Warriors of the Nile is a roguelike strategy RPG that has you take a party of 3 warriors across a series of encounters to eventually fight the final boss. Like most roguelikes, there is no real story or reason why you do this beyond the game itself. Combat plays in a way that is likely familiar to anyone who plays games in this genre. You control your party members, they can each move and then attack, and then the enemy goes, moving and attacking. Your goal in every encounter is simply to kill every single other enemy, and you win the encounter. Your party doesn't heal between encounters, so you must ensure that you minimze the amount of damage you take. Each character has the option to use a miracle; a single ability that is unique to each character that costs energy. Characters can obtain energy via killing enemies, Using a miracle doesn't end your turn, and you still take an attack afterwards. After a battle, you obtain a reward, the form of a tablet, silver, pharaoh coin, or an item. Tablets provide perks for your characters that last for this run. They range from simplistic (+2 attack) to complex game-changing abilities (such as your miracle being able to be used at any range). Most of them are more on the complex side; the basic ones are largely relegated to the more common tiers. Items are equipment you slot into your character, providing them improved stats and potentially new situational benefits.Silver Coins and Pharoah Coins are currency used during the run to buy more progression for your characters. After the run, there is a limited set of metaprogression to improve the characters a bit and provide some new options for them to select in the run. On the face of it, this seems fairly simple as far as a tactics roguelike goes. There are no extra abilities, no additional spells, no additional actions. But this is deceptive, and in fact one of the games greatest strengths. The beauty of the game is in the progression. There are a number of interesting combinations of tablets and items that can result in broken combos and synergies that play out. Perhaps your assassin can teleport across half the map, assassinate an enemy, then walk back. That's one combo piece. But then you get the ability for your assassin to fire off an extra attack when she kills an enemy. And then each time she attacks she throws daggers at nearby enemies as well. Suddenly your assassin is warping around the map killing a bunch of enemies and running back to safety before they can respond. The strategy in the game is finding a way into one powerful synergy or the other before losing, and the game fully expects it. On the harder difficulties the game requires you to be doing something broken or you will just lose. And this is what makes the game interesting in fun. In the vein of roguelikes such as slay the spire, the game is all about perservering until you find a way to break the game within your existing run. Then you win, push up the difficulty, and try again, finding yet another new way to do it. And there are a lot of ways to do it. The game seems initially lackluster in diversity. You have three characters, a fighter, a hunter, and a mage, and you must being one of each into a run. But, each class has 7 different variants that all play meaningfully different from each other, and that adds a good deal of replayability. For what the game sets out to do, it does it shockingly well. Warriors of the Nile 2 is a surprisingly robust tactics roguelike that really aims to scratch the itch of a good roguelike progression party builder. If you want a roguelike that has you play on a tactical grid and sees you growing rapidly in power for your characters, this game exactly hits that itch. A surprising amount of tactic roguelikes fail to do this in a meaningful way, but this game really gets it going with what initially seems like a limited set of tools. That said, there is one big con to discuss - Translation and UI design. The game wasn't made by primary english speaking devs, and it tells. A number of mechanics are obfuscated just because there's no way to tell what it does. For example, there is a stat called DMG RNG. Sometimes an abillity says +1 DMG RNG. What does it do? Well, for some characters it increases the aoe size of your attack. For others, it makes your attack cleave onto adjacent enemies. Where is this mentioned? Nowhere. And make sure not to confuse it with Star RNG, which makes some mage classes have larger aoe, though DMG RNG also makes them hit more. Some boss enemies have abilities you can't figure out because the english translation has cut off the full language of their ability. This adds to the learning curve, but once you figure out what the words mean, its very compelling. Warriors of the Nile 2 really scratches that itch for a good progression party based tactics roguelike. The systems in it are surprisingly robust, and the game has a depth of replay value that is hidden on the surface. This isn't going to be a 100 hour game, but for anyone who wants to play a solid tactics roguelike game, Warriors of the Nile 2 is well worth the price.
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