Conquest Tactics : Realm of Sins is a straightforward roguelite tactics game, using a hex board to place your units and engage in turn-based combat.
You have your usual suspects for a roguelite game: buffs obtained throughout the gameplay, randomised maps, and various random units obtained at different timings. However, the game shines in its ability to be very easy to pick up, allowing you to sink in an hour or two without too much stress.
What’s Cooking In This Game?
The game plays like a mix between a deck building and strategy game, giving it a very unique blend of the two genres. As you progress, you build up your squad/army, which acts like your deck in a typical deck building game.
However, unlike a regular deck building game, the units can be used like a chess piece in a hex board to attack, buff, defend, and generate advantages over your enemy in each battle encounter.
Straightforward And Simple
While it is a strategy game, it is straightforward enough that it is not overwhelming for people not too experienced with the genre. It has basically been boiled down to its bare essentials by combining moving and attacking in a single motion, simplifying some of the complexities that comes with the strategy genre.
However, with this simplifying of the genre, the game risks becoming too simple, where the easiest and best strategy will always be to attack harder, eliminating other strategies in the process. That strategy is what I found myself defaulting to throughout my playthroughs, despite various aspects being very different.
Variety and Replayability
One of the crowning criteria for a good roguelite is to have high replay value, and I think this game has it in spades. Not only are there multiple characters for you to try with unique characteristics, your starting team is always different as well, greatly changing what you may try to go for in terms of your strategy.
The maps are also greatly different in each run, resulting in very different gameplay each time you play it. After sinking in multiple hours playing various characters, I’m still finding out new things every run, which keeps things fresh for each replay session.
Thematics and Style
One thing I was genuinely impressed with was how some battles are thematic. Encounters could range from facing a full team of goblins, or skeletons, with there even being events which throw something extremely challenging your way.
These themes don’t just stop at enemies. Your units that are part of the squad also follow certain themes, ranging from beasts and warriors to otherworldly beings. This not only makes building your squad a little easier by following certain themes, but it also makes exploring the game throughout multiple playthroughs more interesting.
Verdict
Conquest Tactics: Realm of Sins is an easy choice for fans of the roguelite genre and strategy games alike. It successfully marries the two genres together, making a game that is unique to explore. While it may not have enough depth for those that wish to really tinker and build unique teams, there is still enough here that you can play through the game multiple times and still experience new things.
