Adventure? Strategy? RPG?
Overfall is a little difficult to directly classify. Players take on a couple of heroes who come through a portal to their homeland after fighting in a war only to find that much more time has passed and their world is, in a way, being torn apart. The characters are tasked with finding a way to navigate and forge alliances with the various races in the different lands, eventually finding the Everking and stopping an invasion.
One of the first things that will strike you about Overfall is the art style. It is a sort of 2.5D not-quite-isometric world inhabited by characters that are flat. While this may not be a great description, what almost seems like a simplistic style offers the developers freedom to first off concentrate on the core mechanics of the game but also the “limited” art style winds up being highly expressive and charming.
Players will explore the world via ship in a world of islands. There is a border to the world, an impenetrable fog. I was hoping to sail all the way to the left and enter the map from the right, but no, you will waste valuable time by “exploring” the edges of the world. And yes, there is a time limit. The invasion you are tasked with preventing is imminent, so after a certain amount of time it is going to happen if you are not successful.
Each of the various islands in this world are controlled by different factions and have a variety of environment types. There is a wonderful randomness to the types of encounters players will …. encounter. Ouch. Moving on. Most islands feature one primary faction and often a secondary one which comes up in a conflict the players will find themselves in the middle of. Each island will, when landed upon, trigger an event. It is up to the players to determine how to resolve the conflict, either in favor of one side or the other, through force or diplomacy and so on. Certain factions will be less welcoming, some more antagonistic, but each island is a new opportunity.
Death is permanent, well, mostly. If possible one could offer up runes at the temple, but sometimes, well, actually most of the time, it is simply easier and perhaps better to simply start the game over. And start over you will quite a bit. Overall is a bit difficult to navigate and players will need to take what they have learned and apply it to their next round of play.
As play progresses new party members and skills are unlocked that can be used making each successive play through a bit easier, or at the very least more interesting. Completing various quests players will be able to unlock additional slots to add characters to the party.
Combat is turn based, with each character having three rounds of action per turn. One is a movement, then two action. You can skip one of the rounds (or all of them) but you are unable to go back to them until the next turn. Action items available will of course depend on which character you have in play and the abilities of said character, but there is a great variety on the battlefield. The animations are quite good, and this is where the art style really shines.
I should probably discuss the combat more, but honestly, it isn’t the thing that stood out the most to me in Overfall. There is a hex-grid field, each character takes a turn (the PC assigns the order of combat) and … it’s pretty straight forward.
Additionally Overall features a Story Builder mode, which in all honesty I haven’t tried out but for a few minutes. Players are able to not only fashion their own scenarios but share them and download what others have created. This is something that will definitely extend the shelf life of the game and make it well worth the asking price. For $10 you really couldn’t do much worse.
It should be noted that as I write this review the game is available on Steam’s Early Access. This means the game is not finished, but in so many ways you might not notice.