INTRO:
The Alien movie and sci-fi novels like Armor and Starship Troopers generated some interest in stories about a squad of heavily armed and sci-fi soldiers trudging through narrow corridors, fighting against utterly incomprehensible aliens that can turn them to minced meat and mangled scrap despite their seeming technological superiority.
Games Workshop’s Space Hulk board game is the most recognizable rendition of this setting, but its transition to the computer platform had been particularly spotty. Some attempts cleave too closely to the use of dice (namely the turn-based Space Hulk games), whereas some others leaned too heavily on graphical presentation at the expense of decently sophisticated gameplay (namely the real-time Space Hulk games).
There had been attempts by fans of Space Hulk-like gameplay at having their own takes on the genre. Games Workshop’s litigiousness ultimately led them to develop their own narrative settings to avoid legal issues.
Templar Battleforce is one such attempt by the Trese Brothers, who are the creators of the Star Traders RPG. (As a side note, there are a lot of IPs with “Star Trader” in their names; researching the history of the Trese Brothers’ IP can be a bother.)
Templar Battleforce itself is set in the Star Traders RPG fictional universe, which in turn was inspired by Games Workshops’ seminal Rogue Trader RPG. However, instead of being about the boldly adventurous but unwisely avaricious Star Traders, Templar Battleforce focuses on the militant segment of Zendu Society.
(This can seem a lot to take in, but the “Premise” section is there for the matter of explanation of the narrative.)
The Trese Brothers insist on the inclusion of luck rolls in the gameplay of their games, but the gameplay of Templar Battleforce does have elements that reward forward-thinking and planning.
PREMISE:
The progression of the campaign mode provides gradual exposition on the backstory, but the game does begin with an info-dump that can seem on the verge of being too much. Fortunately, it shifts its focus quickly on the titular Templars.
Anyway, as had been mentioned earlier, the game is set in the Star Traders RPG universe. Humanity has spread to the stars, and found that they are not alone. Unfortunately, most contact with aliens have been disastrous. They are either completely hostile to anything that is not them, or they are indifferent isolationists. Any attempt at communication has resulted in bloodshed, if there was any response from them at all.
Still, humanity prospered – or seemed to – thanks to discoveries of things among the stars. Unfortunately, some of these “discoveries” turned out to be bait set by far more advanced ‘civilizations’, who see humans as little more than resources to be used for their own inexplicable ends. The Narvidians are one such ‘civilization’, and their insidious plans for humans as a species were only discovered just before total subjugation has occurred.
A bloody war for freedom ensued, but humanity was clearly overmatched. Fortunately, the Narvidians war and scheme against each other too; this gave humanity a chance to escape to another region of space. The vanguard and rearguard for this “Exodus” are none other than the titular Templars, the militant arm of the Zendu sub-species of humanity.
ZENDU:
Some of the gameplay elements utilize the deus ex machina traits of the Zendu, so their backstory has to be briefly described for this review to make any sense.
As a short description, the Zendu are humans with inherited memories, thanks (or no thanks) to the peculiar ecologies of their homeworlds. Consequently, their professions are passed down from parent to child, effectively creating a caste system. Incidentally, the Templars are the militant caste, and among the Templars, there are the Knights, who specialize in the use of Leviathan suits.
Any Zendu can recall his/her inherited memories with meditation and conscious effort. Gameplay-wise, this means that the player can have the abilities of the Knights re-specified in between missions, with no consequences or price to be paid whatsoever.
ZENDU TEMPLAR KNIGHTS - OVERVIEW:
The player characters are the aforementioned Templar Knights of the Zendu. For the sake of brevity, they will be referred to as “Knights”. Functionally, they operate as elite heavy infantry; followers of Warhammer 40K would be all too familiar with this. Battles that are too dangerous for humans that cannot and/or do not know how to operate powered suits are the forte of the Knights. Also, thanks to their inherited memories of warfare, the Knights are practically fearless, so there is no morale or bravery system whatsoever.
This means that the player would be controlling a bunch of unbreakable soldiers in mechanized suits that are wielding huge weapons. That is, of course, also typical Space Hulk fare.
SOME MORE PREMISE:
The game starts with a particular Templar force’s efforts at escorting a fleet of settler transports (called “colony hives” in-universe). As to be expected, things turn bad, so the tutorial missions are about boarding an alien ship and bringing the fight to them.
Later, there would be plot twists that have the player fighting not just (increasingly nastier) alien forces, but traitorous humans and eventually the inhumanly powerful mastermind behind the plot to decimate humanity’s new home sector.
LEVIATHAN SUIT:
The Leviathan suit is the main equipment of the Templar Knights. It has a glorious but tragic origin of being a weaponized industrial tool. Only the Knight caste knows how to use them, since the manuals for their operation have long been lost and no Zendu is able to teach others what they know practically by instinct. However, although the Knights and the Templars in general may know how to use them, working out their kinks is not something that they have inherited.
Gameplay-wise, this means that the Leviathans have drawbacks that the player has to deal with, lest his/her soldiers are overwhelmed by the always numerically superior enemy.
HITPOINTS:
The Leviathan suits are powerful and durable, but their users are ultimately all too mortally human. Hitpoints (HPs) are, of course, the measurement of the Knights’ ability to withstand injury before they die from the wounds that their suits could not prevent.
HPs can be improved by increasing the Fortitude statistic of the Knights or through the equipping of certain gear pieces. Veterans of min-maxing gear in RPGs would find this quite familiar.
MOVEMENT POINTS:
Templar Battleforce has turn-based gameplay and makes use of grid-based maps. Hence, there is the system of Movement Points (MPs), which determine how far a character can move during his/her/its turn. By default, all Leviathan suits have 6 MPs, which can be modified with gear and some abilities. The enemies of the Knights have more variation in their MP counts. In the case of the Knights, MPs are used as a factor in heat management, which will be described shortly.
