Fae Tactics

Another turn-based tactics game today, this time with a better concept, but not as good of an execution. It's Fae Tactics.

I was initially very hopeful for this, considering the large amount of mechanics this game had implemented. It had a good introduction to them as well, usually introducing a new mechanic one battle, then giving one to practice it, then introducing the next one.
You control up to 6 units on a small map. Each unit has 10+ stats, and then several passive abilities as well as an element. You have melee units, ranged units, terrain has varying height, and units have stats for how much higher than themselves can they move and attack. There's benefits for attacking from above, from behind, against enemies of an element weak to yours, combo attacks, and more. Every unit also has an assist or wait ability they can use instead of attacking that turn, those usually being an allied buff and a self-buff, respectively. Combined with leveling, equippable items, customizable team compositions, and probably many more things I forgot, Fae Tactics is actually quite a deep game.

However, the problems start to arise as you actually get into the game. I think the overall largest problem is the sub-par AI. For one, the enemies are very passive until you actually get close to them. They clump up into small groups (or alone, if no one is nearby) and start buffing each other forever while you have your fight at the other end of the map. This trivializes many encounters, because as long as you survive the first group of enemies near your spawn, you can take all the time you want to apply all allied and self buffs, wait for your spells to be off-cooldown, and heal all your units to full. This wouldn't even necessarily be a problem, as the game can be difficult despite allowing you these times of respite, but it takes very many turns to reach an optimal state if you only have a single unit handing out good buffs and/or many injured units to heal. I could just forego this tedious phase and rush onwards, but a good developer knows that the optimal way to play must also be the most fun way to play. At the very least, these two things should be strongly correlated.
The AI troubles don't end here, because the developers have failed at yet another common design aspect - they gave you allied units that aren't under your control, must not die, but are also bad at keeping themselves alive. They do often force you to adapt a more aggressive playstyle to keep up with them, but that still feels bad because of the reasons mentioned above.
Other minor complaints include character level-ups feeling unsatisfying, as they are just stat bonuses, the effects of multiple stats being unexplained, as well as the game lacking a manual to look up mechanics after they were first introduced. Sometimes the party composition decision feels kind of fake, as you just pick the same team, or as many units as you can that are effective against the element the enemy has the most of. Finally, I would also like to mention that while the pixel art looked good, the entire game had a terribly low resolution, making most areas of the screen very blurry and somewhat unpleasant to look at. The entire UI looked more like it was designed for a mobile game, which this game might actually have been good as.

Overall, Fae Tactics has interesting ideas, many systems, and potential to be a good high-depth game. This potential, however, does not translate into reality mainly due to a poorly implemented AI, but also other, less serious problems. I wouldn't go as far as to say Fae Tactics is a bad game, and it could definitely be fun if you're specifically looking for another turn-based tactics game to play. If you're not a huge fan of most games of this specific genre though, and only somewhat like strategy games, then there are probably many better picks out there than this. So, personally, I can't recommend it.