Human society has been divided. On one side, the natural course of human evolution has been disrupted. What started as an attempt to adapt to the harsh conditions of outer space and hostile planets, led to the creation of a weird race of transhuman cyborgs – the Augments. Driven by a desire to ‘liberate’ ordinary humans from the limitations of their wholly organic bodies, the Augments have launched a full-scale attack. Now we must defend our territory and fight back, to save our Kingdoms and all of humanity as we know it!
Codex of Victory features an extensive story-driven, single-player campaign that tasks you with building and commanding a hi-tech army of drone vehicles, tanks and robots. The campaign offers an exciting mix of real-time base building, global strategic planning and turn-based combat. Travelling between planets and territories, your sole task is to stop the Augments.
Steam User 13
Greetings, comrades, today I am here to talk to you about "Codex of Victory." If you enjoy war-games with turn-based combat, you will enjoy "Codex of Victory." It reminds me of playing the old Avalon Hill 20th century boardgames such as Panzer Leader and Panzer Blitz. The game is fun against the computer and can also be played against a human opponent in a 1-on-1 skirmish. Actually the skirmish mode is more fun as the computer mode involves a very long campaign. In PvP skirmish mode, your turns are timed and you only get a finite bit of time to study the map, plan your move, move your pieces and fire.
Before I go further into my own review, I want to address some misinformation that I've seen in other reviews: first of all, this is not a pay-to-win game, such as an idler or clicker. It's a standard IC game, published under the same umbrella as King's Bounty, though not made by the same guys. Also, it's not hard at all. Well, it has a hard setting, but you have two options: you can play it under the easy setting, or you can do what I did, and sit around and make lots of Space Rubles before your first battle.
The Campaign is divided into two parts. The first part should only take you a few hours, and it involves about 8 missions to take over the territories of your first planet. This ends with a boss battle against Baron Boarov. The second part is much longer, and involves you fighting Ascended Borg known as Augments. As with most such species, there is a Borq Queen in charge of the Augments. Where there are key campaign missions to be fought, at this point the game throws lots of side missions at you, most of which involve keeping the Augments from landing in a territory or in exterminating them if they grabbed a foothold.
In addition to the Campaign, you also have a secret underground base-- I think it's 36 rooms plus an elevator-- and in this base you can, between battles, build various rooms such as a Hangar, Warehouse, Research Center, Tactical Center, Foundry, Uranium Mine, and so forth. Rooms give you money, metal, weapons, upgrades, modules and so forth, and allow you to build whatever sort of army and air-force that you want. You army can be jeeps, tanks, artillery, turrets and mines, and the air-force is mostly attack helicopters, support helicopter, and various targeting drones and combat drones.
There are two ways to upgrade each unit: every vehicles, drone and Battle Mech has a tech tree from 1 to 10-- with each level giving a bonus such as extra hit points, extra range or extra attack-- but all units also have up to 3 modules, and you build these modules yourself, allowing you to give your tanks a force-field, extra armor, or even more range, for example. Some of the best modules allow you to min-max a particular drone or vehicle, so you can decide to take off 1 Hit Point and assign it to +1 attack, or gain a 15% critical hit chance at the cost of unit expense.
Speaking of expense: this is one way I am reminded of those old 20th century board-games. Or maybe Warcraft 3. If you remember from Warcraft, your army could only have 90 points worth of units in it. Codex of Victory is the same way; you get 140 points, and it's your choice if you want your reserve army to be 70 2-point jeeps or twenty 7-point helicopters. That's completely up to you, but this is a game that rewards kamikaze zerging of lots of little jeeps.
The game is 2 or 3 years old, but still runs great on my new Windows 10 computer; no glitches or crashes or any problems at all.
All achievements are doable, though as this is a war-game, many are time consuming and will require grinding. It will take about 40 hours to achieve most of them. However, as the game is all battles all the time, you will know within the first 20 minutes whether this game is for your or not.
Steam User 3
Picked this one up for a few Euros and it turned out much better than expected.
A lot of upgrading, several hero tier mechs you unlock as the game progresses.
Some interesting base control.
A fun little romp with some replayability.
If you like scifi, 4X / Advance Wars like combat, mecha with some rpg elements and the feudal aspect of Battletech... then you'll enjoy this one.
Definitely recommended at a sizeable discount.
Steam User 2
Thumbs up! This reminded me of the original X-COM game in that it alternates base building with turn-based combat. The combat system takes a little getting used to, but it’s worth the effort. You don’t automatically get to move all your units every turn. On your turn, you have a limited number of points to spend. You can use the points to deploy units. You can also use points for movement and attacks/special abilities. There usually aren’t enough points to perform all the actions that you want, so you have to decide which units will get to use points. Some units cost so much that if you deploy them, you won’t be able to do anything else that turn. There’s about a dozen different units though, so you can experiment with different strategies.
The base building phase gives you a chance to build more units or to upgrade existing units. Units start at level 1 and can be upgraded to level 10. Each level upgrade grants a bonus such as longer range or more hit points. In addition to the standard bonuses from upgrading units, there are also bonuses from modules that you can pick from. There are plenty of interesting combinations that you can come up with by trying various modules with different units. One of my favorite combos is to give Lord Lionheart’s battle armor all the modules with attack bonuses. That way he can single-handedly win some missions on the first turn by destroying the enemy dropship with one shot.
The story isn’t too bad, but I thought the graphics were rather impressive indeed. You can zoom in and see how much detail they put in. If you really like the graphics, then you can take a look at the included pdf file with additional artwork.
Almost all of the achievements can be obtained in the campaign. There is only one achievement for playing a multiplayer game, but you don’t have to win. You just have to play one multiplayer battle to get it. Multiplayer mode seemed to work without glitches, but it seems like an afterthought when compared to the main campaign.
The game is a few years old and doesn’t seem like it will get any more updates. However, it seems to run okay under Windows 10. One glitch I encountered was being unable to continue when the computer didn’t finish it’s turn in a battle, but I was able to just restart the battle. The game does have a nice autosave feature, so you don’t have to constantly keep saving the game yourself, but there is a manual save feature also, so you can keep saving the game yourself if you really want to.
Final verdict. If you like turn-based combat, then this game is worth taking a look at.
Steam User 4
It's like Xcom and Into the Breach were mashed up into a game. It's an absolute blast and worth your time.
Steam User 1
It's a fun game.
Steam User 1
Wow :)
X-com meets good old Battle Isle. I'm loving it!
It's just a tiny little bit too simple to be perfect, but all the mechanics work the way they should.
The battles flow nicely, AI is smart enough on Normal Difficulty, the art is simple but perfectly readable.
I have no idea how long it is, but.. just play it. It's awesome!
Steam User 1
Nice turn-based game strategy game with well known battle mechanics.
The strategic layer with base building, research and travel to battle areas is similar to XCOM. (This is NOT a converted mobile game, as some reviewers wrote - those mechanics have been invented before free-to-play and work very well.)
There is a campaign that is fairly easy at normal difficulty.
Again, nothing exceptional, but nicely done and good motivation to research and optimize units to progress in the campaign.
Overall an entertaining game that kept me busy for 20+ hours and that I may pick up and play through again in a year or two.