EXORDER

Review

The King of Cerulean has passed away suddenly leaving the throne to his next of kin. It would be easy if there were no siblings, but in this particular case the king had two children, the Princess Beyla and the Prince Tristan. As the rules of the land of Cerulean demand, only one of them can be crowned. Therefore they must duel each other and the winner will be pronounced either King or Queen of Cerulean.  If you want my opinion, this is a rule that can lead to disastrous friction between brothers or sisters. What’s next in EXORDER?

EXORDER is a turn-based strategy game where you’ll be taking control of the Princess Beyla in the single player campaign. There are other modes available such, as skirmish and multiplayer.

As soon as the game is launched, you’ll be presented with a cartoonish introduction which will lay out the fundamentals of the story. From here you have the choice to select which mode you’d like to play. Personally, I always play the campaign first before jumping into a multiplayer game. This way I can familiarise myself with the units and maps, and most importantly, avoiding a nasty defeat!

The first mission is the duel between the princess Beyla (who reminds me of Lagertha Lothbrok, from the Vikings for some reason), and the Prince Tristan, who has an Elvis Presley hairdo. It’s basically a small tutorial. There are 12 missions in total in the campaign where you’ll have to complete tasks such as eliminating all enemies from the map, capturing castles, escorting a spy, surviving an assault and freeing Lagertha. . . sorry, Beyla!

All maps are pretty compact with beautiful colour in this fantasy world, which includes a certain number of structures. Each side has one castle (maximum of two castles later on in the campaign) where you can buy units; these castles must be defended at all costs. If you lose your castle or if Beyla dies, the mission is over. There is another structure, the tavern, where you can purchase mercenary units as long as one of your units is within its proximity. The houses are probably the most important buildings in each map. You must capture them to regenerate income. However, only a few units are able to capture them. The house has another purpose too; it can regenerate a small amount of health per turn to a damaged unit. The other way to get a damaged unit back to its full health is to stand next to a fountain, and let me tell you they can be crowded as both sides are gathering for the holy water!  Beware the Ballista, especially if an enemy unit is behind the trigger as they will inflict massive damage to any unit.

The gameplay is what you would expect for this genre of game. First, you select a unit and it will display the tiles that it can move to. If the tiles are on pavement, your soldier will be able to move further than if the tiles are throughout the forest for example, which makes sense. Then you have the melee unit, where you must be on your opponent’s closest tile to perform an attack. A couple of long range units, some need to be two tiles away to activate an attack and others must be between 5 to 6 tiles to do so. Hail the mighty Beetles (not the band, in this instance)!  

There is a small numbers of units available to you in EXORDER, but they are really fun and have interesting skills. Apart from Lagg…Beyla, my favourite unit has to be the Illusionist - what a splendid unit!  It looks like a red turtle with a staff, and can duplicate another of your units on the battlefield at no extra cost, and fires spells too.

Difficulty-wise, it is on a progressive system and it is well-balanced.

I haven’t had a chance to play a game online as yet due to the fact that I could not find another opponent. I would imagine it to be really similar to the skirmish.

Graphically the game looks really good and the animations are fluid. In terms of the interface, it’s easy to use.   My only concern here is the price point. It would have been fabulous to have three campaigns instead of one in the single player mode, as we have three factions in the story.  We could have had one with Beyla, one with Tristan and the other with the Federation of Clans with 6 to 8 missions in each. Apart from that this is a good game.