Lost Technology

Review

The Reinald Empire has been ruling the world for the last forty seven years. Before the rise of this Empire, relentless wars between the twelve factions who co-habit this world had an incredible impact, especially on technologies. And the result was devastating, as all valuable technologies that each of the factions had created were destroyed. Unfortunately the beloved Emperor has passed away from illness. The Prince (his successor) died suddenly and the next family member to take the throne is Agnes, the granddaughter who is only fourteen years old. The empress doesn’t know a thing about politics, military or anything within her empire. To make it even more dangerous, her prime minister, with whom she has direct contact, is a warmonger and only interested in his own fortune. Will it be the end of the Reinald Empire?

Lost Technology is a strategy / anime game set in a fantasy world where humans are the largest faction.

The first thing you must do is to go through the small tutorial. It will tell you how to recruit units, move them through the world and show you how to attack locations. The reason I am writing this is that I consider myself a pretty good gamer when it comes to strategy games. Therefore I have a tendency to jump straight into the thick of it and usually don’t have any issues. In this case, I had a bit of trouble and got a bit frustrated. So, to avoid the frustration do go through the tutorial because it is an interesting game.

On the main menu, you can choose between four levels of difficulties. Then you have to select which faction out of twelve you would like to play.

The map has seventy-six locations and most of them will be divided between all the twelve factions. Depending on who you choose, you’ll start with three or four sites. There is an exception; one of the factions will start with a whopper ten locations! In this game, you basically have to conquer your enemies. There are two phases per turn, the first being the recruitment of units and moving them to a specific location. In this phase, you need to look at how many squads you can have in each of the specific locations (it varies between six and twenty squads) and which unit you can recruit. To touch on this quickly, you have a large number of units to choose from but some of them can only be recruited by a specific hero. For example a mage can only recruit mages, a religious hero can only recruit priests and clerics, and so on and so forth. You can only command one action per squad in this phase. If you need to recruit to fill up a damage squad, you’ll not be available to move it to another location until the next turn. Even worst, you can’t send it as a reinforcement to a province who is under attack.

The second phase is the real time battles. This is setup in a pixel graphic style and it is very cool. You can select formations, and some of your units will move faster than others. As I mentioned above, there are plenty of units (over one hundreds), from mages, lizards, priests, frogs, werewolf, demons, knights, soldiers and many more. During the battle, a picture of your hero (anime) will be put up and text will be displayed with their thoughts, as well as a Japanese voice over. Now, here is a whinge on my behalf . . . most German, Russian and French games have text and voice acting in English.so why do a larger number of Japanese games only make an effort on the text side of the equation? In this game, pictures of the heroes will pop up during the battle and say something in Japanese, but I don’t understand it and the English text will disappear quickly. Look, it is purely a whinge here because I feel that I’m missing the impact a hero has in the battle. For me it would have taken this game to bigger heights!

Graphically the game looks good and I really enjoy the pixel battle setup. The price point is stunning and this game will give you plenty of re-playability.