Success / Atlus
Reviewed by Anthony
When impassioned about a game, reviewing it usually means one of two things: I want to grab people and say either “Give this game a chance!” or “Don’t buy that game: it’s horribly overrated!” In this case, I’m pleased to announce that this little gem that flew under most people’s radar falls squarely into the first category for me. Whether it was simply buried under Atlus’s impressive DS library, or maybe the insect theme turned off RPGers and the strategy RPG gameplay turned off kids... the fact is, Drone Tactics was mostly glossed over among DS RPGs, and that’s a shame, because it’s one of the most fun DS games I’ve played to date.
Drone Tactics follows a rather cheesy/silly story where some bug-loving children get whisked away to a faraway planet to help defend the native race of insects from a new attacking force called “The Black Swarm”. Battles are strategy RPG oriented, and take place on a well-designed grid complete with highly impressive battle animations. Players can customize and outfit their units to serve specific purposes, use special cards to influence battles, and participate in either special bonus maps or simply grind through the story. Though the story is inconsequential, the gameplay is rock solid and should be a joy for RPGers who like the occasional strategy RPG.
What’s good:
- The graphics are just fantastic. Battle maps aren’t graphically impressive, but they’re very well made. Units and map areas are represented very clearly, and because the terrain is flat and focuses on movement/defense statistics, there’s no rotating or “find the unit” problems to be found. However, where it truly shines is in the battle animations. All units are represented in impressive 3-D with good animation for their attacks. Further still, every piece of equipment is also fully realized in 3-D with the unit, and combined with customizable paint and emblem schemes, that is an awesome feat.
- Surprisingly, they got a major video game composer to do the music. Although there aren’t a ton of songs overall, many are quite good, and certainly more than you’d expect from an insect-based strategy RPG.
- For any and all of your units, you have the option of customizing their appearance with a pretty wide range of colors from a palette. Units have some set patterns and colors as well as overall main and sub colors to edit. As a result, if you want to sit and make every unit look unique and awesome, you can. Or if you’re going for a theme, you can have a whole army of teal units if you’re, say, my wife. On top of that, you can even design your own “emblem” that identifies your army and is plastered onto your units in one or more locations. It being a technical feat aside, this was a fun aspect to tinker with.
- Battles are presented very well overall. Placing the cursor on any unit displays all of its pertinent stats on the top screen, and if you want more information, the X button brings up specifics on its weaponry and special attributes. The same goes for terrain, with all areas having a short description showing the movement abilities of various types of units, the defense rating, and any other notes on it. Holding B on a unit displays its movement range, attack range, and long-range attack range. They did a great job of allowing you to navigate these battles without being encumbered by menus.
- Unit diversity and customization is done very well here. Over time you’ll gradually get more units to work with, and with few exceptions, all have unique characteristics that may or may not warrant use in your party. All units have three equipment slots for use, and these slots can be used for actual weaponry or for parts that can raise various statistics. That may sound standard, but it’s actually pretty genius in both its simplicity and its strategy. With a few tweaks, you can decide to make a pure melee unit, a unit that can use all types of attacks, a powerful long-range unit that’s a paper doll if hit, or whatever works best for you. If something doesn’t quite work, a quick change of equipment may add new life to a unit that was dragging. It does a great job of encouraging different strategies without punishing you for errors in judgment.
- The AI is pretty good all around. Although it starts out fairly easy, the AI ramps up pretty well and it was clear to see sometimes when the enemies were specifically reacting to my decisions, and not just set patterns. They’ll often be smart and send decent sized swarms at you, such that even the best sniping means a few will get through to hurt you. But it’s balanced enough that despite the enemies maybe having 3-5 times as many units as you, they will rarely just unfairly bum-rush you. Further, it’s actually a shame this game doesn’t have the generic “save x character!” battle that’s common among strategy RPGs. Why? Because even helper partner AI is fantastic. They’ll go to proper areas to defend, attack conservatively, and heal themselves when necessary. It was almost baffling to see, given most strategy RPGs require you to save suicidal idiots.
- Extra “Badlands” levels exist for you to utilize at any point in the story for gaining supplemental income, experience, cards, and items. You can go back to any you like, making it a much nicer option than random battling.
