Game Theory: This free demo is one of the best deals in gaming right now
Unicorn Overlord arrives on multiple systems this week—and its demo is one of the best video game sales pitches we've seen in years
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
Atlus published its new strategy game Unicorn Overlord this weekend—or, if we want to get more exact, published it again. After all, the publisher already handed out VanillaWare’s delightful new war gaming title to gamers for free not all that long ago, releasing a demo for the new game that encompasses five full hours of its exciting blend of automated battles, planning, and tactics. (More than five hours, actually, since the game won’t cut you off if you’re in the middle of a fight or a big story event; the whole thing is ridiculously generous.) Even if you don’t end up buying the game, five hours of very solid strategy gaming for zero dollars is a hell of a thing, making the Unicorn Overlord demo both a) a damn fine sales pitch, and b) the best deal going in gaming at the moment.
For the uninitiated: Unicorn Overlord is kind of what you’d get if you took Nintendo’s Fire Emblem games—the very distinct character classes, the blending of RPG elements with turn-based strategy, the big focus on nurturing relationships between your various soldiers—with some pretty weird and ancient throwbacks. (Does it mean anything to anyone if we say the game reminded us of a less punishing and depressing version of classic Super Nintendo strategy title Ogre Battle? Help us, readers, we’re oh so terribly old.) The upshot is that you spend most of the game moving units of soldiers around a map, getting them into fights with enemies, and then sitting back and watching as your soldiers do their thing, free of any direct input from the player.
The “game,” then, all happens in the preparation: Both the movements of your units on the battlefield—things are typically going to go a lot better if you’re fighting in the cover of your archer unit, for instance—and in how you set those individual units up. That extends all the way to programming the behavior of individual soldiers: Your main character, Alain, gets bonus health back when he lands the killing blow on enemies, for instance, so it can pay to have him target those with lower levels of health. The net result is something that marries wargaming to just a bit of the current auto-battler trend (or Final Fantasy XII’s gambit system, if you’re decrepit like us.) It’s all pretty complicated, with a lot of depth obviously lurking beneath the surface—which is why that five-hour demo is such an incredibly good idea.
There are plenty of video games for which a five-hour demo, which contains as much of the game as you can reasonably get to in that time, would be an obvious case of indulging in poor planning, vis a vis cow-buying/free milk-receiving. But UO—the title is there because Alain has a magical unicorn ring that frees people of mind control, and that’s probably as much of the plot as you need to burden yourself with—knows that five hours is just long enough for you to feel the first tantalizing trickles of mastery of its combat system. It gets you to the point where you can start to see just how stupid and powerful some of these strategies can get, so that when you shell out for the full game, it’s not just because you care about what’s going to happen to them dang ol’ unicorns next—it’s because you’re excited for what you are going to pull off in your next fight, breaking and bending the system in new or interesting ways. There’s nothing quite like the moment when a meaty, complex gaming system starts to reveal itself to you, and Unicorn Overlord’s demo is perfectly timed to get you to that point.
So, yeah: You owe it to yourself to get five hours of really good video game for free; just don’t be surprised if you end up shelling out for the full game once it’s done.