"Tough Witch" nomad review 7 points When "anti-tower defense" meets barista
Once upon a time, an indie game called VA11-HALL-A (Operation Cyberpunk Bartender) made players realize for the first time that "chat games" that used to be bartending and gossiping with guests can be fun.
You sip the music on the jukebox while listening to the guests talk about what happened to them, they may be acquaintances who have been here many times, who have become your friends, or they may be strange people who have set foot by chance, in order to bring some absurd stories. And although you never step out of the bar, you use the stories of your guests to build a complete cyberpunk world in your mind.
Sorry, although we just talked about VA11-HALL-A in our last Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood review, we need to talk again for some helpless reason.
And I'm a big fan of these kinds of games.
Therefore, whether it is "Red String Club", "Coffee Heart Talk", or the recently released "Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood", I can't wait to experience it as soon as it is released.
The same is true of "The Witch of Strength". I was optimistic about the game at the previous Steam New Products Festival, both in terms of making coffee and chatting with customers, and in the original "anti-tower defense" gameplay.
However, the quality of its finished product after release can only disappoint me. Whether in terms of plot or gameplay, it should need more polishing before it is released, which makes it difficult for the current "Witch with Strength" to be called an excellent work.
Make coffee that changes lives
In "The Witch of Strength", you will play as a coffee shop lady, and in front of each customer, you have to grind, extract, and flavor, and personally handle each coffee production process.
Even if you don't know anything about how to brew coffee, don't worry. Because the game will not only teach you how to use the machine, but also indicate the production process of each coffee on the side menu, you can bring up a cup of delicious American, mocha, latte as long as you follow the highlighted prompts.
In addition to enjoying coffee, customers will also chat with you, confide in you about their thoughts and troubles, and you will meet all kinds of people and learn about their stories in the process.
During the production process, "The Witch of Strength" made appropriate simplifications of the coffee system. You don't have to bother with the selection of coffee beans, and the final pulling process, the system will also complete it for you.
But let's be honest, brewing coffee actually brings very little pleasure. Although there are many types of coffee available on the menu, customers are very simple in their order choices most of the time, basically either American or Mocha, and the more free fuzzy ordering orders like "sweet/bitter" are very limited and rarely give you enough room to play.
As for the final flavoring system for making coffee, it is basically a decoration. When a guest wanted a sweet drink, I added a lot of sugar and chocolate chips to her coffee to maximize the sweetness scale, but the guest was still complaining that the coffee was "not sweet enough". This outrageous way of judging can only feel inexplicable.
In the writing of chat texts, "Tough Witch" can only be said to be decent.
Instead of shaping the worldview through dialogue, as VA11-HALL-A does, it takes a more clever approach: based on reality, it reverses how the characters in the game will say and do.
Therefore, you can see that in this overhead "Alola City", reporters are still writing public accounts, worrying about how to create traffic every day. Game producers, on the other hand, resigned from major manufacturers and devoted themselves to independent games, spending all day on investment and bugging.
I'm not saying it's bad. Appealing to the mouth of the game character to tell the problems that exist in the real world will indeed make players have more identification during the game, and also produce many memes that make people laugh. But it also often makes people feel dramatic, so that it is difficult to truly immerse yourself in the world shaped by the game and to make an emotional connection with the characters, which is often fatal for a game with a large proportion of words.
In fact, character shaping has indeed become one of the biggest shortcomings of "Hardened Witch". The Qing classmate that the player came into contact with in the first chapter only came to the coffee shop once at best, and said two words casually with the protagonist, but immediately became like a deep bond in the subsequent plot and became "the object that must be saved". It feels like the story needs to be arranged this way, but the text doesn't show enough power at all, and in the end it can only turn in at great speed, leaving only the confused player.
So until the level, "Witch of Strength" did not let me see any impressive characters, and there was nothing else that could support the characters except their fairly delicate standing paintings, which made the story of the game pale and lackluster.
Inventive anti-tower defense
Running a coffee shop is just your superficial job, and your true identity is that of a witch who has made a contract with the devil.
After accepting the commission of an old friend, you need to become an "exorcist" in your free time to secretly investigate the phenomenon of the people of Alora City being possessed by demons, and use your own power to defeat the power of demons and restore them to normal.
And the process of fighting is the unique "anti-tower defense" gameplay of this work.
In a general tower defense game, what the player has to do is to deploy various defense towers around the established road to attack the enemies on the road and prevent them from reaching the end and bursting their base.
In Extra Witch, on the other hand, you're controlling minions running down the road, while breaking through are the defensive units that the enemy has left behind on the map.
