Iron Oath by Curious Panda Games is a tactical turn-based strategy game that sees you manage a team of mercenaries involved in completing jobs while pursuing the individual who betrayed your company and left most of your team for dead.
Overview
You play the non-represented leader of a mercenary company with up to 15 mercenaries in your team, wandering between regions taking jobs, and pursuing the main plot. There is much flexibility and freedom in how you pursue the strategic part of the game, with city modifiers giving you some chance to hunt down rare gear and modifier-related contracts. There are random encounters that can trigger between towns, providing rewards, story progression, or potential fights, each of which can improve your relations with a specific city or faction.Â
The cities themselves provide you with a number of options, including forming contracts either with the local noble house or the inhabitants of the city, making purchases, putting your mercenaries in the infirmary to restore health, or staying at an inn in order to reduce exhaustion.
Explorations are done in a style that is very reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon. Event sites are given a variably sized map, much of which is empty, but some cells feature battles or events that the player interacts with. Before you leave you are able to outfit your expedition, with unused items sold back afterward. Every move or event causes the time counter to move forward, and every time it is filled up some sort of negative penalty is applied to the party. Longer maps give you the ability to camp, which resets the current timer and also lets you recover some used abilities, hit points, or spirit.Â
Battles feature four of your units vs. some number of enemy units. They are turned-based with the order determined by player speed. Maps tend towards the smaller side with the terrain and other features you can utilize. These maps play quickly, lasting no more than a few minutes each, but usually pack in a fair bit of decision making for the player in that time, especially on higher difficulties. Flanking matters, attack of opportunities keep positioning decisions interesting, and there are a bunch of ways that both the player’s mercenaries and enemies can create temporary terrain.Â
The Early Access version of the game features six character classes, with each character starting with a different subset of that class’s abilities. Additional ones are unlocked as you gain levels. In addition to those unlocks you gain points which you can use to specialize your abilities. There is a limit to spend on any tree, so it is not quite possible to completely specialize in one ability, and you are forced to make some hard choices about how to upgrade a character, especially if you want to unlock one of the ability’s two ultimate upgrades.Â
Characters are further defined by their ability scores and their traits. Each character gets 1 or 2 ability points per level, with each class having two ability scores that improve your power score (and thus your damage). This gives you some build flexibility, allowing you to decide to specialize in one specific subset of a class’s capability while improving their ability to do damage or heal. Traits are individual modifiers for a specific character, which impact how they respond to your choices as well as situations both inside and outside of battle. I am unsure how many you can have, but I’ve seen anywhere between four and seven on a character.Â
Reasons to Get It Now
The Iron Oath framework is very good. Most of the game’s subsystems are in place, and there are minimal bugs, at least on my Windows 11 machine. The controls and UI are mostly smooth, there are plenty of tooltips and information is pretty easy to find, even without extensive searching.
Even without a fully implemented story, there is a fair bit to explore, particularly if you want to explore character builds. There are six different character classes to play and many different ways to combine characters and abilities to explore different team configurations.
Reasons to Wait or Skip
While Iron Oath’s framework is good, it feels like there is a lot of content that still needs to be added to the game in order for it to feel a fully fleshed out, complete experience. This is particularly noticeable in available enemies, with some beast-oriented dungeons being completely filled with regular and advanced versions of the same singular enemy type. The game doesn’t feel empty by any means, but it is definitely clear that the game needs more meat to be ready for people who want to dive deeply into the game and explore its intricacies with minimal repetitiveness.Â
Conclusion
Iron Oath is beautiful and fairly polished, but at this stage of Early Access is a bit more content light than I would prefer. If you like what you’ve seen from the demo and want to get more of a taste of it then the Iron Oath’s current state will definitely whet your appetite, but it currently lacks the density of content required to truly satisfy.Â
Jesse is another of our turn-based game aficionados and is often found playing many different types of turn-based games, whether they be strategy games, deck-builders, RPGs, and much more. He also really likes cats.