Urtuk The Desolation

An entertaining turn-based combat game for those who have played Battle Brothers, X-Com, Gloomhaven and Divinity to death.

Your party of 3-6 characters travels around a map, fighting battles, levelling up, getting loot and acquiring mutators which give added skills or bonuses.

On each map you’re searching for the boss that you will have to defeat to move on to the next level. There’s no time pressure though, you can spend as long as you want on each level taking on fight after fight.

There’s not much story to the game and only a few random events that influence combat. For the most part the entire game is about tactical combat on a grid of hexes.
This is highly entertaining, with several neat tactical twists. For example if you have characters on both sides of an enemy your attacks are automatically critical hits. If you have ranged characters close by they’ll support your melee attacks with bonus attacks. You can also stun enemies by shoving them off high places or kill them outright by pushing them into pits.

There’s a huge number of recruitable characters and scope for different builds, but each class is quite restricted in the gear they can carry. Your Bloodknight can only ever use a greatsword. If you find a cool axe or billhook, then you’ll need to recruit a berserker or footman to use it.

The learning curve is steep and it’s not that friendly initially. I didn’t find the tutorial all that helpful past the basics of combat – there were a lot of ‘oh, that’s how that works’ moments when I was playing.
Enemies have many different skills, even right from the start. Most enemies have 5 to 10 different skills so a lot of reading is required to be aware of what is happening. Still I can’t be the only one who lost missions after having my guys unexpectedly rammed off a cliff, pulled into a death pit or have a carefully planned shove fail because the enemy is immovable.
It’s not that the game is being unfair, all the information is there, but there’s just a mental overload when faced with all the different enemy types with tonnes of skills, often with one crucial skill that you need to know about hidden among a dozen inconsequential ones.

By the end of the game you’ve learned which enemies are which, which skills to fear, and which abilities are most dangerous, but there’s a rough learning curve.

The first map of the game is pretty easy, but the difficulty spikes hard when you hit the second map. My unarmoured team of skirmishers was crushing everything and got ripped apart by the poisonous swampers. You tend to learn by dying in this game.

There are enough positives to make this fun, but it isn’t up to the standard of the best games of this type. I can’t see myself playing run after run now I’ve finished it.

The game does indeed feel pretty basic at first. It is heavily (maybe solely) focused around combat and squad management. Buuuut, I played for 200+ hours and it still feels fun.
I usually list pros and cons for any game I review. Here I feel that it is not needed. Urtuk: The Desolation delivers admirably at what it has to offer. Content and mechanics at which it can possibly fail are just not included in the game.
There are tons of unique character classes that exist in the game. Almost any enemy you can encounter can be a hero in your party too. That is why combat feel fair. AI tries to focus-fire your weakest character, to surround your guys and to exploit crits. You can fool it, but if you make a mistake - it punishes gladly. Most combat maps are random-generated so fights feel different. Mission nodes respawn (and are random too), so you can farm stuff you need as long as it takes. Global "timer" can be ignored. Battlefield is dynamic and can change during the fight by character abilities and special events. RNG can make even easy missions brutally hard so chosing Ironman mode for hardest difficulty is probably not a good idea.
Tactical combat in Urtuk is very well made. Most traits characters have can be extracted and put into other guys. There is limit to this and active abilities can not be extracted. Equipment range available to each class can not be changed. So, it is hardly possible to turn different characters into carbon copies of each other, but it it allows huge variation within every class (and there are tons of classes available). Player characters can have more traits than enemies and better equipment, but your party can only have up to 6 members present on a battlefield. Enemy has numerical superiority (20+ guys with reinforcements? easy).
Ah, I forgot: there is a drawback, kind of. First (strategic level) map has more content, more unique missions and bosses than all others. As global goal is to form your dream-team and defeat bosses, strategic maps do not feel like chapters. Thus, uneven content distribution hardly feels like a drawback.
Conclusion: Excellent fights, nice squad management, art style is superb. No unecessary features.

A game that is somewhat of a cross between Battle Brothers and Darkest Dungeon but with really litlle RNG.
A distinct visual look, a great deal of charm and a huge amount of depth to the tactical combat & lots of customisation in the way to play it.
Soundtrack is great.
May be missing a wee bit of polish & quality of life stuff.
But at that price & considering it's a new game company, I am really impress.
A must try for turn base lover imo.

Mixed feelings on this game. I like the art. I like the concept. The price for it is good (exceptional when on sale). I just don't have fun playing it, it just doesn't have something to hook me. Harder fights feel more like a chore and don't feel rewarding.
I'm giving this a thumbs up because I recognize the potential, and it's just not for me.

It's good. The art is interesting, the music is good, there is enough depth in combat and character evolution/gearing that can keep you for a long time exploring the different synergies and approaches to defeating your foes.
Playing a run of the game can get really time-consuming, though. In my opinion it would be improved by making the areas smaller so a player could plow through the game quicker (or be less bothered by failing to do so).

Urtuk: The Desolation is a turn-based RPG strategy game where you build a team with armor and weapons and fight against a large variety of enemies including bosses.
Pros:
+ very nice graphics with well designed characters with distinct weapons and armors.
+ great variety of classes, perks, abilities, weapons, armors and upgrades.
+ many different ways to form teams as there are different winning combinations
+ random creation of maps increases replayability
+ very good implementation of turn-based mechanism
Cons
- Towards the end the game was not as challenging as in the beginning (exploration difficulty) as battles were rather trivial
- Randomness in maps could (infrequently) lead to some battles dragging for too long or increased difficulty because of environmental elements
- while huge variety of classes and styles, eventually the pool of heroes is rather limited as most of them are left behind with respect to skill development and eventually serve only for scavenging.
-more variety in sieges, fortresses could be welcomed.
All-in-all an excellent strategy game which is very appealing to turn-based fans. Highly recommended and I wish for a sequel to come out, eventually eliminating the minor problems of the present game.

Great tactical game. Deep tactical options, multiple builds to explore and experiment with. Nice art. Good game design. Strongly recommended to every fan of turn-based tactical games.