Traditional turned-based gaming seems to be dying out and being replaced with games of Confrontation’s ilk – a squad based strategy game. Squad based combat that seems to be a heady blend of RTS (without a base) and RPG.

Confrontation was the product of a tabletop gaming company that is NOT Games Workshop (yes, there is and was others), but a French company going by the name of Rackham. We say “was,” because Rackham was liquidated in 2010. Cyanide was evidently a fan though, as they bought the rights to the game.

It’s following the format of the Games Workshop video-game conversions in a lot of ways. Sorry. Every way. The preview build I was given pits four factions against the other in struggle for supremacy over a continent. The winner of the continent gets to fight alongside the gods in the struggle of the impending Ragnarok. To be honest, I’m not even sure of this. The story is not the strong suit and it dumps all the information in one heap into your brain for you to sort out. There’s a compelling fantasy world in there if you can sort through all the information, but you might want to make yourself familiar with it before you start playing the video game (the wonders of Google, right?). For the more casual gamers, all you really need to know is that there are factions are in a state of total war against each other. You have the customary humans, wolfmen, orcs and some kind of huge fantasy cyborg as your four choices here.

I was allowed to play a bit though the human campaign, and my impressions of it were a little disappointing. The combat was hampered by the fact that the useful abilities and hotkeys were obfuscated to the point of uselessness and the ability colour codes were nonsensical. Your squad AI seems to have no problem with sending squishy wizards into the meat grinder, which means that you will have to manually position them yourself, even then they seem to have a very unhelpful mind of their own, and often acting without any commands from myself.

On top of all this, it was very unclear what roles my party members had. The tanks and the wizards looked very similar to my eyes, so it was difficult to even manage the basics of my squad. Confrontation tabletop fans will likely have an easier time here, though, and let’s face it – this is a game for the fans of a liquidated miniatures game. A niche audience perhaps, but it does look nice on the computer screen.

Though I have my reservations about the game, it’s important to remember that that this is NOT a finished product. I don’t know how much they’ll be able to fix for a general audience in that time, though. I wasn’t hugely impressed, and will be avoiding this one for sure upon release. But then, I never played the tabletop game, so I may well not be the target demographic for this game.

– Zane M

Traditional turned-based gaming seems to be dying out and being replaced with games of Confrontation’s ilk – a squad based strategy game. Squad based combat that seems to be a heady blend of RTS (without a base) and RPG.

Confrontation was the product of a tabletop gaming company that is NOT Games Workshop (yes, there is and was others), but a French company going by the name of Rackham. We say “was,” because Rackham was liquidated in 2010. Cyanide was evidently a fan though, as they bought the rights to the game.

It’s following the format of the Games Workshop video-game conversions in a lot of ways. Sorry. Every way. The preview build I was given pits four factions against the other in struggle for supremacy over a continent. The winner of the continent gets to fight alongside the gods in the struggle of the impending Ragnarok. To be honest, I’m not even sure of this. The story is not the strong suit and it dumps all the information in one heap into your brain for you to sort out. There’s a compelling fantasy world in there if you can sort through all the information, but you might want to make yourself familiar with it before you start playing the video game (the wonders of Google, right?). For the more casual gamers, all you really need to know is that there are factions are in a state of total war against each other. You have the customary humans, wolfmen, orcs and some kind of huge fantasy cyborg as your four choices here.

I was allowed to play a bit though the human campaign, and my impressions of it were a little disappointing. The combat was hampered by the fact that the useful abilities and hotkeys were obfuscated to the point of uselessness and the ability colour codes were nonsensical. Your squad AI seems to have no problem with sending squishy wizards into the meat grinder, which means that you will have to manually position them yourself, even then they seem to have a very unhelpful mind of their own, and often acting without any commands from myself.

On top of all this, it was very unclear what roles my party members had. The tanks and the wizards looked very similar to my eyes, so it was difficult to even manage the basics of my squad. Confrontation tabletop fans will likely have an easier time here, though, and let’s face it – this is a game for the fans of a liquidated miniatures game. A niche audience perhaps, but it does look nice on the computer screen.

Though I have my reservations about the game, it’s important to remember that that this is NOT a finished product. I don’t know how much they’ll be able to fix for a general audience in that time, though. I wasn’t hugely impressed, and will be avoiding this one for sure upon release. But then, I never played the tabletop game, so I may well not be the target demographic for this game.

– Zane M