Wintermoor Tactics Club Review – What Happens in Wintermoor

Use your strategic skills as a member of the tactics club to overcome a school competition and uncover the dark forces at work in your school.

Wintermoor Tactics Club
Developer: EVC
Price: $15
Platforms: PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.

As a student at Wintermoor Academy, Alicia spends most of her time with the other members of the Tactics Club, where they play through fantasy adventures in a tabletop game called Curses & Catacombs. Then the school’s principal makes a strange and shocking announcement: all of Wintermoor’s clubs must compete against one another in a series of snowball fights, and the losers will have their clubs permanently disbanded.

Determined to save their club, Alicia and her friends use their tactical knowledge from Curses & Catacombs to overcome their opponents. That’s how it’s justified in-game, anyway, and the snowball fights play exactly the same as the tabletop campaigns. You’ll play both across the course of Wintermoor Tactics Club, as each day puts you up against a new club in the tournament while the Tactics Club members continue to play through Curses & Catacombs campaigns in their free time.

Battles take place on a small, grid-like arena, and you can use a party of three characters. Each character has a unique basic attack, with its own strengths and effects. As you fight enemies, you’ll build up tactics points that allow you to unleash more powerful special attacks. There are a lot of user-friendly features, like being able to undo your movement if you haven’t attacked yet, and it never ends up feeling very complicated–although that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park, either. Regular battles are fairly accessible, but you also unlock a number of optional challenges that can be quite tricky.

Early on, I expected to find a particular party I preferred to use, but the variety of attacks meant I ended up changing my party fairly often based on the type and arrangement of enemies in the battle. For example, a character whose attacks hit multiple enemies might be devastating when enemies are clustered, but not too effective when they’re spread out on the map. A character with powerful magic can rip through enemies weak to magic but will struggle against those with magical shields. No character ever became obsolete even as new characters were introduced, and that kept combat feeling fresh.

Outside of battles, you’re free to explore the school each day and talk to other characters. Many have funny dialogue, and some will also give you side quests. While the side quests are fairly simple and mainly involve talking to people, they reward you with upgrades you can equip for additional effects, buffs, or skills during combat. Both the main characters and side characters are all fairly one-note, with each club’s focus being an obsession for its members, but it contributes to the over-the-top style that contributes a lot to the game’s humor. When the clubs include such things as the Psychic Detectives and an Equestrian Club that doesn’t have horses, it sets up a zany atmosphere from the start.

Now, as the Tactics Club advances through the tournament, the clubs they defeat are disbanded. Sometimes this results in someone new joining the Tactics Club, in which case Alicia writes a Curses & Catacombs story for them to introduce their character to the campaign. These are some of the most entertaining parts of the game because you actually get to construct a storyline from the list of options you’re given. And when these new members struggle to get along with the group, Alicia uses Curses & Catacombs to help them open up and connect with the others.

This is a key theme in Wintermoor Tactics Club. It soon becomes clear that something dark is stirring at Wintermoor Academy, but even as the stakes rise and the Tactics Club begins investigating a sinister mystery at the core of the tournament, the true focus is always about friendship and understanding one another.

The Final Word

Wintermoor Tactics Club is ultimately a feel-good story with fun tactical battles. It might not be the most complex strategy game out there or have the deepest plot, but it’s an enjoyable way to spend 10 or so hours.

– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great