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Haven park review switch1/27/2024 The idea is that while you are a commander sending people to their deaths for the sake of a game, you’re at least trying to navigate the horrible, gladiatorial society with some sense of a moral centre. ![]() There’s only a single save file, which auto-saves, and this is to force you to take every decision that you make in the narrative seriously. It also helps that decisions have consequences in The Way. There’s considerable variety in the decks, units, pieces of equipment and tactics, and battles can become very taut, tightly balanced affairs indeed. However, it doesn’t take long for a stiff level of difficulty to make each battle riveting. At first, this will seem too simple and standard for its own good. One is the damage they’ll deal, and the amount of damage they can take before they perish. Units are a standard range of melee and ranged specialists, and you can also use equipment to power them up. However, you can use your turn to shift them to a different row. Unlike in a tactics RPG, you don’t directly control these characters once summoned. They will then move across the field on each turn, until they either crash into an enemy (at which point they’ll fight), or get to the far end, where they’ll then attack the enemy commander. On your turn, you use a card from your hand to “summon” a soldier to the battlefield. The deckbuilding card genre is a well-trodden path at this point. ![]() When you’re in the right mood, it’s impressively gripping, however. As that concept probably tells you, The Way goes some grim places, and you do need to be in the right frame of mind for it. So they send you into hostile territory to participate in this game, learn something about the enemy, and, ideally, find a way to stymie the invasion while you’re there. The leadership of the threatened nation has decided that the best strategy is to stall for time and learn something about the enemy’s tactics. This empire trains its leaders through this game, causing many to die so they can play may-believe wars. ![]() See, there’s an empire that’s on the cusp of launching a full-scale invasion into another nation. You play as one of Carlyle’s leaders, and while, mechanically, you’re drawing and playing “cards”, the narrative goes to great lengths to make it clear that this is a cruel game and the “cards” are people, so what you’re doing is not benign and rather you’re standing back as the “commander” and sending hordes to their deaths.Īt the same time, you’re not necessarily evil for doing so. The point that I’m making is that this quote fundamentally opposes war, by highlighting that the people that fight in wars are not the ones that cause them.Īsh of Gods: The Way, likewise makes that observation, and can itself be read as stridently anti-war. You could delve deep into what Carlyle meant by this, given his lectures and thoughts on the value of great men as leaders. “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.” However, there is one Carlyle quote that is very relevant to The Way. I know I shouldn’t quote Thomas Carlyle, given the “intellectuals” that have latched on to him in our time. The developers have found a way to deliver an intense narrative through The Way and, while Redemption was a small fish in a pool filled with big golden carp, this monumental shift in gameplay has given the team the opportunity to establish themselves a noteworthy leader now. The plot in these kinds of titles is rarely more than functional, and it was the plot, not the gameplay, that had the potential in the original Redemption. I thought that would be a big step backwards. Ash of Gods: The Way, meanwhile, is a deckbuilding card game. Clearly inspired by The Banner Saga, it never eclipsed that masterpiece, but it still stood in the same ballpark. ![]() The original Ash of Gods (subtitled Redemption) was a gritty little tactics RPG with rich, albeit dark storytelling. At first I was disappointed with the concept of Ash of Gods: The Way.
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