HEAT & OVERHEATING:
From the first few missions, the observant player would realize that there is very little that can stop a Templar Knight in a Leviathan suit. However, the Leviathan suits are powered machines, and all powered machines produce heat; a human in a powered machine would be obviously exposed to this heat.
In terms of gameplay, just about anything that a Leviathan does generates heat. Moving about, in particular, generates the most heat, and moving about is something that any Knight would be doing a lot of. Shooting and fighting, of course, also generate heat. Moving across fires also increases heat.
Every Leviathan has a heat threshold. Once this threshold is reached and surpassed, the Knight begins to take HP damage; this is the ‘overheated’ state. Certain abilities, such as Scanning, are also disabled. The Leviathan’s other functions, especially its mobility, is unimpeded. Higher heat leads to worse HP loss, but the Knight’s Willpower rating does reduce the damage.
However, if the heat gauge goes beyond 200% of the threshold, the Leviathan shuts down and will not be operable until the heat goes below 200%. This effectively causes the Knight to lose his/her turn, which is generally undesirable.
HEAT MANAGEMENT:
Any Leviathan loses some heat every turn; this base amount is decided by the difficulty setting. At the highest difficulty setting, heat is more than guaranteed to accumulate to dangerous levels.
The main way to lose heat is to have a Leviathan not move at all. This is not always desirable, especially in missions in which the Knights must move from one location to another. Fortunately, there are certain abilities unique to certain Knight classes that can be used to lose heat.
In particular, the Engineers have abilities that reduce the heat of others, though not their own (unless of course, the player has two Engineers). The other Leviathans that can actively reduce heat only reduce their own heat, but with consequences such as reduced MPs or defense.
Although fires increase heat, there does not seem to be any environmental means of losing heat. There is a lost opportunity here to implement such things, e.g. pools of water that the Leviathans can wade into, sacrificing more MPs but reducing heat with each tile of water traversed.
STRONG DICE & STANDARD DICE:
For better or worse, the Trese Brothers utilize RNGs in their games. Apparently, their solution to mitigating the fickleness of RNG rolls is to have more and more of them as the player moves up the progression system.
The RNG rolls are represented by D10 “dice”, i.e. RNG rolls with 10 distinct equal-probability outcomes, represented by integers of 1 to 10. There are two types of dice: “strong” dice and “standard” dice. Both of them work the same way: they are rolled and the player hopes that the rolls surpass predetermined thresholds for success.
The only difference between a “strong” die and a “standard” die are their thresholds. The threshold for strong dice is 6 and above, whereas that for standard dice is 8 and above.
The amounts of strong and standard dice are generally used to determine how much contribution that a factor would make to an action that requires dice rolls. For example, shooting actions have a character’s Quickness rating and skill rating as factors; in this case, skill ratings contribute more because they contribute strong dice, whereas Quickness contributes standard dice.
ROLL SUCCESSES:
Strong and standard dice are mainly used for attacks on enemies or defense against incoming attacks. Both the attacking and defending characters roll their dice; the differences between the numbers of dice that rolled above their thresholds, i.e. the “successes”, are used to determine the outcome of the attack. Generally, if the attacker scores more successes at his/her/its attack rolls than the defender did on his/her/its defense rolls, the attack hits. (The damage that is inflicted is independent of these rolls, or to be more precise, damage infliction has its own rolls.)
Ostensibly, the more dice that a character rolls, the higher the likelihood of a positive outcome would be; indeed, one of the things that progressively more experienced Templars get is more dice. Presumably, this makes them more reliable in combat.
Ultimately though, astoundingly bad or good luck proves to be the exception to the rule. There is still the possibility of having many dice, strong or standard, coming up with a lot of failures, thus ruining even the best thought-out and prepared-for decisions.
PERCENTAGE RNGS:
The D10 dice are not the only RNG rolls. There are also percentage rolls, which are used for gameplay elements like Auto-Blocks and Critical Hit chances. The mechanism behind these rolls is none other than a D100 die, implemented using code from the game engine that powers the game, Cocos2d-x.
Having mentioned the RNG systems that are used in this game, the gameplay systems that use them are described next.
DEFENSE:
“Defense” is simply a statistic that determines how well a character does at having attacks not land on him/her/it. It uses the dice rolls, and the dice rolls that contribute to this statistic are further divided into sub-types. The sub-types are used to differentiate the contribution of skills and wargear to the matter of defense.
For example, there is the “Evade” bonus that some wargear applies. “Evade” contributes strong dice to both ranged and melee defense rolls, so wargear with “Evade” bonuses is more valuable than other kinds of bonuses that offer the same number of dice but to either ranged or melee defense but not both.
It can take a while to learn about the factors that contribute to defense, but there is in-game documentation that explain these, assuming that the player bothers to read them.
ACCURACY:
“Accuracy” is the name of the statistic that is rolled by an attacker against the Defense of the Defender. There are not many sub-types in the case of Accuracy. Most strong dice are provided by the attacker’s weapon and his/her Talents (more on these later). The other dice are standard dice.
In the case of the Templar Knights, the information on the composition of their dice is quite clear on their “status” screens. However, for enemies, the player can only obtain this information by checking the log of calculations that the game makes during a mission.
DAMAGE, ARMOR, PENETRATION & DEFLECTION:
As if the RNGs for attacking and defending are not enough, there are more for the purpose of damage infliction and reduction.
All damage outputs work on ranges; there appear to be no factors that determine where the rolls land in the ranges. Of course, this has been a staple in video game history for a long time, but age and tradition should not be an excuse to justify luck as a factor in gameplay.
Armor, as to be expected of video game “armor”, acts as damage reduction. However, for better or worse, armor rating is not implemented as a straight-up reduction. Instead, there is the twin gameplay elements of deflection and penetration, which determines how effective armor is.
Every attack by any character has a penetration rating, which is represented as a percentage roll, i.e. a D100. Every defense attempt by a character has a deflection rating, which is also represented as a percentage roll.
