Massive Chalice

I can choose who to marry to who in order to know exactly what Class their offspring will be. I can choose who to shackle to breeding or research or novice training for the rest of their lives. I can choose whose life to gamble with. I can't change anyone's name or appearance. I can't change any family's banner. I can't change the canned line printed on the screen when they score a kill. I can't find anything that would make them, or Massive Chalice, feel like mine. I wonder why that is. There are many good things within Massive Chalice, but they're frustratingly kept at arm's length from me.

In Massive Chalice your goal is simple: defend your kingdom for 300 years. Accomplishing this — by building castles, arranging marriages between royal families, and fighting the mysterious “Cadence” in turn-based combat — can be fairly complicated. Massive Chalice builds on the genre recently re-popularized with games like XCOM by adjusting a few dials, mixing in a little Game of Thrones, and injecting Double Fine’s signature quirkiness.

The tactical gameplay is satisfying, but the game could do better if it made use of cover. Standing behind objects can block line of sight or impede movement, but cover does not actually mitigate damage. In fact, your archers have to step out from behind a tree in order to see and fire at something down the line.

Massive Chalice is lots of fun and highly addictive. Yes a lot of the best things about it come from it being highly influenced by XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but it not only captures a lot of the spirit of our Game of the Year 2012 but Double Fine also manages to provide their own unique spin on it with the Game of Thrones-style setup. Yes it has a few minor problems, most notably not providing a reason to care for any of the people under your command and some fairly unimaginative combat area desig...

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In Massive Chalice, it’s not just random whether your hero will hit or miss, but whether your hero will die of old age or whether they’ll be born at all. As much as I enjoyed its aggressive brand of tactical combat and interesting enemy types, there are too many unpredictable variables outside your control, and too much happening to too many quickly aging, mortal characters for this tactical game to feel like decisions matter.