Wargroove already fails; Shattered Throne's tutorial is better

Channel:

Master Knight DH

Subscribers:

1,970

Published on February 13, 2019 5:50:15 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eezy6NBIPQ

Game:

Wargroove (2019)

Category:

Tutorial

Duration: 9:10

140 views

0

Shattered Throne is playable on Steam here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/469710

I will say first and foremost, that I dislike Forced Tutorials in general, because they shred player agency and do not consider the idea of Replay Bonuses. However, Wargroove's is just appalling even by Forced Tutorial standards from what I saw of a YouTube video of it. Already it has basic action tutorials and it gets to the point where the first level plays itself out, even though basic action tutorials should be kept condensed. What is particularly heinous, however, is the Critical Hit tutorial, which uses 2 Pikemen reinforcements and forces the player to MOVE THEM SUBOPTIMALLY. You can't use matchup damage as an excuse either, because the enemy types take enough damage, plus the north of the 2 enemies the Pikemen faces should have both been Pikemen, not one a Pikeman and the other another enemy type that takes 80% base from Pikemen. Freaking Advance Wars 1 did this sort of thing better by using terrain to demonstrate damage differences. Wargroove, how can you waste the availability of positioning AND a 1.5x damage multiplier with convenient conditions?

Shattered Throne is better about the tutorial business. Sure its first level has a Forced Tutorial, with its own arguably suboptimal movement too, but it gets right to teaching about Combo Points, the existence of unit traits, and even Leader Powers; there's much more to do even without glitching out the Forced Tutorial so the arguably suboptimal movement is forgiveable; and there's actual threat to your units, kept tame enough but still can teach you some stuff. Case in point with that last one: taking out the first Zombie on the west front after following the Forced Tutorial will require positioning a Guard where he can be flanked by the second, positional Zombie and a Ghoul, displaying just how dangerous Ghouls can really get if they're allowed to run around. It's funny how the first level of a game is what opened the lock on my comprehension of flanking, and yet here we are thanks to Shattered Throne. Wargroove by contrast is never going to claim any such thing outside being a counterexample.

Oh, and Wargroove nice to see your Critical Hits also work on the enemy phase. Gods. ...yeah, Shattered Throne has Defender units be enemy phase friendly, but they're not overboard about it, and the game's Player Phase friendliness is absolutely abundant.

You know another thing Shattered Throne does right within the first level? Terrain to play around with. For example, there's actually 2 Mountain tiles on the west front, and with the availability of the Undo button, you can see how ST's Mountains boost ATK, particularly handy for range units who can move onto them and also have low ATK up against the game's subtraction defense. I'm able to appreciate this because, oh right, the game actually lets me do actions on my own.

That's what the whole thing boils down to: trust and competence. Wargroove involves neither. It's made abundantly clear with a problem that would have been taken out on square one.

(Oh, and I'm sorry, arbitrary dislikers, but your credibility is in another castle. Especially when you use dummy accounts for your maliciousness.)

Other Statistics