Here comes another autobattler for the pile! Only this time we’ve got deckbuilding and balance system in place that enables the meta to constantly adjust without becoming entirely stale and annoying. As a gamer who is regularly annoyed with overpowered skills and builds, I say any sort of speed towards improving a game’s balance through nerfs and buffs is extremely interesting! That aspect of Flawed Tactics is what really caught my attention, so I was happy to grab an early look at the game courtesy of studio Flawed Games.
Flawed Tactics offers a blend of genres from autobattlers to tactics. I’ve played a good number of autobattlers recently. I wasn’t particularly struck by the autobattler sales pitch at first, but slowly I’m beginning to come around to them. Now, with tactics games, it’s a totally different story. I’ve been a fan of tactics games since the original Final Fantasy Tactics was released on the PlayStation. It certainly wasn’t the first of its kin, but it was a stand-out game. Plus you can unlock Cloud Strife. I mean, how much more amazing does it get?
Flawed Tactics is a bit of a blend of the two game types, but I’d say it dips only a toe in the waters of tactics gameplay. It’s really much more of an autobattler with deckbuilding aspects. To me, a tactics game really needs to have bonuses due to positioning and even elevation changes. This is more like a board game grid for minions to move about in. And speaking of minions, the minion designs are highly Pokemon inspired! But I’ll get into that more later.
Matches are 1v1 and involve choosing minions to deploy and spells to cast each round then hoping that your choices turn out better than your opponent’s. As it’s an autobattler, once you commit to the round, it’s all out of your hands and down to the fate of the NPCs. Win or lose, you’ll earn 10 gold to spend on evolving or adding new minions to the board and 10 gems to purchase new cards to add to your hand. Rinse and repeat, gradually growing in strength due to the minions and cards you’ve been carrying through the rounds.
The number of rounds you need to win each match depends on the tier you’re playing in. In my tier, it meant that after winning seven rounds or losing three, the run is over, and you’re scored to earn some amount of credits for a portfolio that can be “invested” in. You’ll also unlock a couple of new minions and spells. There’s not an unlimited amount of cards to unlock (only 31 minions and 31 spells), but it does feel pretty varied, at least after a week of playing.
The balancing system is extremely interesting and is the crux of how the meta in Flaw Tactics works. Essentially, the game constantly keeps track as players are buying (playing them with the gold and gems in a run) to use minions and spells. This means that if a certain minion is being played a lot, then its cost to buy and play it in a match will go up. Suddenly that minion that was so cheap and easy to play is now becoming costly and might not be the best one to place on the board anymore. In other words, the game self balances. It seems so obvious that I’m upset I hadn’t thought of it!
There are two main parts to your build: minions and spells. While you’re on the lobby screen, you can browse through and select six types of minions and eight spells to equip and have available during the run.
As in many autobattlers, players queue up to play against other players’ setups. That is, you aren’t actually PvPing live against another person in real-time but are instead playing against their deck/hand/setup (whatever you want to call it) from that same round. In Flawed Tactics, that means you can take your time and set up your next round in peace. According to the lobby page, the developers are working on a live mode, but as of this writing it isn’t available yet.
So, what are you doing each round? As in Down with the Ship or Backpack Battles, you’re preparing for the next round by choosing which minions will be placed on the board and which spells you’re going to use – which is the deck of cards you’ve chosen. So rather than buying from a random market, you’ll buy from the spell cards you chose to bring into the match.
When you first load up the game, there isn’t a whole lot of information to go through other than a handful of pop-ups that explain the basic features. So the tutorial is really just a series of dialogs that appear and direct to you towards playing a few cards and minions in this first run. It’s snappy and easy to follow and gets you right into the game quickly. The game tries to explain the stock market-esque balancing feature for how cards change in value, but when you’re first starting out, all of that may as well be an alien language. Luckily, it really is simple enough to understand after a couple of matches.
The only part of the meta’s balancing game I haven’t fully grasped is the point of the credits and portfolio value. I mentioned above that you earn credits from completing matches, but from what I can see the only thing those are for is playing a pseudo-stock market by guessing whether you think a card will increase in value or decrease over the next 24-hours. If you’re correct and it goes up in value, I suppose you earn more credits than you spent, but again, those credits don’t do anything other than reinvest. Perhaps there’s a future feature that I just can’t see from here.
It’s also important I point out that all this investing, credits, and portfolio talk is all in-game currency. I’m not talking about any real money here, so rest assured on that. And while my first gut instinct when I see a feature like this is to be concerned that it’s a rug-pulling cryptocurrency scam, all of my research online hasn’t pulled up anything of the sort. So as far as I can tell, we’re clean on this one. There aren’t even any microtransactions yet to speak of. Weird, I know.
And before we wrap this one up, I’ve got to mention that enjoyed the minion and spell designs. They are certainly Pokemon-inspired. From the way a new card is unlocked after a match (being a throwback to the cartoon where you’d guess which Pokemon it was) to the meme-style spells, I was really into it.
Overall, I have been bowled over by how much I actually enjoyed playing Flawed Tactics. It really all plays so simply and makes so much sense. I even played a few rounds of it for my friends to see if I could get them to download too! It’s brand-new, costs less than an avocado toast, and is available on Steam today. Go check it out!
