Tooth and Tail

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!
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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.)
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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.

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

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.

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.

Deceptively simple. If you bring depth of strategy to this game, you will find it delivers depth of strategy. It feels a bit more like chess at times, since a lot of effective moves are "Material gains". It's impossible to fully protect your units in most cases, but they respawn quickly. So instead, it's about keeping your unit count above that of your opponent, and using your superior firepower to find new strategic footholds.
This game holds up, and on controller is very fun. I only wish I had it on my Switch!

Great!
An absolute gem of a game! I like its fast-paced mechanics, character design, and voice acting; because of this, they all feel alive when fighting; however, this game has a unique cursor and an absurdly difficult campaign.