The threshold of success for an attack to “penetrate” the armor of the defender is the result of deducting the deflection rating from the penetration rating. If the result is a zero or a negative, the attack will not penetrate armor; this is one of very few certainties to be had from this gameplay element. If the threshold is positive and the D100 roll rolls above it, the attack penetrates the armor.
If there is no penetration, half of the armor rating of the defender is used as straight damage reduction. The other half is rolled with a dice scaled to its magnitude. If there is penetration, only the rolled half works.
Such a mechanism does make the benefits of armor more complex than just straight-up damage reduction. Consequently, armor, deflection and penetration ratings are used to differentiate wargear. On the other hand, that this complexity is based around yet more RNG rolls may rankle people who prefer not to have so much luck involved in the gameplay experience.
LEVELS AND EXPERIENCE:
Typically, character “levels” are used as a rough estimation of how powerful a character is. That said, each of the player’s Templar Knights/Leviathans has a level counter, which is used to determine how many points in certain statistics and variables that represent his/her combat prowess. To reach the next level, his/her “experience meter” has to be filled up, typically by participating in and surviving missions. This is little different from the typical experience and level system seen in many other tactical games with progression systems.
However, there is a peculiarity that the player might want to keep in mind; the main player character’s level matters much more than the levels of the other Templar Knights. This is because his/her level is used to determine how powerful the opposition would be; the descriptions of the difficulty settings do mention this, and it is certainly the case gameplay-wise.
DIFFERENCE IN LEVELS BETWEEN THE CAPTAIN AND OTHER KNIGHTS:
Knights gain experience by participating in missions and the Captain will always participate in every mission, so the Captain is always the highest-levelled Knight. Since the level of enemies is determined by the level of the Captain, there can be the worry that the other Knights might not be able to handle the enemies that are scaled to match the Captain’s prowess. To address this issue, the level of the Captain also determines the minimum level of the other Knights; presumably, recruits would be of a sufficient level to deal with enemies when they are brought into missions as reinforcements.
This is not always true in practice. A rookie Leviathan who has just been recruited will have problems dealing with powerful enemies that would be a regular challenge for the Captain. On the other hand, the player could still trick them out to play support roles, e.g. applying buffs or de-buffs, or have them handle enemies that are still push-overs in combat regardless of their level, such as the Chitterings.
ATTRIBUTES:
Attributes are statistics that veterans of stats-oriented RPGs would find all too familiar. There are attributes with the usual labels of “Strength”, “Fortitude” and such. Some are almost self-explanatory; for example, Fortitude determines how many hitpoints that a character has and how well he/she/it is at shrugging off damage.
Some others do not do what their names suggest though. For example, Strength does not increase the damage of melee attacks; rather, melee damage is determined by weaponry and talents. Rather, Strength takes up one element of Strength in Dungeons & Dragons, which is to improve the chances of melee attacks landing.
The effects of each attribute are mostly adequately described in tool-tips. Indeed, their effects are diverse enough such that an inexperienced player might just distribute attribute points almost evenly. In practice though, the player might want to dump points into making a character more reliable at doing whatever he/she does.
For example, if a Knight is using a weapon that uses Strength ratings as dice for attack rolls, the player should dump as many points into Strength as possible to maximize the reliability of the Knight’s attacks with the weapon.
SKILLS:
Skills would have practically been little more than Attributes with different names, except that they affect the effectiveness of some Talents and any dice that they contribute are always strong dice. Again, like attributes, the player might want to dump points into whatever skill that makes them do better at what they do.
For example, it is a no-brainer that the Engineer should have most of his/her Skill points dumped into Engineering; the Engineer has a couple of incredibly useful Talents, both of which use the Engineering skill as a major factor of their effectiveness. (The Engineer will be described later.)
TALENTS:
Talents are special abilities that are generally unique to individual Leviathan/Knight types. For example, all of the Engineer’s Talents are not available to the other classes.
Every class of Leviathan/Knight has a few starting Talents; each of these Talents always has one point invested in it. Most of these starting talents are different from each other, though there are some similarities. For example, the Captain, the Berserk and the Paladin all have basic melee talents that are functionally the same; they hit only one target and inflict damage, with no other effects.
Some of the Talents will be described further later, together with the elaboration on Knight classes.
GEAR POINTS:
Due to their inheritance of skills and abilities, Templar Knights both benefit from and are inhibited by their wargear options. They have the know-how to produce and utilize weapons that are well-suited to their roles and cannot be used by any other human due to the Templars’ use of Leviathans. However, a Templar Knight cannot immediately use any piece of gear that is associated with his/her Leviathan, supposedly because he/she has yet to recall the memory to do so.
Gameplay-wise, this limitation is implemented via the Gear Point (GP) system, which determines how much wargear a Knight can wield and how sophisticated it is.
Every Knight starts with five GPs; this is just enough to have a Leviathan suit and a weapon. Incidentally, every Knight will have to allocate at least two GPs for a suit and a weapon. The remaining points are used to get better suits or weapons, or optional gear.
Every level that a Knight gains grants one GP. Even so, there will not be enough GPs to mount everything that the player wants, so some compromises would have to be made. Nevertheless, there is a rule of thumb; GPs are best spent on weapons, if only to make sure that the damage output of a Knight stays competitive thoughout a playthrough.
WARGEAR:
The Leviathan suit and its main weapon are indispensable to any Knight. In addition to the default models, there are more advanced ones that provide more bonuses. In the case of the Engineers, they have two very different variants of their suits, both of which impose restrictions on their options for other pieces of wargear.
Some Leviathan types may have another mandatory piece of wargear. For example, most of the Leviathans that are not melee specialists must have powered gauntlets that act as their backup weapons in close combat.
There are two optional pieces of wargear for each type of Leviathan: one is usually an augmentation of sorts for the pilot himself/herself, while the other is an auxiliary system for the Leviathan. These usually grant straight bonuses, but they may come with setbacks such as lowering heat capacity.
