Fantasy Wars

I have a soft spot for games that refuse to hold your hand past the tutorial, and Fantasy Wars earns that status the hard way. This is a hex-based turn-based tactics game from Ino-Co that draws a straight line back to the old Fantasy General school of wargaming: no base-building, no resource micromanagement, just unit positioning, terrain exploitation, and the slow dread of watching a veteran cavalry squad get ground down when you miscounted movement hexes. If you have ever colour-coded a campaign save file, this game was made for you. The structure across all three campaigns is clean and legible. You command one of four factions, humans, orcs, elves, or dwarves, across a series of hex maps with geography that actually matters. Forests slow movement but offer cover, rivers create chokepoints worth fighting over, and mountains can protect a flank or strand a siege engine depending on how carefully you read the layout before moving. Units range from peasants and militia through crossbowmen, halberdiers, knights, catapults, and mages, and each levels up with a branching perk system that is faction-specific rather than generic. Orc archers can unlock poison arrows, human militia can harden into brigandine-armoured line troops, heroes can spec into jousting or siege mastery. The roster is not enormous, but the per-unit customisation gives your army a hand-crafted quality that generic buff menus never achieve. The campaign design introduces the game's most interesting pressure mechanic: units and gold carry forward between missions. Lose experienced troops to a bad engagement and the next map opens with raw recruits who cannot fill the gap. Chase gold-medal turn limits aggressively and you risk leaving the map under-explored and short on coins needed to recruit back up. This persistent attrition loop is genuinely tense, though it is also where the game's most cited frustration lives. Difficulty ramps sharply by the fourth or fifth mission even on the easier settings, and the AI compensates for its tendency to hang back defensively by throwing numerical superiority at you. It is not clever AI; it is volume AI. Experienced TBS players will recognise the design language and adapt, but newcomers expecting a gentle learning slope should plan for repeated replays of individual maps. That said, the interface is one of the cleaner ones in the genre: movement ranges, likely combat outcomes, and unit stats are surfaced upfront, so deaths feel earned rather than obscured. What Fantasy Wars does not deliver is production ambition. The story across all three campaigns is functional world-building at best, thin justification for the next hex map at worst. Voice acting is flat, the cartoony visual style has aged into retro charm rather than genuine graphical quality, and there is no online matchmaking for the multiplayer side, which supports hotseat and LAN only. Replay value is limited once you have run the campaigns; skirmish maps exist but the pool is small. The sequel, Elven Legacy, reportedly tightened several of these rough edges if you find yourself wanting more after the credits. For the right player, specifically someone who wants pure tactical decision-making with persistent consequences and no city-builder padding, Fantasy Wars delivers a compact, unforgiving, and quietly satisfying experience. Approach it as a wargame, not an RPG with strategy dressing, and the 67 Metacritic score starts to look stingy. Approach it expecting narrative depth or a forgiving difficulty curve and you will bounce off it fast.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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