Now Playing: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Because I (mostly) enjoyed Fire Emblem on the GBA (via NSO) I decided to pick up and try a more recent entry in the long running series – Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Once you’ve chosen your character type and played through a short tutorial battle, you’re given the choice of ‘teaching’ one of the three titular Houses in a sort-of-but-not-quite military school.

Well, it’s actually a ‘monastery’ which is part of a Church that rules everything in the land and is happy to use violence to keep it that way. And your job is to train your students in the art of war – including the future rulers of the three empires of the land (all subservient to the Church, of course). In other words, your students are also your soldiers.

Each House has eight unique students that form the core of your ‘army’ and each House is led by one of the aforementioned rulers. You do get the option to recruit additional students and characters into your House, but I’ll touch upon that later. The game is split into two distinct parts – Part 1 plays out largely the same regardless of which House you choose as you focus on developing your students, improving their skills, picking their classes and boosting their ‘support’ levels with you and each other.

Part 2 is where things start to diverge as the plot will vary quite significantly depending upon your chosen House. You do continue to develop your students, but this section of the game is more streamlined so you’ll spend less time ‘teaching’ and more time progressing from battle to battle. And it’s the battles that I was always more interested in during my time with Fire Emblem on the GBA and the same is true here.

 

    

What kind of surprised me though is how instantly familiar everything felt. From the pre-battle map screen, to weapon types, classes and terrain bonuses it really doesn’t play any differently to that 20 year old GBA game. And that’s . . . kind of disappointing? I guess I was expecting a little more of an evolution to the formula. Don’t get the wrong idea – battles are still fun to play – but I thought there’d be a lot more new systems, weapons or classes to play with. There is some new stuff, but I don’t think the game pushes that stuff hard enough.

Maps, for example, really aren’t great. Some are quite big but the action is often contained to a limited section. And your unit count is oddly small – only a maximum of 12 characters – which when combined with the big maps, also makes the battles feel very small. Frankly, the GBA game had a more varied selection of map types and battle scenarios than Three Houses does.

There’s little in the way of new terrain effects or interesting layouts to be found. The game also recycles the same maps for the optional quest battles and it doesn’t even mix up the enemy placements – so you’ll sometimes fight the same enemies, on the same map in exactly the same configuration in several different quests.

From a strategy point of view, it doesn’t feel – at least to me – that Fire Emblem has really evolved, expanded or improved in any significant way. And maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe fans of the series don’t really care. Maybe they’re far more interested in the character management and ‘relationship’ aspect that has evolved considerably from the GBA days.

Characters and their relationships was an important part of Fire Emblem on the GBA but it’s taken to an entirely new level in Three Houses. You’ll spend as much time – if not more – managing your students than you will on the battlefield. You’ll be buying them gifts, finding lost items, improving their motivation (making it easier for them to learn skills), inviting them to tea parties (don’t f**king ask) and speaking to them regularly to increase your ‘support’ level that does play a (somewhat minor) role in battles but is more about reaching S rank with certain characters so you get the option to marry them at the end of the game.

Which is a bit weird considering you’re their ‘professor’ but the game does feature a time skip at the start of part 2 – your character falls asleep for five years because . . . actually I don’t having a f**king clue why – so I guess it’s not as weird now that they’re older? But you won’t just spend your time grooming . . . I mean building your support with your students between main missions, you’ll also be busy building your own stats and ‘professor rank’.

You can go fishing, grow plants, flowers and vegetables, cook various dishes, invite characters to dine with you and visit shops. It’s . . . kind of a lot of busywork that does get a tad irritating as you go. Thankfully you can fast travel around the monastery once you’ve unlocked each area and that means you can avoid the terrible frame rate that dips quite a bit when you’re running about.

You can also ‘instruct’ your students which levels up their stats in the skills you’ve chosen for them to focus on. And you really need to decide early what kind of class and skills path you want everyone to take because grinding up those skills takes quite a bit of time and trying to switch classes or weapon skills later in the game will only be detrimental to your progress.

You also probably won’t want to recruit too many extra characters into your House because like I said, you can only a take a maximum of 12 into battle and you’re not going to evenly level everyone up if you’re constantly swapping people in and out – not unless you’re willing to do a lot of grinding per character.

