Desert Ashes

I have a spreadsheet for turn-based strategy games sorted by unit-type complexity, and Desert Ashes lands near the shallow end. That is not automatically a condemnation. What Nine Tales Digital built here is a lean, grid-based tactics game in the Advance Wars mould - two warring factions, the Winged Crusade and the Landians, fighting over forts and factories across a series of short campaign missions. You capture buildings with infantry and mage units, spend the gold they generate on new troops each turn, and try to either seize the enemy HQ or wipe the map clean. The loop is immediately legible to anyone who has spent time with the Famicom Wars lineage. The unit roster covers four broad categories - infantry, heavy ground, air, and water - and the type-matchup system is straightforward enough that a complete newcomer to the genre will have the relationships memorised within two missions. Air units fold to infantry, ground vehicles chew through foot soldiers, and so on. Terrain matters too: roads accelerate movement but strip defensive bonuses, mountains extend attack range, and bridges become chokepoints worth fighting over. The day-night cycle adds one genuinely interesting wrinkle: when the clock ticks past nightfall, bodies of water freeze solid. Naval units get locked in place, and ground forces can cross what was previously impassable. In practice, the cycle takes long enough to complete that most short maps conclude before it meaningfully shifts the tactical picture, but on longer skirmish maps it does create real planning decisions around positioning your water units before the freeze hits. Multiplayer perk customisation is where the systems get marginally more interesting. Before an online or skirmish match you select unlockable perks to augment your forces - things like Fort Toughness, which stacks a 20% defence bonus onto units holding structures, or time-gated options that only activate during specific in-game hours. It is a thin but real layer of army-building. The single-player campaigns offer three episodes across both factions, which is a reasonable amount of content at the price point, though the narrative is skeletal: two sides at war with minimal context beyond that. There is no difficulty tuning worth mentioning, and the AI does not present a serious challenge to anyone with prior genre experience. The problems are hard to overlook once you notice them. The PC port carries visible scars from its mobile origins. Navigation in the menu system uses swipe gestures that translate poorly to mouse input, and several reviewers reported crashes tied to the concurrent-games menu - the feature the developer most prominently advertised. The Steam community forum contains reports of the game refusing to launch in offline mode entirely. Mac users on anything newer than macOS 10.14 cannot run the game at all; Catalina compatibility was never patched. Online multiplayer, which was the strongest argument for replayability, appears to be effectively dead - network errors are the most common post-launch complaint, and the player population was never large enough to sustain reliable matchmaking. Skirmish mode against the AI is the realistic use case for anyone buying today. As a genre entry point, Desert Ashes is tolerably functional. The mechanics are transparent, the campaign teaches the unit relationships through a first chapter that acts as an extended tutorial, and the low price means the stakes of disappointment are minimal. Anyone who already owns Wargroove, the remastered Advance Wars titles, or War Theatre - the developer's own improved follow-up - has no reason to look here. But for a player who has never touched a tile-based tactics game and wants to test the waters without committing to something dense, this covers the fundamentals without overwhelming. Go in with that calibrated expectation and you will probably get your money's worth out of the campaigns and a few skirmish sessions before moving on to something better.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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