So positives first: Sound and music are pretty good. The pixel art of the backgrounds and character designs is great, but most of your time is spent in combat with a far less detailed version of your character. It is still decent, but not anywhere as good...
The Game has two main mechanics: Exploration & Combat.
The better of the two, Exploration, runs on Fuel, which limits reach and is refilled after combat. Which means to use it efficiently you always wanna go as far as possible before engaging in combat. You can also find little Events which offer minor decisions. The game also has a Fatigue system that allows you to engage with 9 Events or Combats before having to turn back to town to rest and reset, so you wanna leave some Combat Islands behind to guarantee your return trip.
The map itself resets after you die or after you clear a chapter. You clear a chapter by finding and defeating a boss island. On my first chapter I cleared most islands while on my second one I found the boss after just half of my first fatigue bar. Since I cleared the combats on the way there and would have cleared the rest in the vicinity on my return trip, I had a choice to make: I could have turned around and come back later using Fuel Barrels, a resource purchasable in Town for these Situations, after looting and grinding the rest of the chapter map or I fight it immediately. Since the Combat was already annoying me at this point, for reasons I will get into, I chose the latter option.
So far so okay. I am fine with it honestly, not a ton of depth, but serviceable.
Now the Combat... Well, I guess the best thing one can call it is simple... If you consider that a good thing in a Tactics RPG, which I don't...
The basic principle is that your enemies always go before you and wind-up their strikes, leaving you to react. Unfortunately your possible reactions are VERY limited.
You have your main character which has an attack, movement and one special abilities plus any equipment you can get and equip. You can also hire different mercenaries who are the same, except no special ability and less equipment capacity plus lower base stats. Even after unlocking more characters it doesn't look like you can have more than one of them at a time... You can upgrade your character with different trees for VERY minor changes in how they behave during combat.
Movement, attacks, equipment abilities and special abilities all draw from the same pool of action points, limiting your decisions further. Most turns in any fight basically come down to: hit the enemy and get out of their attack range, in either order. This leads to even simple fights being excessively drawn out and boring as you lack any more interesting responses and your enemy always maintains the initiative and dictates the pace of the fight.
Combat damage is maintained between fights and healing resources are limited, especially if you don't wanna run back to town, which you can't afford to do anyway.
Side note: It also repedeatly happened that I ran into a fight only for the random layout I spawned on and the first attacks to make it impossible to survive the first round no matter what I did. In that case your only option is to quit to the menu and load again, hoping you get a doable layout this time.
Each chapter also introduces new game mechanics and those were what tipped the fights from boring into frustrating and extremely boring.
All enemies in Chapter 2 get a self-buff that let's them immediately counter melee damage during your turn. It is important to mention here that the first main character you play as, the big huge barbarian warrior, starts with 3 max health and only has a melee attack by default... the first mercenary I got had 1 max health by default. And as I said healing between fights is limited... That buff has a 5 turn cooldown, which seems like you should just wait for them to use it and then attack them when it's down right? Well the buff also lasts those 5 rounds or until it activates... which essentially lead to melee attacks being functionally useless as a a strategy. The enemy health also doubled from the first chapter, while each of my warriors could still only reliably do one damage each turn... luckily, I had gotten ranged weapon equipment for both of them, meaning each fight turned into an annoying exercise of slowly widdeling the enemy health pool down and dodging out of the way...
Oh, and remember how I mentioned unintentionally rushing the boss of chapter 2? Yeah, it wasn't a problem, I killed it without taking a single damage, while being way underleveled, it just took a while...
And in Chapter 3 the special mechanic was another self-buff: every second turn the enemies could make it so their next strike would hit immediately on their turn instead of having wind-up, ignoring the main mechanic of this game's combat entirely...
After the run, you get to unlock new abilities in a rogue-lite style system and that's probably what makes progression possible, but at that point I stopped caring.
If you prefer to grind in order to beat a challenge, rather than figure out a character build or a working strategy to win, I'm sure you can have some fun with this game.
Personally I don't consider this game to be a Tactics RPG at all, I consider it Dead Weight.