SOME SPECIAL WEAPON OPTIONS:
Most of the weapons that a Knight would get later are merely upgrades to the ones that he/she already has for his/her Leviathan. There are also some side-grade options, e.g. the next set of wargear that a Knight would get are two functionally similar guns with different statistics. For example, there are two pinnacle bullet-shooting pistols for the Engineer: one has higher penetration but shorter range, whereas the other is the converse.
Some other weapon options are much more interesting. Returning to the Engineers, they may opt to carry hand-flamers instead, but this necessitates the donning of a different variant of the Engineer Leviation suit. As another example, the Captain can choose to forgo his/her sidearm for a shield, effectively making him/her a close-combat-only fighter.
PLASMA & FIRE:
Most attacks inflict damage that is subjected to the aforementioned armor system. However, there are some damage types that bypass armor. These are applied by plasma- and fire-based weapons.
Unsurprisingly, the advantage of these weapons is balanced by setbacks. In the case of plasma weapons, they have significantly shorter range than other alternative guns; some examples can be seen in the options for the Soldier’s guns.
Fire damage bypass armor too, but they come with secondary effects as well, namely setting the tile that the target is on alight. However, tiles on fire are hazardous to the Leviathans themselves.
(There will be more explanation on tiles on fire later, because they are practically a gameplay mechanism of their own.)
BIO-POISON:
Bio-poison is an interesting damage type. When a hit with a bio-poisoned weapon is resolved, the bonus damage from the bio-poison is resolved as regular damage, i.e. it is reduced by armor. Supposedly, this simulates the difficulty of piercing the target’s body and delivering the venomous payload. If no damage is dealt, the poison has failed to deliver. There are only a few enemies that can shrug off such damage, by the way, and these are usually the heavily-armored ones.
If damage is dealt, the target is afflicted with a damage-over-time debuff; incidentally, the heavily armored ones are rather vulnerable to this. Moreover, there is one unique de-buff for each type of poisoned weapon, so the player could attempt to stack multiple bio-poison de-buffs on a target by kitting out multiple Leviathans with poisoned weapons of their own.
RANGED WEAPONS & TALENTS:
Templar Battleforce would not be a Space Hulk wanna-be if there are not any guns that can be used to keep monstrous hordes at bay. Indeed, the use of ranged weapons in reliable winning strategies is pervasive enough that there is a challenge set by the community of fans of this game, which is to use melee-only weapons.
Most guns work in the same way; they hit targets within their range and inflict damage. The Talents of the Templar Knights are the things that differentiate one ranged attack from another, even if they are made with the same gun.
There are Talents that just inflict more damage, penetrate better or provide some other statistical benefit. Then there are those that can inflict de-buffs, such as reduced armor and MPs. In particular, the MP-reducing ones can give the player plenty of time to stall and whittle down incoming enemies.
AMBIGUITY WITH MULTIPLE-TARGET RANGED TALENTS:
There are some ranged attacks that can hit more than one target. The additional targets that can be hit is shown by a diagram of bright red and dim red squares that appear in the tooltip for a talent. For example, if the diagram shows that any enemy that is adjacent to the target can be hit, accuracy rolls will be made against that enemy, along with any damage rolls if the hit lands.
Unfortunately, the diagram is not enough to allay all ambiguity. The game does not inform the player that the line of fire from the attacker to the target also matters. For example, there is a talent with a diagram that shows that an enemy to the “east” and an enemy to the “north” of the target would be struck. What this diagram fails to explain is that any laterally adjacent enemy that is to the ‘side’ or ‘behind’ the target, relative to the attacker, would be struck. Other enemies that are laterally adjacent to the target but are in front of it will not be hit.
Even so, the game sometimes becomes confused over which enemies are eligible, especially when the line of fire is not completely lateral or diagonal. Sometimes, the game duplicates the process of determining which enemies are hit, resulting in more enemies being hit; at other times, no additional enemies are hit at all.
TACTICS CHECK FOR SOME AREA-EFFECT TALENTS:
For better or worse, some area-effect talents require Tactics checks; this is the case for powerful, high-damage attacks such as grenades and the Hydra’s flame-throwing abilities. The talent will indicate the number of enemies that can be affected, though of course it cannot be greater than the number of tiles that the talent affects. As for how the game determines which enemies are struck if there are more enemies than the maximum number that can be struck, that is done through – of course – RNG rolls.
OVERWATCH:
The gameplay element of Overwatch would seem familiar to long-time followers of turn-based squad-based tactical games. The character that goes on Overwatch duty looks out for enemies that move within range of his/her/its weapon and gets to shoot them even if it is the enemies’ turn.
Overwatch in this game works much in the same way, albeit with three twists. The first is that Overwatch is an ability that is unique only to the player’s side. Secondly, a Knight can only fire on enemies that enter a 3-by-3-tiles zone that the player designates. Furthermore, the Knight can only fire into each tile within that zone once. These limitations can seem restrictive and bothersome.
Yet, this is where the third difference plays its hand: a Knight on Overwatch can fire up to 9 times, if there are enough enemies to trigger the firing. Moreover, the same enemy can be fired upon multiple times, if it moves across more than one tile in the zone. Furthermore, an enemy does not need to end its turn within the zone; merely straying into it is enough to trigger Overwatch fire.
This is a substantial amount of potential triggers, when compared to the usual practice of being able to fire only once in other games with Overwatch.
Nevertheless, if there are enough enemies, or there is a particularly tough enemy that can soak a lot of fire, the Knight’s Overwatch can still be overwhelmed. Indeed, the CPU-controlled opponent will keep in this mind; it will sometimes mass creatures just outside the Overwatch zone and then rush them through the zone in its next turn.