It sounds a bit like Loop Heroes, but there's actually a gap between the concept of Magic and Force. The game does not design the growth content in the bureau, and the player's operations are very limited, you can not directly control the unit actions, you can only choose the order of deployment of the team members, or simply click the arrows at the fork of the road to control the direction of the entire team.
Therefore, this "anti-tower defense" gameplay experience is actually the same as traditional tower defense games. You'll need to pick your squad before entering the level, and after the battle, you'll have to take on some "Sunflower" units that can last for more money in order to deploy other, more powerful advanced units.
The difference is that you can freely control the direction your team is going to decide which enemies to defeat first. You can either adjust the arrows to take your team into a closed section and repeatedly whip a bloody enemy, or you can create a path that allows the team to pass quickly to minimize damage from attacking enemies.
The division of labor in these units is also very clear, in addition to the production cost units mentioned above, there are also various functions such as physical attacker, magic attacker, tank, healing, etc. If you subdivide it, you can also extend the summon-type genre that generates additional item cards, and the enhanced genre that relies on retreat and redeployment to improve the quality of units and send special units, which still has a certain depth when actually playing.
Moreover, as the process evolved, the game also expanded more gameplay for anti-tower defense levels. For example, you can use cards to freely switch between the aquatic world/underwater world, avoid some strong enemies who block the road, or you need to let the unit deliver the express to the designated area within the time limit, both to ensure speed and to ensure that the unit can survive the enemy's powerful firepower.
However, there is still a lot of room for polishing in this work's anti-tower defense gameplay.
In order to allow players to assign units like the Fool that are suitable for solo action, the game doesn't make all your units act strictly in line. At the fork, if you click the arrows to switch a little slower, it's likely that only two or three units have turned around, while the rest of the people are still on their way.
As a result, your team is always very chaotic during the march, and the tank units you arrange may not work at all at all in many cases - you originally put them at the front of the line to get them to eat the main damage, but after a few turns, the order of the team is completely out of order, leaving the tank units in the center of the line.
And there are some problems with the design of the underwater world. The cards needed to switch worlds are in high demand in the level, and the output is not only scarce, but also relies heavily on destroying designated monsters. This leads to most of the levels of the underwater world requiring players to make perfect planning in advance, determine where to switch the world, and when to switch back, and if you are new to the world, then it is likely that you will end up because the cards for switching the world are consumed and you will not be able to see the boss at all, so you can only switch the card again.
While this design adds more puzzle elements to the game's levels, it also severely limits the way players can play, and repeatedly reopening cards is certainly not a pleasant thing.
Deepen bonds with helpers
In addition to opening shops and fighting, "Witch of Strength" also provides players with a lot of free time to move, building a personal attribute + bond system somewhat similar to "Persona".
In the free time, "Powerful Witch" will undoubtedly show the excellent soundtrack level. Each song not only has a strong melody, but also a very varied style, and whether it is jazz or electro, it is perfectly embedded in the scene, creating a better atmosphere for the game.
The customers you've received when you open your coffee shop will become your helpers, and as you spend more time with them, you'll learn more about their stories, and when the bond reaches full value, they'll give you special witch cards to add new available units to your anti-tower gameplay.
Of course, in the free time, you can also improve your courage, charm, and wisdom attributes by eating hot pot, watching movies, visiting bookstores and other actions, and you can only open and assist the subsequent plots of the objects when a certain attribute reaches a certain value.
Unfortunately, these properties serve no purpose other than to start the story, do not affect the course of certain events, and there are no options that specify properties. It feels like it is purely to restore the atmosphere of "Persona", and the mechanics have followed this system, and it has not been organically integrated with the entire game.
Moreover, in fact, "Tough Witch" is too demanding on the player's schedule. During the process, I tried to save as much time as possible to try to achieve full bonds, but in the end, the time in the game was only enough for me to achieve half of the characters' bonds. Since there is no time-saving method of "opening the temple of the mind at once" in the game, it is actually forcing the player to play for multiple weeks - but the replay value of "Magic Girl" is almost nothing, and the process of multi-week is basically the same as that of Week.
From some of the later maps of Gone Hard, you can also see slight traces of rushing. Maps such as colleges, hospitals, and beaches are useless after triggering the plot once, and there are almost no interactive elements in the map, far less rich than the first two shopping streets, and the actual utilization rate of the huge scene is very low, which is quite regrettable.
Overall review
"Magic Girl" brings together a lot of excellent gameplay, giving people a very unique experience, but it seems to have many problems in terms of coffee making, anti-tower defense, and bonding systems. Its story is both grounded and carries a strong two-dimensional imprint, but the character shaping is too pale and does not bring too many surprises.