Confrontation Review (PC) | Video Game Reviews | GamingUnion.net

It's always interesting to see a table-top epic adapted into another form of media, particularly of the video game kind. Just take a gander at Dungeons & Dragons, Dragon Age, and even Warhammer 40,000. Cyanide Studio have picked up the now administrated Rackham Entertainment's Confrontation, a miniature war-game set against the dark fantasy world of Aarklash.

Like most table-top games, Confrontation is set in a dark fantasy world with a very rich lore. The world of Aarklash has been ravaged by the great war Rag'narok, split between two main factions: The Griffin and The Scorpion. There are two other factions that join in the conflict as well: the orcs who wave the banner of The Jackal, and the wolfen that fly the flag of The Wolf. You play as a group of elite Griffin Templars who have been charged with sneaking behind enemy lines to investigate The Scorpion's plans and what exactly their twisted alchemical minds have devised.

This is great storytelling. There is a lot of lore, a lot of backstory and it's just a huge juicy piece of meat to sink your teeth into. This is also one of the shortcomings of Confrontation. Unless you're already familiar with the world of Aarklash, it's going to be really hard to invest any significant amount of time into the game's story as it can easily come across as intimidating.

The game has been designed where story progresses along with each level you complete. Each mission is separated with narrated briefings and cutscenes, which serve as a nice break from the methodical role-playing. Unfortunately, the loading times between each level are excruciatingly long. It's no joke that you can make a sandwich and comeback in time to play the next level.

The gameplay itself isn't all that remarkable or ground-breaking, but I personally found it to be quite addicting. The pause-and-play mechanic lends itself well to the strategy involved with planning your attacks and actions. You'll be looking down on the action from a bird's eye isometric view, and you can control the camera a la Warcraft or League of Legends, with the added feature of camera rotation.

Positioning and timing plays an important role in combat. Some enemies will always attack the first person they see, so putting Darius at the front lines is always a good move. You have your standard auto-attack, plus skills and abilities unique to each of your four characters; each of whom fulfills a specific class role, be it tank, DPS, range or support. The game can be played in real-time, by clicking on the respective character and selecting or queuing up the desired actions, or the action can be paused, giving you more time to plan to out your battle strategy.

The AI aren't stupid either, while some tend to charge the first character they see, they'll at times switch their attention to the squishiest of the group: Zelia, and she just so happens to have most of the crowd control abilities. Despite this, the gameplay remains slow and very methodical, which may not appeal to a lot of gamers, but then again this game is targeted at a very specific audience.

In battle, you can anticipate what the enemy is going to do next by the respective colour representations. Red signifies high damage abilities, while green signifies healing, yellow for buff, blue for anti-magic and so on and so forth. When all's said and done, the active pause-and-play, class roles, and user interface system work together to create quite a tactical experience.

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