Considering that most of the enemies that the player would encounter are melee-oriented or does not have range that surpasses that of the guns that an Overwatch-capable character has, Overwatch is an invaluable inclusion in the player’s tactical repertoire.
NO AMMUNITION CONCERNS:
Considering that there are limitations such as the Heat mechanism and the Overwatch zone that are imposed on player characters to balance them, it can seem odd that ammunition for weapons is not a factor at all during missions. In fact, none of the characters in the story even mention magazines for guns.
This means that as long as the player can enact strategies that keep enemies at bay and manage heat build-up/loss, he/she can very much hold back tides of monstrosities with blazing guns turn after turn.
TALENT USES:
On the other hand, some talents can only be used a few times before they run out. Some of these are understandably limited in number of uses, such as grenades and some of the Hydra’s flame attacks. However, some others are less understandable, such as the limitation on the number of times that the Captain can rally his/her comrades.
COUNTER-ATTACKS:
Counter-attack, as its name suggests, is a mechanism that allows a character to make an additional melee attack when an attacker makes a melee attack on him/her/it. However, the opportunity of making a counter-attack is determined with a D100 roll against the character’s Counter-attack percentage.
Counter-attacks are the provenance of melee-oriented characters, most of whom are overwhelmingly on the enemy’s side. As for the Leviathans, only three Knight classes can perform them. This can seem lop-sided, but counter-attacks can be used to annihilate whole swathes of melee-focused enemies, assuming that the player has tricked out a character to be a melee powerhouse with a high Counter-attack rating.
When a Knight makes a counter-attack, it is made using his/her default and always available melee Talent. Therefore, the performance of this counter-attack depends on the level of that Talent, so the player might want to put some points into a melee Knight’s default melee Talent.
COUNTER-ATTACK TIT-FOR-TAT:
There might be a bug or a programming loophole in the mechanism of counter-attacks.
If a melee-oriented character attacks another melee-oriented character, the latter is of course entitled to a counter-attack roll. However, upon the latter having made a counter-attack, the former character can also make a counter-attack roll of his/her own. This can go on and on until one character is dead, fails the counter-attack RNG roll or run out of Counter-attack uses.
LIMIT ON COUNTER-ATTACKS:
Speaking of Counter-attack uses, this is something that the game does explain well to the player, and can be unpleasant to learn the hard way.
There are two factors that determine how many counter-attacks can be made by a character: one factor is used within the character’s own turn, and the other is used in the enemy’s turn.
The first factor covers the circumstance of a character making a counter-attack against an enemy’s own counter-attack against that character’s own attack; essentially, the character is making two attacks in a single move. However, this is not a free attack; two additional APs are consumed if the character does this. This can be unwelcome, especially if the player intends to have the character do something else after making a melee attack.
(On the other hand, the AP expenditure does not consistently occur, so this might be a bug.)
The second factor is represented by an unseen counter that tracks the number of counter-attacks that a character can do. This is generally just two, which means that the character can only make two attacks within the enemy’s turn. However, there are some gear pieces and talents that remove the limitation on the number of counter-attacks.
LEVIATHAN TYPES:
Some Leviathan types have been mentioned in passing already, such as the Hydra and Soldier. This section will describe them further.
The Captain is the core of the squad; he/she is always deployed on every mission, and his/her survival is paramount to the success of the mission. He/She is therefore always the most experienced member of the team. Furthermore, the Captain is the only melee-oriented Knight capable of having a ranged weapon in the form of a sidearm. If the player so chooses, he/she can swap the sidearm out for a shield. The Captain also has access to some of the best armor.
The Soldier is a general-purpose albeit non-melee class, and is one of very few Knights that can use Overwatch. The Soldier also has grenades that can hobble incoming enemies, which complement his/her Overwatch ability.
The Engineer is practically a must-have class. The Engineer is not well-armed, at least until the player has unlocked the highest-tiered handguns for him/her. The main reason for having the Engineer around though is his/her ability to set up a Sentry Turret. The Sentry Turret has Burst Fire and Overwatch, the levels of which scale together with the Engineer’s Engineering skill. Many difficult levels become manageable with careful placements of Sentry Turrets, e.g. using a Sentry Turret as a disposable rearguard in a perilous point-A-to-point-B mission.
The Engineer is also the only Knight that can reduce the heat of other Knights; indeed, having a pair of them follow the main group of Knights makes heat management so much easier.
The Scout is another class that a wise player would use more often than not. The Scout has the Stealth skill, which has him/her making an RNG roll against the awareness of individual enemies. If he/she makes the RNG roll, enemies simply ignore him/her and may even pass by; this is just as well, because the Scout is the most fragile of Leviathan Knights. The Scout is very much the Knight that the player would use in order to reach and deal with objectives that are far away from the team’s starting point.
The Scout also has the longest-ranged weapons, and has the highest damage-per-hit potential. Indeed, the Scout can be tricked out for the elimination of powerful enemies like Terrox Goliaths before they reach within striking distance.
The Hydra is a Knight that specializes in the infliction of Fire damage. There are not a lot of enemies that are resistant to fire; even particularly tough enemies like the Goliath and the Narvidian Warrior are susceptible to fire. Therefore, the Hydra will be of particular use in the latter parts of a playthrough, which is when more of the aforementioned enemies appear. The Hydra also has the Napalm Charge talent, which has the biggest area-of-effect in the game and can set swathes of tiles on fire.
The Neptune is the heavy weapons support for the team. Much of his/her Leviathan’s strength is committed to lugging around the big gun that is the signature gear of the Neptune, so the armor of his/her Leviathan tends to be quite thin. This is a worthwhile trade-off though, because deft positioning and clever use of the Neptune’s Overwatch can lock down an enemy’s approach much more effectively than the Soldier ever could.
The Paladin is the healer of the team, and also the Knight with the highest defense potential. However, there are means to heal Knights on the go without having to resort to the Paladin’s ministrations, so the Paladin is not always a must-have. Besides, there are viable strategies that minimize the possibility of having Knights injured, and characters function the same whether they are at full HP or at near-death.
