Month: January 2025

In Tastee: Lethal Tactics, your plan is more important than the action that follows. It’s a game of bets and bluffs, and if you telegraph your next move, you’ll likely lose. Tastee doesn’t always communicate its ideas effectively, and there are frustrating barriers to hurdle, but there’s a tense, layered, turn-based strategy game waiting on the other side.

It all revolves around simultaneous turn-based combat in two phases. In the planning stage, you direct the stance, movement, vision cones, and attacks of four individual mercenaries fighting your opponents. In the action phase, you watch your plan unfold–all while the enemy does the same.

This forces you to think on several levels as you extract briefcases of money, defend control points, and eliminate enemy soldiers from an overhead view. You not only have to plan out your own attacks–you also need to consider the route your opponent might have in mind. So while your sniper may have one doorway covered, and your grenadier is ready to move around the corner of that building to get in position, this could all fall apart in the action phase if your opponent anticipated it. The resultin…

Ink as a weapon. Only through divine intervention could a tool for creative expression be used in acts of aggression. In Sumioni: Demon Arts–through the blessing of the gods–you paint destruction with the flick of your fingertips. Fire erupts and allies are summoned as you call forth the power of a higher being. And you feel this power coursing through you. Even the act of building platforms with the swipe of a finger creates a feeling that you have strong friends in high places.

Too bad it doesn’t last.