Review: Tactical Nexus
A game of extremes
I reserve the right to review anything, even video games. But since some of y’all are here for the LitRPGs, enjoy!
Tactical Nexus is an odd duck. A spiritual successor to the obscure Japanese freeware game Tower of the Sorcerer, it looks like it never left the 2000s: a gloriously low-resolution window of bright pastel pixels and the most visually busy playing fields.
Unlike its ancestor, Tactical Nexus is definitely not for free. The team suggests a play time of around 10,000 hours when all DLC are released, and slowly increases the price over time. The craziest thing is, they may be able to back that up.
Tactical Nexus is not a Minecraft-style open world game, where you can go forever and keep exploring the same few bits of procedurally generated content but in new random arrangements. Rather, not only is every level handcrafted, but there is not the slightest bit of random chance.
Not even one.
Like its predessor, Tactical Nexus is on nominally an RPG, though it would be much better classified as a puzzle. You climb up the towers, collect items, and fight the unmoving, always-visible enemies. Each battle is very simple: you do ATK minus its DEF damage, then it does that back to you, until either one of you is dead. If you can’t even damage the enemy, you’re prohibited from attacking, and if the enemy can’t damage you, it’s just free EXP.
Enemies are thus just speedbumps that cost health and usually spit out items. The game even shows you the math, giving you the amount of health each of these speedbumps will cost, and how much more ATK is necessary to reduce the turns the battle will take. The game will also tell you what each enemy will drop. The only unknown is what’s on the next floor up.
And how to get there.
You see, unlike most RPGs, because there is no infinite supply of enemies to grind, nor infinite items to pick up, nor infinite healing, the game is about maximizing the value of every item, door, and enemy. Run out and you’re left with an unwinnable tower.
I enjoy difficult games, and I have my own list of rare accomplishments: I got every banana in Donkey Kong 64, I’ve 100% Devil Survivor Overclocked and beat its unreasonably difficult secret final boss without cheesy tactics, I got all six chaos emeralds in Sonic 1, and I’ve even gotten all three Apostle victories in Cultist Simulator.
Tactical Nexus puts every other PvE game I’ve played to shame. It even puts NetHack to shame, though I’ve never ascended in NetHack. It has the rare distinction of being so insanely difficult that anything beyond “winning” the first tutorial by getting to its lowest exit is an accomplishment.
Aside from the aforementioned first tower, the game does not deluge you with resources. In fact, there’s not even enough keys in each tower to open all of its doors. You will have to spend precious level ups to buy keys instead of buying more stats.
But it doesn’t end there. Most towers either have Golden Feathers, which multiply EXP gain, or Heart Crowns, which multiply health gain. An item you pick up now could be worth far more if you went deeper into the tower and collected such rare items. But by forgoing powerups, you will potentially run out of health earlier, or spend too much.
Like the original Tower of the Sorcerer, each floor is like a part of an interconnected puzzle, but a meta-puzzle overlies them all, based on a mechanism most gamers would wish had been left in the 2000s.
Almost every tower has a Nexus that can be accessed at any time, essentially a store. All sorts of rare items can be found there, locked behind doors requiring Medals. You can also usually find sunwishers there, which will raise your stats in exchange for Sunstones. Without either, the Nexus is useless. With them, towers can become much easier, or even possible to win at all.
But of course, getting those Medals and Sunstones is where the meta-puzzle comes in,
Should you get to one of the exits of a tower, of which there are between one to three, your health, stats, and levels are combined to get your high score, with better formulas depending on what kind of exit you got to. But there comes that notorious mechanic I mentioned, which turns an insanely diffficult game into a solid rock wall of difficulty.
Like the original N64 Banjo-Kazooie and early games in the Gemcraft series, there is no cumulative score. All that matters is your highest score from one individual run, and if reaches one of the very high thresholds, you will get a different rank of Medal. If you spent no Medals on your run (a “Pure Nexus” run), or get a completely ludicrous high score, you get bonus Sunstones. Otherwise, you get nothing at all.
How high are these threshholds? The first exit in Tactical Tutorial 1 will give you nothing. The second, if you can struggle all the way there, will probably not even give you a bronze. My first success, after many hours of flailing unsucccessfully, was scraping by a bronze in Tactical Trip Mini.
You’ll need to go to multiple towers, therefore, and win at each of them a little, until you can win at one of them a lot. And despite the simple graphics and deterministic gameplay, each tower has its own distinct feel and gimmicks. Tactical Tutorial 1 is “easy”, but suprisingly difficult to master. The entirety of Tactical Tower Mini’s main floor is visible at the top of this article. Tactical Tower D has no ATK power level-ups and ATK items are almost non-existent. The lengthy tactical Tower NEW has its own plot and has numerous intricate details. Hinafuna Dojo is a notoriously difficult puzzle where you can’t even walk normally. I’m not sure if Tactical Tower K is even a puzzle so much as an elaborate torture device.
The game, and its small but dedicated community, feels very much like a kind of turn-based speedrun. It’s not so much about exploring or fighting enemies as optimizing each run until you snag one more medal, one more sunstone, so you can climb up and snag the next. And the developers are very much aware of this. The game is equipped with a map function that remembers previous run’s progress, you can leave notes in-game on any tile you’d like, and, due to its deterministic nature, undo and redo.
Optimizing a route over several futile runs as you slowly progress towards one more small success is not for everyone. As the developers say, it’s a game of extremes, and one of the extremes is the sheer difficulty. But it stays interesting, because each run you do learn a bit more about the tower, or try something different, or maybe, just maybe, get a new medal or reach a new exit.
Which brings me to the final twist: each tower has multiple parts, depending on how far you can go. In almost every nexus, behind numerous high-value medal doors, lays a staircase to the final exit. I’ve never actually seen behind any of these in my nearly 50 hours of playing, and in fact they may be hundreds of hours away. But that’s the beauty of it. If you’re the right kind of player, it really could be a 10,000 hour game.
For those of you who are unafraid of difficult games, the game is on Steam. There is also a discord somewhere out there, but I strongly recommend you spend your time bashing your head against the wall first and learning the ropes before seeking community assistance. As it is, 50 hours in, I’m still on 11 sunstones and only two gold medals, yet still greatly enjoying it. What else can I say? It’s an odd duck.