Battle Chasers Nightwar - More Like Nightsnore

BATTLE CHASERS: NIGHTWAR

Back in the mid-90s a comic by Joe Madureira called Battle Chasers came out and I thought it was awesome! The art was rad, the arcanopunk setting was cool and the story was entertaining. Well it got cancelled after 9 issues (the finale, issue 10, never came out).

When back in 2015 (ish?) there was a kickstarter for a video game in the Battle Chasers world with all the characters from the original story I was jones'd! The kickstarter was a success, development went ahead and the wait began. (I should not that I did not back the kickstarter.) Released in late 2017, I didn't pick it up till a 50% off sale, and I am glad for that.

Battle Chasers Nightwar is an RPG with turn based combat, crafting, dungeons, an overworld map with encounters and a lot more of the trappings that the genre has had over the years, but gears more towards the old style, for better or worse. A lot of these systems are slow, cumbersome or just plain unnecessary. To start I was very pleased, the art style was spot on, the turn based combat had some interesting hooks and the story had a slam-bang start. The problem is that as the game went on so much of it is piled on for no reason and the good stuff is left fallow.

The combat has a number of interesting systems, making a variety of situational specific attacks or buff/debuff moves, building up a meter that allows the real powerful actions to come into play. Unfortunately most of the enemies you fight don't require any tactical thinking of that type - just try and deal as much damage as possible as fast as possible because you are going to have to fight the same enemies over and over and most are not that interesting and all of them have far to many hit points for style of encounter. And the attack animations, while very pretty and well animated are slow and there are all sorts of pauses between actions and it just take far to long and the rewards are minimal. The boss fights step up what the game asks of you but again, after you have seen what the boss has to offer its just a matter of choosing the right actions over and over till they are defeated. Maybe I have just grown tired of turn based RPG combat but I found it all too slow and repetitive and when suddenly faced with having to grind up a level or two because the enemies in the next area are higher up my shoulders slump in defeat.

But what about the story? Well it starts out strong and drops you right into the mix at the beginning, giving the game lots to work with. Unfortunately it doles it out with a tiny spoon over huge spans of time. So much of the world is stuck into plain pages of text found throughout dungeon. This is a video game - show and tell me - don't make me read simple prose to fill in the world. after From my understanding the game is about 40ish hours long and after my 8 hours of play the story has progressed almost nowt. Maybe it get better after 10 or 15 hours? Maybe it just has a rough start? I honestly just don't have enough invested mentally to find out.

Battle Chasers Nightwar isn't a bad game, its mostly just "OK". It looks really nice, both in the comic art style of the story and overworld and in the more traditional isometric dungeons and combat splash screens but it's not enough. The drawn out combat, the slow story, the tacked on crafting (there was no reason for it, it adds nothing but a time sink - even though they did come up with some interesting twists to the standard rpg crafting) all just meant I was long bored with it before any of it could pay off. And I like a lot long games, but you have to keep me interested and entertained and Nightwar couldn't do that.