Tactical Nexus is a game inspired by Tower of the Sorcerer. The game controls similarly to an RPG: your character has HP, ATK, and DEF, and you walk around fighting enemies to gain items and level up. The reason it's more of a puzzle game than an RPG is because there are a finite number of enemies to fight and items to pick up in every tower, and if you want to reach the top of the tower with a high score, or at all, you need to be very careful about what order you fight those enemies and pick up those items.
You might recognize these mechanics from Desktop Dungeons, but it's a little different from that. Desktop Dungeons is based on short, randomly-generated play sessions. Tactical Nexus consists of several hand-crafted towers with several floors each, and each tower takes hours to get through. Tactical Nexus also doesn't experiment with different character classes like Desktop Dungeons does, but it does introduce new twists to fundamental gameplay concepts in nearly every tower, so you can arguably make a comparison in that sense.
You might also recognize these mechanics from DROD RPG: Tendry's Tale. I'll be honest, I think the main DROD series is great, but I never made it very far in Tendry's Tale because I didn't think it was very good. I don't think the DROD mechanics of "hiding" things from the player (like breakable walls or clever movement tricks) meshes very well with the mechanics of Tower of the Sorcerer, which is based more heavily on resource management, where it's very important that you know what all of your options are and can see all of them in front of you. There's still some tricks you have to figure out in Tactical Nexus, but it's much better about being transparent with what it's asking you to do, and usually you don't have to walk very far to see what your options are in the next room over. (I don't mean to be hard on Tendry's Tale if you enjoy it, I'm just making the point that you might like Tactical Nexus even if you didn't like Tendry's Tale, as is the case with me.)
Like Tendry's Tale, though, Tactical Nexus does encourage you to spend hours learning the full layout of the tower and replaying it to make your run as efficient as possible. Each tower gives you a score at the end based on your level, HP, ATK, and DEF. If your score is high enough, you can earn a medal, with ranks ranging from bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond to, uh... "beyond". But these medals are for more than just bragging rights--once you've earned one, you can use that medal to buy certain powerups at the beginning of any tower, with better medals getting you better goods. As you can imagine, you can use those medals to make your score go even higher, to earn even better medals to earn better powerups, and then the process just keeps repeating itself. There's still an incentive to complete a tower without using medals (to get Sunstones, another medal-like resource), but in the end, what this all means is you end up playing each tower several times over, with different priorities each time.
Here's the Steam page for the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141290/Tactical_Nexus/The developers also have a free demo on their site, though it's weird that they're not offering it through Steam itself.
Full disclosure: The pricing scheme for Tactical Nexus is weird, and going by the response I've seen in the discussion forums, it's the most confusing and controversial point surrounding the game. Currently, the base game is $9 USD. Originally, the game released at $60 despite not starring Norman Reedus, and the developers plan to bring it back up to that price point eventually, a few dollars at a time as new expansions are released for it. Even though the price increases coincide with new content being released for it, the higher prices do not include the new content; the new content will still be priced separately from the base game. Getting all the DLC will cost over $300 if you get them at their cheapest, and over $700 if you don't. I'm well aware that this looks completely insane. I'm also pretty sure I'm going to get all the DLC anyway.
Double full disclosure: This is my first post on Reddit. It's been a long time since I've done anything on any forums, and I've never joined anything just for the sake of advertising something before, but I'm making an exception for this because:
- I think I'm one of maybe three people playing this game outside of Japan.
- Since the game did nothing to make itself stand out among the dozen other Steam games that came out the same week, no one's going to buy it unless someone like me starts making recommendations.
- Due to the pricing scheme the developers have planned for the game, if it's ever going to start selling, it needs to start happening right now.
- I love this game, and I want it to be successful so that the developers keep making more of it.
I know the price seems excessive. However, know that I've already spent about 90 hours optimizing just the first three towers with no medals, and there are 12 towers total in the base game, eventually 60 towers with all DLC. If you like resource management games, I genuinely think the base game is worth buying just to try it out, even if you never get any of the DLC, even if you buy the base game at $60--but if you're going to get the game, you should get it now, while it's still cheap.
That said, though I want to help this game to reach its audience, I'm not here to push the game on anyone who wouldn't enjoy it. I want people to play games that are special to them, and I recognize that this is a title designed for a niche audience, so it's not going to be special to most people--but it will be VERY special for that small audience. So I'm here to answer any questions you might have to help you decide if the game's right for you. Like I said, I've spent over 90 hours with the game, so I'm fairly familiar with its ins and outs (though not as much as I could be. It's a huge game).
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