Tenderfoot Tactics

Tenderfoot Tactics is a turn-based tactical RPG. You run around the overworld with your party of 6, and fight other, generally larger, parties, which in essence are comprised of the same units as yours. There's about a dozen different classes, each with about five different abilities with multiple levels. There's also an equipment system, but it's just two stat items (you only have two stats overall - health and damage/healing power) - nothing fancy. There's some mysterious quest you have to solve, but it's not really much of a gameplay element, other than forcing you to move around, and thus triggering more battles.

I actually played Tenderfoot Tactics for a relatively long time compared to its simplicity - about 5 hours. It seemed really interesting at first. For one, the art and the music are... memorable. The terrain is constantly shifting around visually, meaning you can kind of understand where obstacles are, or if you're going uphill or downhill, but any details are lost. It's hard to explain. Similarly, the music is a bit like someone's just banging pieces of metal together in a rhythmic fashion. It's all quite unpleasant, and I'd prefer if they made this stuff a bit more normal, even if it sacrifices the "artisticness" of it.
No, but, what really kept me in at first was the combat. I think Tenderfoot Tactics has a really good combat system. The terrain is tile-based, and each tile has a height, vegetation density, growth rate, water level and fire level. You can manipulate each of these variables, and in fact most attacks or abilities do. Having a high ground advantage can mean your ranged attacks do more damage, and the enemies have a harder time reaching you. Similarly, it is difficult to move through water or dense vegetation, and fire actively burns and spreads. Despite this already being a lot more than most turn-based combat games offer, I really wish they would have done more, because the rest of the combat was so bland. Trees and cliffs don't block line of sight, meaning there's no cover. Fire can kind of be shrugged off. There was more potential here in general, if they really wanted to distinguish their game with this deep elemental terrain manipulation gameplay.

I guess a big reason I got bored was the lack of content. While each class was pretty interesting in itself, the different classes didn't feel too different, and had too much horizontal progression. Sometimes I didn't even want to upgrade because I felt my character might get weaker. The battles started to play out the same, and the story wasn't existent enough to make me care about its resolution. I think there were also some balance problems, with some classes or abilities just being better, which further hurt diverse parties and trying out new things.

Overall, I like that Tenderfoot Tactics did something a bit new, but there wasn't enough content around this cool mechanic, nor was the content polished enough. After going through 15-30 battles, you will probably feel you've seen what the game has to offer, and get bored. I sure did. So, I think it might be worth just trying out for the experience, but not really. I wouldn't recommend actually getting into it.