I can’t say it wasn’t satisfying seeing my students get stronger, rank up their skills and develop into the cold-blooded killing machines I desired, but I probably didn’t need so much ‘social’ stuff mixed in and honestly, I reached a point quite early on when I just ignored most of it and skipped any ‘support’ cut-scenes between characters because I just didn’t care.

Three Houses feels like a game caught between two player bases – one that wants really engaging tactical battles and the other that just wants a relationship simulator – and it feels like this game is leaning more heavily in favour of the latter.

Thankfully, the battles in part 2 of the game are a little bigger and more engaging, and a lot of the other ‘social’ aspects take more of a back seat. And I do think I made a mistake when choosing the game difficulty because I set it to the default and that ended up proving just a tad too easy which probably made some of the tactical nuance related to terrain, support levels, special abilities and battalions less important than I’d like.

Or did it? Because I’m also wondering if all that bumping up the difficulty would really do is just make battles take longer. I won’t really know until I start another run with another House, and that’s thankfully going to be much easier as you can jump into a New Game Plus mode in which you carry over various skills and can quickly boost up your own stats and the levels of your students. And I do want to do that, because I really did enjoy my time with the game and I want to see how things shake out with the other two Houses. That said, whilst splitting the unique content across the three different Houses does give the game good replay value, it’s also something of a weakness.

Why? Well, it means that the story – which I did, overall like despite some really dumb and silly shit – feels like a puzzle with a lot of pieces missing if you only play as one House. You only get the full picture if you’re willing to play through them all. I probably will – eventually. Given it took me about 40 hours to finish one House, I’m not eager to jump straight into another just yet.

Oh, and the performance kind of sucks! Don’t tell me ‘it’s the Switch, what do you expect?’ because the game really doesn’t look good enough to have such a piss poor frame rate.

Overall, I did enjoy playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses and maybe if I’d played through every House I’d have a better appreciation of the overall package. But when a game locks so much unique content behind multiple paths and expects you to replay a lot of the same content to reach the new stuff, I don’t really see that as a good thing.

And from a strategy point of view, there’s nothing here that’s all that exciting. The battles are mostly okay and sometimes really good . . . but never great. The game felt more like a relationship simulator at times than a tactical strategy game and maybe that’s what the fans really want? I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy the social aspects at all but I guess I just wanted more from the other side of the game. It’s certainly a unique kind of experience though and something I will be going back to in the future.

7/10

Steam Next Fest 2025

The first Steam Next Fest of 2025 had a few games that caught my eye, so I thought I’d write a little about each of them here.

The King is Watching is a fun little mix of tower defence and settlement management with a rogue-like twist. Your goal is to keep your castle standing for as many weeks as you can, as every week brings with it a new wave of enemies. You’ll construct various buildings within the walls of your castle to generate resources and train the soldiers you’ll need to defeat the enemy waves.

The castle has a limited number of building plots so you’ll need to chop and change depending upon what you need. But all buildings are only ‘active’ when you – the King – are ‘watching’ them and your gaze only extends (initially) to a handful of plots.

You can increase the range of your gaze, just as you can upgrade the limit of your soldiers but, as you can probably guess, doing so requires an increasing number of resources for each upgrade tier, and with waves of enemies attacking your castle regularly, the game becomes a balancing act between production and defence.

The rogue-like aspect is related not only to the randomised enemy waves, but the rewards you can receive and the upgrades you can unlock. And each new ‘run’ resets everything, although there is a selection of permanent modifiers you can unlock to give you an edge on future runs.

The King is Watching is a visually charming little game. Simple and repetitive, but fun. If the price is right, I can see this doing very well.

Tempest Rising is an RTS game that feels like someone really wanted to make a Command & Conquer sequel but couldn’t get the licence, so they decided to make it anyway and just change the names. There are two faction campaigns to play – the GDF (not to be confused with GDI) and the Tempest Dynasty (not to be confused with NOD).

The demo offered a couple of campaign missions for both factions and . . . yeah, this is a new Command & Conquer in all but name. There’s no live-action mission briefings, but you do get similar in-engine briefings instead. Once you’re in a mission, you’ll build a base and harvest Tempest (not to be confused with Tiberian) and recruit units to destroy the enemy and complete your objectives.

