Telepath Tactics Preview

There’s a brief preview for Telepath Tactics at IndieGameInsider, thankfully based on some hands-on time with the title. Here’s a snippet:

Beginning the game, you start off with a small story sequence where you control one of the game’s characters and spar with one of your allies. This brief moment gives a little character insight, but more importantly, teaches you the basics of the game. Units are moved across the battlefield on tiles, which are square units that compose the ground of the playing field, and you can only move across so many spaces in a turn. Players can rotate their soldiers to take advantage of tactical positioning to get bonus damage on backstabs or to conceal their backs and sides to minimize the brunt of enemy attacks.

After this short briefing of basic mechanics, the game sets you out with a small group of varied units to show off the different soldiers at your disposal. The main units shown included swordsmen, archers, cavalry, and two casters that rely on psionic powers: the healer and cryokineticist. Swordsman are the most basic unit having decent health and a basic melee attack. Archers have a little lower health but could be set up to attack from several tiles away to their direct left, right, top, or bottom. Healers can provide small or large heals in a similar fashion for a cost of points from a psionic pool. One of my favorite units is probably the cavalry who can successfully dash in and out of combat to get quick and devastating backstab damage. Attacks are also not based on any sort of dice roll or random statistics, but purely on how players manage their units across the battlefield. Avoiding the annoying factor of random chance that some other tactical RPG games face, Telepath Tactics rewards players more for their actual skill.