Where the Paladin’s combat prowess may be oriented around turning aside the blows of enemies, the Berserk is made for dishing out damage. Indeed, his/her axes has far higher damage output than swords, which are the main weaponry of the Paladin and the Captain. The Berserk is also the only Knight that can dual-wield weapons, albeit both weapons would have to be axes.
REQUISITION:
In addition to the XPs yielded by missions to participating Knights, there are “Requisition Points” (RPs). Veterans of Space Hulk might recognize these as the resource that is used to determine the quantity and complexity of the wargear that the player characters can use.
Such a system is also used in this game, albeit with a twist. Instead of spending RPs to equip each individual piece of gear on a Knight, the player would be spending RPs to increase the variety of gear that the Knights can have and raise the soft caps on the levels of their talents. The requisition tree and the nodes in it represent this variety; RPs are spent on unlocking the nodes. Each node has information on what gear pieces or Talents that it unlocks and this information is available regardless of whether it has been unlocked or not.
The requisition tree may be large, but there are a finite number of nodes. This means that the player can eventually unlock everything in the tree, typically through completing multiple playthroughs. This would probably be the point that even an ardent fan of the game would stop playing.
SHAREABLE WAREGEAR:
Some pieces of gear can be used by more than one Knight. An example is the Captain’s swords, which can be used by the Paladin. The optional wargear, namely the armor upgrades, are especially shareable.
This means that the player might want to consider unlocking gear for multiple Knight classes as they obtain more Gear points from gaining levels. This helps the player minimize the amount of RPs that he/she would spend while simultaneously maximizing the use of the Knights’ Gear points.
RELICS:
Some nodes unlock special wargear, of which only one of each type can be used by any Knight in the team. This is just as well, because they happen to be quite powerful or have properties that none of their regular counterparts have.
For example, most of the Soldier’s guns are ballistic- or plasma-based; there are also a couple that inflict bio-poison. However, one of his/her guns, which is a Relic, inflicts fire-based damage too, and like other fire-based weapons, also sets tiles on fire. Considering that the Soldier can set Overwatch zones, this means that the Soldier can set tiles on fire even in the enemy’s turn, which makes his/her Overwatch fire even more effective at keeping enemies at bay.
TACTICAL POINTS:
One of the gameplay conceits in this game is the tactical point. For whatever reason, there are machines resembling radar displays (or vents; it is hard to be certain) that are found in quite a number of places, including even on alien ships. These machines, when claimed by the player, allows him/her to bring in additional Knights other than the ones that he/she start with, among other things like accruing Supply points and buying ordnance, which will be described later.
Anyway, Tactical Points have their own type of HP. They cannot be damaged by anything, except “Capture” attacks by the Engineer (who looks like he/she is sanitizing the point with fire) and acid- or plasma-splashing by most types of enemies.
In the case of the latter, the damage that is inflicted is just one HP, but there tend to be many enemies and it will not take long for a tactical point to be lost to the player if it has been overrun. In the case of the former, the Engineer can often inflict more than just one HP; his/her Engineering skill also provides a bonus to the damage inflicted.
After unlocking the relevant nodes in the requisition tree, Tactical Points under the player’s control can be upgraded in a few ways. Most players would purchase the Supply Booster, which improve their yield of Supply Points; there will be more on these later. Others might purchase the upgrades that boost their HPs, if only to stall enemies that have managed to overwhelm the Tactical Points. There is also an upgrade that installs a massive turret on it, but it only attacks enemies that have damaged the point.
SUPPLY POINTS:
Every scenario has the player starting with some “Supply Points” (SPs), which are the resource that the player use during missions.
Every turn gives the player at least 1 SP, but most options that require the expenditure of these points have asking prices of far higher than just one point. To get more points and to maintain a viable income of them, the player has to capture Tactical Points, each of which provides 50 SP by default over a turn as long as they are in the player’s possession. The player can get more from a Tactical Point by purchasing the Supply Booster upgrade for it. There are also some secondary objectives that yield SPs when completed.
Anyway, Supply Points are used to deploy more Knights into the field, purchase consumable replenishments for them (more on these later) or upgrade Tact Points. Obviously, the player will want as many of these as possible.
Accruing SPs for more expensive options is not an easy matter, because there are many problems that require the player’s attention and the easiest solution to them is to make a purchase there and then.
ORDNANCE:
In gaming parlance, “Ordnance” is usually a word that describes munitions and their handling. In actuality, it is the act of managing not just munitions but other resources of war too, such as medical supplies. This is the case in this game.
Instead of purchasing upgrades for Tactical Points or bringing in additional Knights, the player can purchase consumables for the Knights to use. These are given the catch-all name “Ordnance”. Conveniently, Ordnances are kept in their own inventory, i.e. not kept on the person of any Knight.
Knights have to spend one Action Point to use any Ordnance; the player might want to keep this in mind. Like other ways of spending AP, spending an AP in this way also reduces one MP, if there are any MPs left.
Among the Ordnances, med-kits are perhaps the most useful. Med-kits can be used anywhere; indeed, deciding whether to spend SPs on med-kits to save a hurting Knight or hoarding the SPs for important things later can be a dilemma.
Some Ordnances can only be used close to a Tactical Point. These tend to be consumables that replenish a Knight’s limited-use Talents. For example, each grenade-using Talent has one Ordnance that is associated with its replenishment. This can seem like an unfair limitation, considering that other Ordnances can be used just about anywhere, but perhaps it is meant as a gameplay-balancing design that is intended to have the player planning the progress and resupply of his/her forces as they advance through the mission area.
REINFORCEMENTS & TEAM SIZE LIMIT:
More often than not, the starting Knights that the player has at the beginning of a mission is not enough. The player might want to bring in more; considering that mission experience is duplicated for each Knight that participated, it is in the player’s interest to reach the maximum allowed number of Knights anyway.
