Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes

My spreadsheet instincts fired warning shots the moment I clocked the character sheet in Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes. Each party member gets exactly two skills, both unlocked automatically at fixed levels, with attributes that raise themselves and gear slots limited to weapon, chest piece, and trinket. There is no build order to plan, no ability synergy to map out, and no unit composition to agonize over before a mission. For a strategy specialist, that is either a dealbreaker or, read charitably, a feature. Silent Dreams built this as a lean, joke-forward SRPG parody, not a systems showcase, and once you accept that framing the modest combat loop makes a lot more sense. The turn-based battles play out on square grids across about a dozen missions covering forests, ruined castles, and graveyards. Your party of up to ten anti-heroes, including the arrogant Holy Avatar, the vampire sorceress Solithaire, the goblin thief Rukel, and the hot-tempered angel Angelina, lines up and takes turns moving, attacking, using a skill, or looting fallen enemies. Positioning matters in a basic sense, since melee units need adjacency and ranged archers have a strictly limited range with no elevation bonus, but do not go in expecting flanking multipliers or facing mechanics. The one genuinely interesting wrinkle is the Obsession meter: when a character takes or deals enough damage, their personal tic triggers as a combat effect. Drake's motivational speech buffs the party for a few turns then leaves him depressed and underperforming, while Angelina's jealous rage sends her flying directly into Drake to pummel him regardless of where the enemies are. It is chaotic, occasionally annoying, and absolutely on-brand for the game's tone. The bigger structural problem, from a tactics standpoint, is the lack of squad control. All ten heroes trail behind Drake in a conga line and every one of them shows up to every mission, so there is no roster management, no bench decisions, and no replay incentive once the credits roll. The campaign runs roughly 12 to 15 hours and then it is done. No New Game Plus, no optional maps, no mod support to speak of. The game is also a linear corridor experience with missions locked sequentially and no ability to return to prior areas for supplies mid-mission. For anyone who measures an SRPG's worth in post-game content and replayability, the number is zero. The parody writing is the actual product being sold here, and its quality is genuinely mixed. The premise, emo recruit Drake teaming up with the insufferably self-congratulating Holy Avatar to fight a cult called the Dark Church, is clever on paper. The humor lands when it is skewering JRPG tropes through character behavior, less so when it leans on crude jokes about the archer maidens. Critically, the English localization is rough. Silent Dreams is a German studio and the translation introduced grammar errors and broken idioms that blunt jokes which were presumably sharper in the original text. If the writing is the main attraction, a stumbling localization is a meaningful tax on the whole experience. Steam user reviews sit at a mixed 61 percent, and the Metacritic score of 65 reflects the same split: people who tuned their expectations to "short, cheap, funny" came away satisfied, and people who wanted a real tactics game did not. For a strategy-focused player, the honest framing is this: treat it as a light RPG adventure with comedy ambitions and turn-based window dressing, not as a tactics game. Newcomers to the SRPG genre will not be overwhelmed, the interface is simple and mouse-friendly, and the campaign is short enough to finish in a weekend without a guide. Veterans looking for the unit-positioning puzzles of Fire Emblem or the job-system depth of Final Fantasy Tactics will find the mechanics too thin to sustain interest past the first couple of missions. At its current deep-discount pricing it is a curiosity worth a few evenings if the parody premise clicks with you, but do not mistake the word "Tactics" in the title for a promise.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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