What’s neutral:
- The “Card” system for making special effects happen in battle was simultaneously an exercise in brilliance and of missed opportunities. On the brilliant side: there is a great diversity in the types of Cards available and their effects. While some run through generic ideas like increased attack or healing, others will allow for increased range, specialized countering, minor teleportation, self-destruction, and other techniques that you can really use to your specialized advantage. Further, you get weaker cards after all battles that you can combine into various stronger cards at your whim. On the bad side, activating certain cards forces you to play a touch-screen minigame, and of those games, only half are remotely winnable under normal circumstances, with the others being downright impossible to win against bosses. Further, certain cards seem to be negated completely by losing the touch screen game, while several still activate at roughly 50% power. So even if you go through the work to win, a boss attacking at 150% power still means you’re dead. The fact that enemy teams that can have 3-5 times as many units as you can use these cards actually adds a level of imbalance to it. Reviving is only done with a very rare card, so if they slaughter one of your units by using a card, it’s a lot more damaging to lose 1/8th of your team versus them losing 1/30th of theirs. Further, you won’t know they’re using a card until they’ve activated it, so if you might’ve had a card to save you, it’s too late by time you know that they’ve activated it. Great for PvP mind-games, but not as good for fighting the computer.
- There are actually more bonus Badlands levels than story chapters; over twice as many in fact. Although they start out as simple diversions, partway through they start adding some interesting strategic setups to overcome, and just past the halfway point, they become more difficult than the main game’s fights. That inherently isn’t a problem, but to have the most challenging and diverse battles only available through a side area gradually unlocked and not at all related to the story... well, it means that some of the creativity was lost from story battles and the average player will miss those entirely.
- Especially notable in the mid-to-late Badlands levels, enemies having amazing accessories that you can’t obtain is kind of a slap in the face.
- I saw a review utterly blast the game for not being able to cancel out of an attack once you’ve chosen a target. While I agree that’s somewhat archaic, Drone Tactics gives you the full listing of stats on the top screen for any target before you attack it, which is more than most modern strategy RPGs give you. It didn’t cause any problems for me.
- No voice work to be found here, and despite good music, there’s surprisingly few sound effects overall. Loooots of repetitive hits, beams, bullets and malfunction noises. It’s not terrible, but a few deviations from the same sounds would’ve been cool.
What’s bad:
- Some items in the shop increase a weapon's accuracy, but you can't tell until you purchase or memorize the items which of the two possible stats it raises. Eventually you learn what does what, but that's still a silly oversight.
- Although I don’t mind the lack of damage/hit estimates, they really should have done something to help quantify the effects of accuracy and evasion. For example, the very defensive Pillbug unit, at say, 120 defense, could pretty much negate any physical attack by selecting Defend. If that’s the case, why does my Butterfly unit with over 240 speed get routinely blasted heavily by attacks when choosing Evade? Further, if my 240 speed unit can be hit fairly often, then how the heck can a slow, 40 speed unit somehow dodge my attack that had over 300 accuracy? I realize it would be broken to have a unit that can evade everything, but they shouldn’t have slow units able to completely dodge attacks without some quantifier to tell me why this is happening. It’s easy to see that higher numbers equals better, but there’s some baffling randomness to it. Though it’s not game or strategy breaking, it led to a few “Why did that hit?” and “Why did that miss?” moments.
- Yeaaah, the story is pretty silly. Strategy RPGs historically tend to have political or emotional storylines, but this game’s plot is very akin to a Saturday morning cartoon anime that your nephew is addicted to. The main hero kid thinks everything is amazing, and the storyline never deviates from “recruit more evil guys to the good side to fight the bad side!” Now granted, this is no worse than some storyline tripe offered in say, Final Fantasy Tactics A2... and if you enjoy the characters, you have the option to chat with some of them between story scenes, which is nice. The character Hydel managed to make me smile a couple of times even. But this is definite beginner-RPG/kids fare as far as plot goes.
Frankly, I loved this game. If you’re an RPG player who enjoys the occasional strategy RPG game, there’s a good chance you’ll get addicted to the gameplay. This was one of the few games I can remember in recent memory where I was excited to get home so I could play it. Where beating a long chapter battle meant eagerly checking the shop for new weapons and accessories. Where if I made a mistake and lost a unit by my own fault, I’d work hard to make sure I didn’t repeat the error. It was that kind of game; just a joy to play.
That said, there’s a tough niche genre to hit here. Hardcore strategy fans who are more enamored with complex offerings like Super Robot Taisen, Front Mission, or Advance Wars might find the game too simplistic. Players who expect a deep plot will be turned off by the Saturday morning cartoon-esque plot here. And a further population probably just doesn’t have interest in an RPG about bugs.
If you’re anywhere in the middle like I was though, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Drone Tactics. It’s fun, rewarding, and even has some system-pushing graphics to boot.
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