Absolute Tactics: Daughters of Mercy

My spreadsheet instincts lit up the moment I saw the dual-class system here: 21 individual classes, equippable skill books that you can swap freely between maps, and a party of six heroes that each carry a distinct attack pattern tied to their weapon type. That is a real foundation for build experimentation. The Chessmaster class alone, whose attack ranges mirror how chess pieces move, kept me occupied for a couple of sessions testing positioning angles. Pair that with a backstab mechanic that rewards flanking for crits, environmental switches and crystals scattered across each map, and occasional large-scale war levels that throw dozens of units onto the battlefield at once, and there is clearly a designer here who understood what makes the tactical RPG loop satisfying on paper. The problem is execution. The AI is the first thing a strategy-first player will notice - and not in a good way. On hard mode, enemy units ignore explosive traps sitting directly beside them and rarely bother attacking from behind, a mechanic that you will be exploiting constantly. Enemy variety peaks very early: the zombies and soldiers you face in hour two are essentially the same ones you are still fighting at the end. Bosses do not compensate for this either; they feel like oversized regular units rather than tactical puzzles that demand a specific plan. Optional side encounters, meant to serve as grinding content, are fully scripted with no variables, so the same strategy clears each one every time. The balance on normal sits too easy for anyone with genre experience, and the post-launch hardcore mode, while a welcome addition, arrived after many players had already overleveled their way through. The narrative is the other weight dragging this down. Protagonist Huxley, his dog Max, and a fairly archetypal cast - tanky guardian, crossbow archer, buff-or-debuff cleric - march through a paint-by-numbers story about stopping villain Father Eldritch from harvesting a life energy called Adenine. Multiple critics noted the writing reads less like a sincere RPG story and more like an accidental parody of RPG tropes. In a genre where story pacing carries players through dry stretches of grinding, thin characterization becomes a structural problem. Around the halfway mark, the motivation to push through maps starts to evaporate. For newcomers to the SRPG genre, though, this picture changes. No permadeath, three difficulty settings from the jump, a camp menu between battles where you can shop and take optional missions, and a class system accessible enough to learn but with enough combinations to reward patience - that is actually a reasonable on-ramp. The mixed 2D-character-on-3D-map art style is vibrant, the enemy unit designs have personality even if the heroes do not, and a run sits around 17 hours on normal which is an honest length for the budget tier this occupies. Steam user reviews sit at 69 percent positive across 83 reviews, which tracks: people who found it on a sale came away entertained; people who paid full price against the competition of that same year left disappointed. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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