Bringing in reinforcements is not without cost. Every Knight has a price in terms of SPs, which is viewable before and during a mission. (Interestingly, Engineers have the highest SP price, the reason for which would be quite understandable after the player has figured out how useful Engineers can be.)
There is another limitation to reinforcements too: a hard limit on the number of Knights that can be on the field at once. This is dictated by the coding for a mission; if a mission allows only 6 Knights, there can ever only be 6 Knights, including any special characters. On the other hand, a mission might also raise the default cap from 3 to higher numbers, typically to allow the player to start with 4 or 5 Knights.
The SP price of a Knight increases by 5 points for every character level beyond level 1, up to a maximum of an additional 50 SP. It is not entirely clear why the game bothers with such small differences though, because all Knights eventually hit their ceiling SP prices.
CHARACTER SWAP:
At the start of almost every mission, Knights are spawned into the map. Usually, a mission would have the highest-ranking Soldier in the roster as one of the default spawns. Fortunately, the player is given the choice of swapping these Knights for other Knights. Swapping is not without cost though; the player has to pay for the difference in SP cost, if the Knight being swapped to has a higher SP price. (This is usually the case, since Soldiers are one of two classes with low SP costs.)
There is a minor problem here: the player has to calculate the difference in SP cost himself/herself because it is not shown. Of course, this is an easy thing to do for anyone who would deign to play this game, but considering that much of the game is shot through with thoroughly informative in-game documentation, this omission is glaring (especially considering that the game does actually calculate the difference in SP costs).
PRIMARY OBJECTIVES:
Every mission has an objective or more that has to be achieved. Some objectives are laid out for the player right from the start of the mission, but some others only appear after circumstances change.
In particular, there are missions where the Knights have to reach an extraction point. Usually, the player is informed of this at the start of the mission, but not always. There are some unpleasant surprises that would have the player scrambling to get the Knights together, if only to avoid having them isolated by enemies as they make their way to the exit.
Clicking on an objective usually brings the camera over to where the objective is, even if it is obscured by the fog of war. This gives the player a general idea of where to go to, though complex level layouts may complicate this matter.
SECONDARY OBJECTIVES:
There are some objectives that do not need to be achieved for the mission to be successful. Completing them does increase the XP rewards that the player would get upon completion of the mission, however, and they may make achievement of the primary objectives a tad easier.
Some secondary objectives are listed together with the primary objectives; this is the case if they are directly connected to the primary objectives, e.g. disabling defences to help an assault on an enemy strongpoint.
Some others are not listed. These are not actually secondary objectives, but rather optional endeavours that have been coded using the programming for actual secondary objectives. These not-objectives usually involve the retrieval of ordnances, typically by having a Knight walk up to a bunch of crates or boxes. (These crates and containers are layered over with a translucent blue rectangle.)
These free ordnances might help the player’s efforts if retrieved early. On the other hand, these goodies are so situated so far out of the way that the player would have to risk the isolation of a Knight just to get them. The Scout is much better for doing this, of course, but that would mean that the Scout is away from the main body of Knights and cannot provide supporting fire.
TILES ON FIRE:
Fire is one of very few environmental hazards in the game. Weapons and Talents that inflict fire-damage always set tiles on fire. These tiles will damage anything that tries to move through them; any character that ends his/her/its turn on them suffer worse. Fires eventually die down, but it can take many turns for them to do so; in particular, fires that have been set by the Hydra take many turns to diminish.
Usually, setting tiles on fire is done with the intention of having incoming enemies burn themselves while moving through them. On the other hand, if the player is not careful, he/she can set places that the Knights have to go through on fire.
SUPPRESSING SPAWN POINTS:
Early on in the campaign, the main player character (the Captain) makes a statement that the nests of xeno monsters can be “purged” with fire. This is not entirely true; setting the spawn points of enemies on fire does not permanently disable the spawn points.
However, spawn points that are on fire will not spawn any enemies as long as they are burning. It can take a while to notice this, if the player has not done research about this.
CHEATING WITH FIRE:
Interestingly, the data for tiles that are on fire is kept in a separate save-file. This means that an unscrupulous player that has no issues with cheating can make copies of the file and use them to “restore” tiles that are on fire, namely fires on spawn points. Likewise, the player can remove the file after having created an inferno to destroy incoming enemy waves, so that the Knights can advance through where the inferno was.
ENEMIES DYING AT THE END OF THEIR TURN FROM FIRE OR BIO-POISON:
The cunning player would eventually learn that fire and bio-poison can pile a lot of additional damage on enemies, especially if the player knows that they cannot be killed in a single turn. However, there are some gameplay designs that balance against this.
Enemies that should have been killed by damage-over-time effects, i.e. have their HPs reduced to zero, will not die in their own turn. Rather, they are marked by the game for certain death upon the end of their turn. Until then, they can do whatever they can do like any other turn. This means that enemies that have ran through a lethal inferno can still reach and hurt the Knights (typically the Hydras that created the inferno in the first place). This can be unpleasant to learn the hard way, but there is in-game documentation on this.
DOORS:
Most doors can only be opened, but not closed; presumably, the Knights and their inhuman enemies use their great strength to pry them open, thus permanently breaking them.
Some doors can be closed, typically through interactions with switches that toggle them open or closed. This can also be used against enemies; the doors outright kill anything that are still on their tiles when they close. On the other hand, it would just be a lucky coincidence if enemies end their turn on the tiles with closable doors if the player is not actively blocking them from moving beyond the doors.
FOG OF WAR:
When the player starts a mission, only the area that is immediately around the player characters are revealed; more would be revealed if the coding for the mission has scripts for this. To reveal any more of the mission area, the player has to have Knights explore it, and/or have Knights with the Scan Talent reveal parts of the map within range.
After a mission area has been revealed, it is then layered over by a lesser fog-of-war; veterans of RTS games would be familiar with this. This lesser fog can only be kept at bay by the view range of Knights and any other characters under the player’s control.
