Drone Tactics

"a fun, simple tactics game with a good range of difficulty settings"

Drone Tactics gameplay system is similar to the Super Robot Wars series, set in an Advance Wars style universe of talking mecha bugs and mostly child pilots. Unlike the recent Rondo of Swords, it's easy and accessible enough for just about anyone to play, with 3 difficulty settings and a simple gameplay system. On the other end of the scale, the optional levels past the main campaign can be quite challenging. Anyone who enjoys tactics games should definitely pick this up.

The game has a nice clean design and a fairly snappy interface. Like other Success games, it tends to fall on its face with lack of UI niceties and features that gamers have come to expect in a modern game. There's no options menu to turn battle animations off (expect to press a lot of 'skip cutscene' buttons), or turn on a black grid over the map, or turn on auto end-turn when your units are finished moving, or make the game remember what last attack you chose per mech.
Deploying units takes too long, as there are too many unnecessary screens to go through to get all 8 of your units out. Fortunately these annoyances are not game stopping.

The difficulty of the game is flexible since players can grind levels, money, and free equipment in the badlands stages. There are no rewards for completing a mission well, and the only penalty for losing units is that they only get half XP at the end of the stage. Interestingly, units do not gain XP during missions, only in between them. This makes it less worrisome when it comes to one unit outleveling another one.

The level design is a mixed bag. Most of the campaign is decent, although nothing will really tax a good players strategy. Some of the main chapters have been sloppily designed, leaving my army running around to the edges of the map trying to finish off a couple hard to reach units in the corner that don't want to start moving. This artificially extended a couple chapters for no good reason.

Drone Tactics is one of those unusual games where the optional levels go beyond the campaign in terms of enemy levels and challenge. Once you finish the campaign, you have the option of playing through a large number of well designed and more difficult Badlands stages. The difficulty really ramps up at Badlands 31+ - all the maps are large size and frequently require certain party, equipment, and card setups to survive (assuming you didn't outlevel them).

The cards system itself is pretty good. There are healing cards, teleport cards, buff cards, cards that let you drop obstacles to blockade an enemy, damage up cards, and cards you can use when counterattacking. The minigames attached to the cards got old really quick once I started using them a lot. When you have the potential to use 16 cards per chapter, plus minigames to fend off enemies using their own cards, it loses its appeal faster than a boring Wario Ware knockoff.

So what handicaps would provide a decent challenge to a player looking for one? Here's what I used on Hard Mode, which I found to be definitely hard enough, especially in the later Badlands stages.

1. Only play each Badlands map once.
2. No player controlled units destroyed by the end of the mission.
3. Get all capsules possible.
4. No turtling or trying to win by attrition. Aim for a fast completion time.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/22/08

Game Release: Drone Tactics (US, 05/12/08)