Your building types (power plant, barracks, refinery, silo etc) are exactly what you expect if you’ve played C&C and so are most of the unit types. I’m not saying Tempest Rising doesn’t have any new ideas of its own, and there are obviously aspects to the game that this demo doesn’t reveal such as an unannounced third faction – although it looks like that will only be playable in skirmish and I feel like it’s going to be something akin to the Scrin from C&C 3.

But . . . yeah, it’s unashamedly C&C in all but name. And I’m pleased to say, this demo was pretty fun to play. I’m not totally sold on the setting, perhaps because it does feel a little too much like off-brand C&C rather than something new. But it plays well, perhaps a little too fiddly at times with so many different unit abilities – but that’s something you learn as you go.

The missions were fun, with main and optional objectives, and there’s a neat campaign upgrade system that enhances your faction and units between missions. The demo even came with a few skirmish maps which was nice. I’m not totally sold on picking this up at release, but it’s something I’ll certainly keep my eye on.

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a side-scrolling zombie survival game set in 1980s Texas. It is, essentially, This War of Mine with zombies – and that’s a pretty neat idea. I reviewed This War of Mine back in 2015 and I wasn’t really a fan, but it’s a game I’d like to try again some day to see how the ‘Final Cut’ edition stacks up.

Given how I disliked quite a few aspects of This War of Mine, I wasn’t sure how much I’d like Into the Dead. But whilst the basic gameplay structure is more or less the same, Into the Dead does do and allow you to do things a little differently and in ways that appeal more to me.

For a start, you’re not locked to a single shelter but can (and it appears must) relocate your survivors to new shelters in order to stay one step ahead of the zombie horde. You also assign tasks to each survivor during the day/night phases but aren’t forced to tediously watch or wait for said tasks to be completed.

You also have the option to leave your shelter and scavenge during the day or night. And controlling your survivors is a little more ‘hands on’ as you sneak, sprint, vault and fight your way through various locations. Like This War of Mine, your survivors have their own unique skills, needs and quirks and you’ll be splitting your time between scavenging for supplies, keeping your people healthy and/or sane, and improving your shelter.

But unlike This War of Mine, you’re not just passively waiting around for a (randomised) ceasefire, you’re actively seeking out clues that will let you prepare a plan for your survivors to escape the city. It’s not super impressive visually, but it looks decent enough. It’s going to release in Early Access first, so I’ll keep an eye on it and see how it shapes up.

Gallery: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Now Playing: Avowed

My review of Avowed is likely going to come across more negative then positive, but don’t let that fool you – Avowed is a good game and one I thoroughly enjoyed my time with. But it’s certainly not without its flaws and frustrations and that’s what my review will primarily focus upon because they do, I feel, prevent Avowed from being as good as it could be.

Avowed is a first person (or third, I suppose – but I never really bothered playing in third person as the game doesn’t feel properly designed for it) action role-playing game set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. I’ve not played the Pillars games so I went into Avowed without any prior knowledge and it was, I must admit, tricky to get into at first.

A lot of early conversations were constantly interrupted by my use of the (handy) in-game glossary to explain various terms, events, names and locations. It’s not an ideal way to introduce a player to the world, but the game sensibly front-loads all the important details so once you get over that initial hurdle, you’re pretty much good to go.

And there’s a ton of lore to be found in Avowed in the form of countless books, notes and conversations. I think if you are a fan of the Pillars games, then Avowed is a game you’ll get a lot more out of than I did from a story and lore perspective.

But even without any familiarity of the Pillars universe, I still enjoyed and was engaged by the main quest. There’s a couple of major aspects to it that – without spoiling things – I felt were rather obvious and as such, the ‘reveals’ fell flat. But despite that, there’s interesting choices to be made throughout the game and they all build to an exciting final conclusion and a satisfying epilogue that reflects upon those choices and what you’ve achieved.

There’s also a lot of fun side quests on which to embark, although I do wish each ‘zone’ of the game didn’t adhere to the same rigid (and repetitive) structure of side content. There are also two companion related quests . . . which is a little strange considering you have four companions to pick from.

Why only two of your companions have bespoke quests I really can’t say. Time? Budget? I did come to like all of the companion characters but I must admit, I’m not convinced the game needed so many. I feel the game would have been better to focus on a single companion or two with more extensive (and flexible) skill trees. The other companions would then be relegated to act as temporary comrades for specific quests or areas – kind of like what you have in the initial tutorial zone of the game.

