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.

Brilliant game. This games crime was it was ahead of its time. Some great idea's and mechanics that are only just starting to appear in games of this type today.
A massively underrated gem. The graphics and animations are something to behold, sound and music are good too.
One that belongs in every turn based strategy fans library.
I played the paint off this game when I bought it on GoG. I also bought it on Steam to support the dev's.

This is a soft recommendation. The different "classes" work well together and the combat mechanics are interesting, but there's a lot of randomness when it comes to the mutators (which you need to get powerful), the node-based movement system on the map is very limiting, and each of the 4 maps are essentially identical so it becomes tiring when you get to the 3rd/4th map. I soldiered on till the end but I couldn't defeat the final boss, and I just don't have the urge to grind to higher levels at this point. If the game was just 2-3 maps instead of 4, and therefore a more focused experience it would have been better in my opinion. Still, it was fun whilst it lasted.

Really good game with a lot of depth and build flexibility. I usually tend to save scum, but this time I played on Ironman mode because it felt like the game would be more fun that way and I was right. I’ve only had to restart once so far, and that was early on when I didn’t fully understand the mechanics.

It’s also not as punishing as some other games in the genre. If a character “dies” during a mission, they’re not gone for good they just become injured. At that point, you can either heal them and wait until they recover, or keep using them while risking permanent loss. The game strikes a nice balance where mistakes are allowed without being overly harsh.

One thing to keep in mind is that it’s still possible to soft-lock yourself, even if you save scum. If you progress with a poorly built team or bad synergy, you might eventually hit a wall where you can’t beat enemies in later zones.

Lastly, a really big downside is how the game handles new party members in the later stages. When you recruit someone new, it takes a long time to get them up to the same strength as your existing team. Because of that, you rarely feel incentivized to switch out characters, which can limit experimentation.

If you like turn-based strategy games, Urtuk is worth a try. It is all just battles and planning, wasting little time with stories and build-up; which was a breath of fresh air at first, but then in the late game I started missing a stronger narrative. The combat is a lot of fun and the learning curve was hearty enough. I may yet return to give an honest try to the hardest difficulty one day - and would definitely keep my eyes out for a sequel as the mechanics were pretty enjoyable throughout.
Cost compared to time played: well worth it :)

I hesitated to get this game because I was not a fan of the art style reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon (which I don't like as well), so I was thinking this was another simplistic turn based copycat of DD made in an afternoon with Unity (it is not made with Unity btw).
Anyway I was terribly wrong because this is a totally different beast compared those type of games, there are a lot of things going on here and it is much more serious than I expected, it requires a functioning brain at all times and it is amazing.
Be prepared to be wiped out often, this is a difficult and addictive game where the more you think about your turn, the more strategies to approach the fight come to mind, some encounters are pain in the rear especially those with boiling ground expanding.

Fun.
With very many factions and different tactics this game is fun for many hours.