of enemy attacks, then yeah they’re dead meat.
(End of Guild Application Draft)