A bad idea? Maybe. But honestly, the companions from a gameplay perspective don’t really seem to add much. They contribute little to combat and their skill trees are extremely limited. I do like the characters, I just never found them very useful and I was not particularly convinced of their necessity within the plot beyond certain events.

I think my main criticism of Avowed is that it’s just too big for what it offers. The game is split into four main ‘zones’. The first large, open zone – Dawnshore – is great. I’ve written before about the importance of structure to open maps in games – about how breaking up even the largest of maps using natural boundaries can lead to them feeling more approachable and less daunting to the player.

Dawnshore does this perfectly, using rivers and mountains to break up the map into more manageable chunks to explore. And exploration is something Avowed does brilliantly – there’s always something to be found in practically every nook and cranny and there’s a lot of verticality to the maps so you’re always searching high and low for treasure. The only thing I really hate is the actual in-game map that doesn’t mark clear boundaries to the playable area of each zone.

This makes it somewhat deceptive (and there’s nothing worse than a map that’s deceptive) as it may appear you can can travel a certain way, only for you to hit the map ‘wall’ without realising it. You also only clear the map ‘fog’ around a very small area of your movement, so your map ends up incredibly (and annoyingly) patchy with where you have and haven’t travelled – down to just a few feet.

But as I said, Dawnshore, as a zone, is great. Great pacing, interesting quests, the right balance of combat and conversation . . . but then you get to the second zone and that’s where the game takes a wrong turn. Emerald Stair is bad. Just bad. The map is terrible – it’s too open, there’s little to no structure, the colour palette is bland and the quests are largely dull. It’s where you meet the feisty Giatta so it’s not all bad, but it’s a significant step (excuse the pun) down from Dawnshore.

Thankfully, Avowed picks up a lot in its third zone – Shatterscarp – with more varied and interesting terrain, quests and characters. It’s as good, if not better than Dawnshore. And then we have the fourth zone which – whilst not as good as Dawnshore or Shatterscarp, I felt was still pretty good but the problem is, the game became a bit of a tedious slog for me at this point.

I think this is a result of two things – the first is the combat which, whilst very fun, also doesn’t have a great deal of depth to it. I love the flexibility of the skill tree, how you can essentially custom build your own class with your own combination of weapons and magic. That’s great – but the skill tree is still very limited. However, in a shorter game, you wouldn’t really have time for it to grow so stale.

But grow stale it does. By the time you reach the fourth zone combat will be a matter of routine. You’ll have unlocked all of your (limited) skills and nearly upgraded your weapons to their maximum level. There’s a lot of combat in the fourth zone and I felt like I was navigating fights on auto-pilot. I feel like they really needed weapon specific skill trees to help mix things up.

Avowed needed something more, something to help keep the combat feeling fresh in the latter stages of the game. And new enemies certainly would have helped which is my second point – the fourth zone features all of the same enemies you’ve already fought in the previous three. The game does that old trick of: same enemies – but more of them! But that’s no substitute for having the player encounter something new to tangle with.

And that’s why I feel Avowed is too big for what it offers – if you cut out that tedious second zone and shorten the overall game, the limited skill trees and shallow (but undeniably fun) combat wouldn’t have time to get stale because the game would be wrapping up at just the right moment. Unfortunately, Avowed drags things out for way too long and the cracks really start to show.

I also feel like Avowed was an opportunity to really drive home the consequences of your choices. With a smaller scope, I feel like it would have been easier to make your choices in the game have more meaningful and impactful results. I feel like that’s the hook Avowed needed – something to really set it apart.

I’m not saying there’s no consequences to your actions – in fact, the game does a decent job of all your actions (both big and small) having an impact throughout the game. But it just doesn’t push it as hard as I’d like. I feel that’s where Avowed missed a trick. As a game of more limited scope I think it could have gone hard on choice and consequence in a way few RPGs can. Where entire regions can be reshaped, where characters or even entire settlements can die, and where the game world is shaped in a far more tangible way by your decisions – and in ways that directly impact your progression.

Visually, Avowed looks great and runs smoothly. The movement and combat also feel great and I did absolutely everything I could find in the game across my 50 hours which gives you some idea of how much I still enjoyed it despite all my criticisms. Because Avowed is a very good game – it’s just not quite the great game that I wanted it to be or felt it had the potential to be.

7/10