Crawl Tactics

This charming little game is honestly pretty great! It is consistently getting some polish from the dev and they are quite responsive. This feels very much like an homage to tactics games of old like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre. It is missing the engaging story (due to its roguelike nature) but still offers quite a lot of value.

A hidden gem among strategy RPGs. While the UI can be a bit cumbersome and there is basically no story or lore to speak of, you've got a pretty rock-solid core here. Gameplay-wise the most immediate comparison is something like Tactics Ogre, with a bit more emphasis on things like environmental interactions (i.e., wet tiles/water tiles will cause electrical attacks to have AoE, fire spells will light grass tiles on fire, and so on). In terms of class selection it doesn't really break the mold, but it has all the essentials. All the classes you'd expect are here. From knights to paladins, warlocks and bishops, spellswords and dragoons and the whole glut of elemental mages. Even slightly more esoteric picks like the terror knights and fusilier-equivalents show up. Alongside racial variations that provide unique benefits/maluses (i.e., hawk-men who can fly and can evade ranged attacks easier at the cost of being easier to hit with ranged attacks). There are even tameable beast units. Although honestly plain human characters are probably the best overall, as they are the only ones who can subclass. There's two main modes, Dungeon Mode and Quest Mode. Dungeon Mode is a more focused rogue-like experience, having you choose a party and go through about ten dungeons that get progressively harder as you go along, before fighting a final boss at the end. The scope of this mode is smaller and it's harder to really explore the whole of what the game offers here, but it serves as a nice introduction and is the mode you should probably play first. Quest Mode is a slightly more traditional experience, having you pick and choose dungeons to explore at your leisure, with occasional raids on your home base that you upgrade between missions with the resources you find. Because the timescale of this mode is longer, you can really start to break open the class system and make some truly overpowered combinations. My personal favourite being a Mage who I rebirthed (prestige system) into an Elemental Blade ("spellsword"), who then went on to do ludicrous magical-melee damage for the few missions I had them (they were doing about 600 damage a swing when boss units were capping out at about 400). I got it discounted, but I would not be disappointed had I paid full price for it. ~30 hours well spent. For those who get super into it, maybe even more (there's a meta progression layer that unlocks new classes and starting parties for you to use - I didn't unlock everything until about 20-25 hours in).