Cross Tails

The best thing here is that you get two full tactical campaigns that argue with each other. You fight this war from the canine side and from the feline side, and the second run is not the first one with the map mirrored and the sprites recoloured. Events you accepted as settled fact in one campaign turn out to be somebody's convenient version in the other. In a genre where replay value usually means New Game Plus with a stat multiplier bolted on, that is a structural choice worth respecting, and it is the reason this stayed on my list despite everything I am about to say. Mechanically this is Rideon's house style, and anyone who put time into their Mercenaries Saga games already knows the shape of it. Grid-based battles, a readable turn order you can manipulate, terrain and height that matter to where you plant your units, and a class progression system where characters graduate into stronger roles and carry a small hand-assembled skill loadout. The interesting decisions sit two or three battles ahead of the one you are playing: who gets the healing job, whether you want a second front-line body or a ranged specialist, which passive earns the slot when you only have a couple. It is single-player only, with full controller support, achievements and cloud saves, so it runs fine as a handheld PC game. Where it disappoints is nearly everything wrapped around the tactics. It sits at mixed on Steam, around 68 percent positive across a pool of roughly 73 reviews, which is a sample size I would not treat as gospel, but the complaints track with what this actually is. The presentation is functional rather than expressive. The script carries the slightly stiff cadence of a budget localization. And the enemy AI is the real problem for anyone who plays a lot of this genre: it takes bait, it walks into chokepoints, and once you have learned that, the middle stretch of both campaigns stops asking hard questions of your build. There is no Workshop support either, so no mod scene is coming to rebalance the difficulty curve for you. What ships is what you get. And yet I would still hand this to someone who has never finished a tactics RPG, so here is the build order I would give them. Start with the canine campaign, because you want the version of events that reads as straightforward before you get the one that complicates it. Do not spread experience across ten units. Pick six, promote them on schedule, and make peace with a couple of characters riding the bench permanently. Spend your first class change on a dedicated healer and your second on whichever unit already has the movement range to reach a flank, because reach solves more problems in this game than raw damage ever will. The tutorial does the basic literacy work without talking down to you, and because the opposition is soft, a newcomer gets genuine room to misplay a turn and recover from it. Forgiving AI is a design flaw for veterans and a safety net for beginners. Same code, different value depending on where you are standing. So who is this for. Tactics regulars in a quiet year who want something to chew through between the genre's heavyweight releases, and anyone pulled in by the dual-perspective conceit, which is honestly the one thing that separates this from the dozens of other grid RPGs sitting on PC. It will not hold you for 200 hours and it never pretends it will. What it offers is two campaigns, a class system with enough branching to justify a second lap, and a war story with the decency to admit both sides believe they are the reasonable ones. Set your expectations at competent rather than remarkable and you will get your time back out of it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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