Tenderfoot Tactics Review for Xbox

Tenderfoot Tactics, from publisher Ice Water Games, is advertised as an open-world tactical RPG. This seems a difficult pairing at first glance, seeing how one genre is typically known for its sprawling openness, and the other for its deliberate linearity. As with any mix of disparate ideas, it’s not a question of if, but how they can be effectively combined to create an engaging experience. Tenderfoot Tactics’s unique approach to fusing these genres creates an adventure full of experimentation and replayability.

Your party is a group of goblins seeking to rid their world of an invasive fog, a mysterious force of nature that corrupts all it touches. The moment-to-moment gameplay shifts between exploring the overworld and fighting souls lost to the fog, and in some cases recruiting these foes to your cause once they’ve been saved. The game world is a vast archipelago, one with a very ethereal visual style. The camera distorts everything as you travel: proportions warp, vegetation grows and shrinks wildly, and the low-poly world at large seems to breathe as its edges fade in and out of the ever-present fog. It’s dreamlike, in some ways, with a hypnotic quality that makes the simple act of movement interesting. Which is good, because at times the world feels spread too thin. There are sparse settlements for your party to come across, but aside from the castle at its heart there is not much outside of the wisps in the fog that cause combat encounters. I appreciated the quiet of the world between fights, but at the same time it feels like something is missing here.

In combat encounters, the tactical depth of the game shines. Nothing is left to chance, but the battlefield itself is so dynamic that it keeps the purely deterministic system from feeling rigid, boring, or predictable. Natural systems, like fire and ice and terrain manipulation, all develop in real time during characters’ turns. There are a number of classes and skills with lots of space for specialization, customization, and experimentation, which feels like it supports the ethos of an open world. Also, it seems that enemies scale with your party, so you really are free to move through this world however you choose. There is much more to unpack in this area, as the game’s slow rollback of new kinds of magic and combat moves has made clear to me, but everything I’ve seen so far has been a great deal of fun and a well-crafted challenge.

Frankly, my only notable complaint about the combat is its interface and tutorials. As with many other titles with complex gameplay systems, there are a lot of moving parts and getting familiar with how the different layers interact can be a slow adjustment process. A common pitfall is incomplete or unhelpful tutorial systems, and while the offerings present here are far from the worst I’ve seen, there’s always room for improvement. The tutorial pages are short descriptions of how a variety of gameplay systems work, and they provide a basic understanding but some things, like the tick system for how time progresses throughout an encounter, are so complex that more could be said on the matter. Also, there are certain status effects and special cases in combat that seem to not have a tutorial at all, which would be appreciated. Not having them isn’t the end of the world, however; encounters can be retried with no penalty, so learning through trial and error feels like a natural part of the experience.

Tenderfoot Tactics is an odd experience. It’s a barren world, haunted by an enigmatic mist. The atmosphere is calm, yet otherworldly, and the battles are a puzzling treat. In spite of its simpler-than-most visuals and minimal story, there’s a lot going on under that surface. I can’t wait to sink my teeth in further.

Score: 8/10

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Related: Reviews by John D’Auria

John D'Auria

Video games are my personal favorite art medium by far. I love how many ways an interactive story can be told, and I can't stop myself from getting hooked on a good puzzle. I'm a student majoring in game design and music, so I hope to make creative work a part of my life going forward.

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