This lesser fog does not completely hide enemies, however. The player can still see the sprites of enemies that are approaching the Knights, but the player cannot click on them to set their stats.
This is an understandable set of pros and cons. Knowing the relative positions of enemies is critically important, especially considering that the CPU-controlled enemy always knows where the Knights are. In return, the player does not get the advantage of having enough information to plan counter-strategies with maximized efficiency, e.g. using a Knight with low damage output to handle an incoming wave of enemies that have already been weakened by fire.
SCAN TALENT:
The Scan talent, as its name suggests, reveals parts of the map in areas that are centred around points that are decided by the player. These points, in turn, can only occur within a certain range from the Knight that has the Talent. These are understandable limitations.
What is not as understandable is how the tiles are revealed. The coding for the talent is such that an invisible character with a considerable sight range is placed on the aforementioned points. The tiles that are revealed is determined by how much this temporary character can see.
This means that if the player used the Scan talent on a point that is outside the boundaries of the mission area (likely because the player does not know that this is the case in the first place due to the opaque variant of the fog-of-war), not much would be revealed. Places with plenty of opaque obstacles will also hinder the process of revealing tiles.
ENEMIES - OVERVIEW:
There are numerous enemies that are out to kill the Knights, and there is considerable variety in how they would do so too. The number of enemies that would go after the heroes is determined by the difficulty setting and the scripting for the mission; typically, greater difficulties and later levels spawn more enemies.
The enemies are practically endless. As long as there are active spawn points on the map, fresh enemies will continuously appear; the rate of spawning is proportional to the difficulty level. There are very few scenarios in which the player can permanently stem the arrival of enemy reinforcements. (In these scenarios, the only spawn points for enemies are tactical points, which the player can seize.)
TYPES OF ENEMIES SPAWNED:
For better or worse, the coding for the determination of the types of enemies spawned is not entirely clear. Presumably, weaker types of enemies have higher likelihoods of being spawned. Yet, I have had experiences in which the game spawned a lot of powerful enemies turn after turn; a retry of the mission did not yield a repeat experience.
THE TERROX:
The genetically unstable aliens known as the Terrox are the most numerous enemies in the game. Most of their sub-species are only capable of melee combat, so gunning them down before they get close is generally a good idea. Besides, many of them hit hard, making a mockery of most Leviathan suits.
There are some Terrox sub-species that have ranged attacks, such as the slow Spitters and the much more dangerous Lancers. There are some other sub-species that are practically variants of the ones that have been mentioned, such as the Predator, which is a faster variant of the Hunter.
RANGED STRATEGIES MORE VIABLE:
Since the bulk of enemies are the melee-oriented Terrox, strategies that are predominantly focused on ranged attacks are often the ones that would carry the day.
Of course, one could argue that when it comes to inflicting damage during the enemy’s turn, melee counter-attacks have much more damage potential than ranged attacks, because of the presence of Talents and wargear that provide unlimited counter-attack chances. Yet, melee-oriented strategies often involve enemies having already reached the player’s forces in the first place; there are always chances that they could get lucky and land devastating blows.
SIMILAR SPRITES FOR VARIANTS OF ENEMIES:
It has been mentioned earlier that there are Terrox creatures that are variants of each other. The Terrox are not the only ones with variants, however; there are some enemies that are almost practically palette swaps. However, for the most part, these variations are noticeable, even through the fog-of-war; their sprites have silhouettes with small but still distinct differences.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
Templar Battleforce is not much of a looker. Much of its 2D artwork, especially the sprites that appear during missions, are rather simply done. Due to the top-down view of the camera, sprites are mainly composed of heads, shoulders and arms. The inhuman enemies do get legs drawn for their sprites, but even these are sparsely animated. At best, they are functional, e.g. a Leviathan Knight is noticeably different from a Terrox monster. On the other hand, the graphical designs for the game contribute a lot to the short loading times.
There are some superfluous graphical designs that contribute little to the gameplay, and even betray how amateurish the developers can be. The most prominent of these is the animated Captain-type Leviathan that appears in the main menu; the Leviathan is holding its sword in a silly manner.
SOUND DESIGNS:
There are almost no voice-overs in this game. Even the Leviathan Knights have no utterances that sound human. When they are “hurt”, grinding machinery is heard. When they are slain, no human is seen or heard coming out of them; they just explode.
The sounds that are the closest to being those of a human being are the yelps that are uttered whenever a human enemy dies. (Yelps are also heard when player-controlled tact points are cleared by enemies; this is most likely a bug.)
There are plenty of sounds for other occurrences in combat though. All weapon types have their own sound clips, for example. In particular, the sounds of exploding enemies are satisfying. There are also noises for enemies being spawned onto the map, especially the Terrox. The player might want to listen for these, because the number of times these sounds are played indicate the number of enemies that are spawned.
Finally, there is the music. Initially, the soundtracks would cater to the palette of players who have had experiences with Space Hulk video games; they evoke feelings of grim resolve, which fit well with the themes of the game. However, there are only a handful of soundtracks and the game’s campaign is quite long, so they will eventually sound repetitive.
CONCLUSION:
At first glance, there seems to be considerable complexity to be had from the gameplay in Templar Battleforce. There are plenty of factors and statistics to keep in mind, and there is fun to be had from customizing Leviathans and choosing who to bring into the mission and who else to bring in as reinforcements.
Yet, like so many other turn-based tactical games with gameplay that eventually turned disappointingly fickle, Templar Battleforce has a preponderance of RNG rolls that can make a mockery of well-laid plans and good decision-making. There are also lost opportunities to improve the complexity of the gameplay, such as environmental means of reducing heat.
Nevertheless, if the player is looking for a Space Hulk game that is more sophisticated and better-executed than the existing Space Hulk games themselves, Templar Battleforce is not difficult to recommend.