Tooth and Tail

The gameplay is great. Missions are short, so it keeps your attention. But the story is what you play for. Talk to EVERYONE! Seriously, I found the story and the details everyone shares incredibly disturbing and I couldn't get enough. This...this world is...the definition of dystopian. Talk about dog-eat-dog... its great

This indie game "Tooth and Tail" is a very different approach to the RTS genre.
Very simple yet with potential to be complex.
By their nature, RTS games are predominately complex and have a high learning curve, as expected from Dedicated PC games. You must be strategical and have good reflexes to compete.
No wonder the genre exploded and caused multi-million dollar tournaments and entire countries (Korea) recognizing it as the first E-Sport!
Due to that, the genre outlived its time and is in a decline. Having such a difficult barrier of entry does not help the issue.
That's where new age RTS like this game come into play.
While flawed in its own way, "Tooth and Tail" proves that the core gameplay loop of RTS can be enjoyed by all, even if all the complexity is stripped down and the genre is distilled to its very basics.
This game feels perfectly tailor-made for playing on tiny and inferior Tablets or Steam Deck.
The matches can barely last 5 minutes and require players to be hectic and highly aggressive.
No macro: There is no base building, only a meager attempt at fortification, if you can even call it that.
No micro: You don't control an army but a single commanding unit which also happens to be your actual Mouse cursor!
-
You can imagine what issues arise with this. Your unit is your cursor and your screen is locked 100% of the time on you. Meaning you can't survey the map. Your commander can be killed, which wrestles the control from you and forces you to wait and be utterly inactive until your unit respawns shortly. That can mean life or death for your army that is left behind enemy lines..
The game was made with simplicity in mind and can be easily learned. Maybe TOO easily.
You can drop it anytime and pick up in a couple of years and be just as good as you were before.
The development focused too much on making the controls intuitive and streamlined for mainstream casuals.
So it is no wonder that the multiplayed died. (Sure there is a dedicated Discord community, but who hasn't by now..)
What I absolutely enjoyed about this game is the pixel artstyle and the very political story!
The pixel art is cute and the headquarters are fun to explore, but in actual gameplay it gets a bit hard to navigate pixelated maps where you can't distinguish from a rocky wall/cliff or a passage/stairs..
The single player campaign plays through all 4 factions and shows you the conflict from each one's perspective.
(I wish the gameplay itself was more story-focused like Starcraft/Warcraft campaigns instead of each mission being a challenge akin to puzzles. The difficulty was all over the place, sometimes it spiked, other times it mellowed.)
-
Each faction is politically unique and goes in depth to differentiate between them. The conflict can be applied to any country, but in this game fits the 1917 Russian Revolution the most.
1) Bellafide (Longcoats) represents the agitated capitalist bourgeoisie who were fine with injustice until it finally touched them personally. Now a revolution is ignited in the name of a seeming meritocracy but we all know it is in order to preserve the power and influence of the merchants in dire times.
2) Hopper (Commonfolk) represents the proletariat lower-class that was always getting the short end of the stick. Their revolt was inevitable and may be justified, but their lack of a functional plan would sooner or later pop like a bubble and leave the entire country in squalor.
3) Archimedes (The Civilized) represents both the aristocracy and the church. Both holding power in the past, both utterly corrupt. Their inhumane ways may have worked if they simply wouldn't get so greedy. Truly the rats feasting on the dark side of a decaying Monarchy.
4) Quartermaster (K.S.R) represent the secret police like the KGB or CIA. But in this historical case, more the KGB who took over the military after the collapse of the monarchy. Holding great power, but lacking the head to decide what to do with it, so they follow their original directive of "keeping up order at whatever cost", even if that order is misplaced/ out of date.
So basically Russia in a nutshell.
Not exactly Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, revolutionaries and Lenin, but a distilled recap version of history.
Try out this new take on RTS genre, maybe the future of RTS is in tablets/Steam deck..
(But don't come crying in the future when cross-play is introduced and superior PC masters outperform your pathetic aim-assisted console controllers, like it already happened in the FPS genre.) lol
I greatly enjoyed the political aspect,
that alone is a big plus in my book worth checking this game out.

Beautiful looking RTS game that's really friendly for new players, or controller players. Still lots of depth without having to have really high APM to compete.
And yes, unlike what some other reviews state, there is a way to set up a skirmish game vs AI if you want to do that.

Underratted RTS, totally unique in it's gameplay and it's a damn shame it's not alive and thriving. Cannot recommend this game enough.

Probably the best aspects of this game are everything but the core gameplay:

-The Soviet era story + animal farm references with carnivorous animals is awesome.
-The campaign manages to remain non-repetitive and engaging.
-The sprites and general aesthetic are very nice.
-The music does its job very well.

But the core gameplay remains obtuse, mainly because only being able to pick units as either a class or everybody makes it near impossible to properly move the units you want to attack with, while also defending the spots you want to defend.

It also becomes extremely annoying how even when you are bleeding resources, there is no button (that I know of) to stop the spawn points from constantly creating new units, so you might legitimately have moments where you can't capture a farm at all because your spawn points never let you accumulate 60 food, all while your current farms are about to dry out.

Basically, it's not TOO bad if all you want is to finish the campaign, it doesn't become too much of an issue until the latter half of the 3rd faction, and ultimately you can manage to finish it all without having to tryhard the game.

That said I recognize this might just be a "me issue" and maybe I simply failed to fully grasp what the devs expected of the player, after all, the game does have sort of a PVP competitive scene, which means other people managed to find ways to git gud at the mechanics.

Ultimately I can recommend buying the game during a sale on the quality of its campaign, story, and aesthetics, they are very much worth it, but you might have less-than-ideal moments due to the limitations of the mechanics.

Be warned, the multiplayer is dead. Despite this it has got a great campaign which has unique objectives per mission with a great story, instead of being a "sequence of skirmish matches."
The Devs also made an amazing decision to make all the ranked multiplayer achievements doable single player by playing skirmish matches against the higher AI difficultys.
I would recommend waiting for a sale (often -75% sale every couple months), definitely worth getting, even if you are inexperienced with RTS games.
in ~16 hours I was able to beat the campaign, and get 100% achievements, The rest of my playtime was spent playing skirmish matches.

RTS but watered down for the common player. While the bar is lowered, the ceiling is still up there!

Story wise, I think they did a great job world building and its political commentary is superb. You have animals that are going hungry due to a plague so they resorted to eating each other! The civilized aristocrats declare that a lottery will decide who is butchered but others seem to suspect its rigged in their favor. They break off into faction and go to war.