Telepath Tactics Review
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Along with gaining experience, characters can also find money and equipment during missions. When enemies die, sometimes they drop bags of loot (containing money or consumables), and if you grab them before your enemies do, then you get to keep them. There are also frequently treasure chests (containing weapons or armor) located in obscure corners of the maps, and you have to decide if you want to send one or more of your characters to break into them and steal their contents. This can be tricky in some missions, like when enemies charge at you and the mission ends when they die, which means you might need to sacrifice some fighting power for extra gear. After every five missions or so, you also meet a wandering merchant, and you can use him to replace broken weapons or otherwise fill whatever gaps you have in your arsenal.
For the most part, Telepath Tactics is a fine budget title. The campaign works well, and you're given plenty of motivation to defeat the Shadowling boss at the end. The characters ended up being more involving than I expected, especially with so many of them hanging around. And while the 2D graphics and background music aren't anything special, they get the job done, and there is some variety to them. For example, you end up fighting in lava-filled caves, frozen tundras, and balmy island jungles.
But Telepath Tactics has an awful flaw -- the save system. Basically put, you're not allowed to save during the missions. In theory, this isn't something I disagree with. I don't like it when games allow you to save during battles because it cheapens the end result. But unfortunately, Telepath Tactics has some things in common with the X-COM games, where your characters start out very fragile, and it's easy for them to die. That makes the first third of the campaign thoroughly frustrating, since it's sort of okay for characters to die, but you're not sure how much leeway you really have, and so just about any death means restarting. I must have played the early missions of the campaign at least three times each just to get an acceptable result, and that amount of repetition isn't any fun.
Another issue with the save system is the simple fact that if you're not going to allow players to save, then you should keep the missions to a reasonable length. But instead Sinister Design went big with the missions. The deeper you get into the campaign, the larger the missions get, and the more characters you control in them. For the final mission, I had 18 characters on my side, and it took me over three hours to complete the objectives. That's just way too long. At one point in my life I could sit at my computer and play games all day, but these days I don't want to be forced into playing for that long, especially since the game doesn't alt-tab very well.
Finally, in what I can only term to be an incomprehensible decision, for some reason when the game autosaves, it always picks the slot of your most recent manual save, overwriting it. That's just terrible. Autosaves and manual saves should never mix. Ever. Luckily, once I figured out what the game was doing, I realized that I could manually save twice, guaranteeing at least one save slot I could fall back to if the current mission went poorly.
Telepath Tactics has some other issues as well, but during the 10 days I spent with it, no less than three patches came out, and so a lot of the problems (like the weird inventory disappearing / duplicating bug that hit me once) might be fixed before you read this. But I suspect that the unfortunate save system is here to stay. That's a design decision that's probably difficult to change.
And so, overall, Telepath Tactics is a mixed bag. It's definitely an indie budget title, and if you look at it through budget-tinted glasses, then its 40-hour campaign can provide some fun. Plus, it has mod support, so at some point there might even be extra campaigns that you to try out. But the save system drove me nuts, especially early in the game, and I'd only recommend Telepath Tactics to people with a high threshold for frustration.
