Vanillaware's beautiful art brings to life a staggeringly deep strategy RPG where building units is just as fun as orchestrating battles.
Unicorn Overlord plays with overfamiliar tropes throughout its entire 50-ish hour runtime , though that didn't really bother me because - with over 60 unique characters plus ones that you can create and"hire" yourself - the game shines when it's dishing out piecemeal vignettes that slowly contextualise its world.
Learning about the Fevrith region's expansive cultures through the eyes of its very different citizens easily outshines anything that happens in the central liberation story. There are some instances where a character appears again after hours and hours, just for me to scratch my head, wondering who they are. And the game sometimes stumbles with a quantity-over-quality approach to its many, many side stories, making some encounters as forgettable as a random battle.
Unicorn Overlord's vast and creative map design opens the door for strategy and emotion that's constantly shifting. One battle makes you extinguish a large forest fire while also moving through enemy territory, an exercise that had me rubbing my forehead in an effort to not anxiously combust. Another has you protect a coliseum against a four-way invasion using trebuchets, archer watch towers, and roadblocks to turn the assault into a tower defence-like encounter.
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)