IMMORTAL REALMS VAMPIRE WARS PREVIEW FULL

However, there are numerous buildings and other natural obstacles that prevent movement through certain grid spaces, which creates bottlenecks for your army more often than not. The battle grids themselves are large enough to cope with your armies, which are capped at a maximum of eight units. Generally, it works well, making battles feel strategic, making victory all the sweeter.

These could further buff your army or harm your opponents and add an additional tactical layer to proceedings. If your army is led by a Lord, they have additional spells they can cast using mana at any point when your army could make a move. You can see your movement options ahead of time as well as the damage you will do and incur during each potential clash between units. Ranged units, others with unique abilities and various landmarks on the battlefield providing boons, help to keep the battles fresh for the most part. Battles are turn-based, with damage being dealt to a chosen adjacent unit, with most units able to deal smaller counter-attack damage back as well. Separate to the management side are the battles themselves. I’m now on a mission where you can’t recruit, but you can. I randomly tried using one after many turns of discarding them and bizarrely, the game let me, leaving me gobsmacked. I was confused because my card hand was being filled up with cards that made recruitment cheaper, which felt odd given I couldn’t recruit.

You’re now relying on your tactical nouse in battle or a very expensive random card that gives you two base units when certain conditions are met. Death is permanent in battle, so you need to ensure you don’t lose units. The first mission, for example, restricts your ability to recruit new units for your army. Some of the rules feel a little confusing too. The problem is that en route to that feeling you’ll find yourself in earlier missions which take too long and have unbalanced difficulty, making them feel like a slog to get through before you unlock the true experience. You’ll find yourself having to juggle more ideas and take more decisions as you go, while wrestling against enemy forces that become clearly more aggressive in their pursuit of you. As you make your way through the campaigns, these restrictions tend to ease, opening up the experience, and certainly making the beginning of each mission feel less repetitive. The one thing this decision does create is a sense of progression. However, it did feel a little odd having to disregard things I’d been taught minutes before. Throughout the campaign, missions have their own specific rules which restrict what you can do, often in the interest of balance and the story it is trying to tell. And then, bizarrely, Immortal Realms mixes up the rulebook and abandons a few of the mechanics it has literally just laid out in its tutorial. But you have to play through each in order, so only a single first mission from the initial Dracul clan is available. It consists of three separate faction campaigns, each with four missions to play through to appreciate their separate stories. You’ll finish it getting a sense of what you’ll need to do in the main game even if your head is still whirring trying to remember how some of the interlocking pieces fit together.Īnd so into the campaign you go. The number of mechanics you are introduced to is a little overwhelming, but they each make sense in isolation when explained and executed through the tutorial. It’s a fairly robust tutorial that gradually introduces its many different facets, from the intricacies of the overworld map, to the various considerations during its separate grid-based battles. Some will enjoy it, others will tire of it quickly, and some, like me, will flit between those two feelings whilst playing through its fairly meaty content.įor a game such as Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars, playing through the tutorial is highly recommended, even for strategy and empire management aficionados. It’s a melange of themes that certainly gives it a unique feel.

IMMORTAL REALMS VAMPIRE WARS PREVIEW FULL

All this is based in a world full of vampires, werewolves, and giant bats looking to take down their human hunters. Oh and it asks you to manage resources, has RPG elements, and also some trading-card mechanics thrown in as well. It’s an empire management simulation that also has turn-based, top-down grid-based battling, like a fantasy-based XCOM game. Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars is a hard game to pin down, to categorise, and compare to.

Immortal realms vampire wars preview