Telepath Psy Arena 2 is a basic strategy RPG by Craig Stern / Sinister Design. The genre is kind of underrepresented among indie games (although perhaps it appears more than we’d expect), and as it’s one of my favorite genres I’m just happy to play a new one, even if it doesn’t do anything particularly special and felt a bit unpolished for its price to me.
The way it works is you buy a party from the slave market (there’s a variety of classes), and fight a series of coliseum battles. You gain more money, which you can use to train your characters to make them stronger, or buy orbs to make your hero stronger, or buy new characters. If you lose a character in battle, they’re usually gone for good (like Fire Emblem). There isn’t very much story (although there’s a little), most of the game is just battle after battle. There’s no equipment or class changing or other bells and whistles, it’s just a bare essentials strategy RPG, although occasionally there are alternate win conditions to add some variety (such as capture a square, or protect one). I’d guess the game will probably last about 6-8 hours for a single playthrough.
By unpolished earlier, I mean things like many actions (such as GUI actions or walking) not having associated sound effects, a GUI made largely of round rectangles and text which often gets in the way and has to be moved around manually, very few pieces of music, difficulty in telling your team and the enemy team apart (they don’t even have separate colors), the inability to place your characters where you want at the start of a battle, and so on.
And of course the graphics. I know that Craig wrote an article called The Obsession With Aesthetics in the Indie Scene, but I kind of think there’s a difference between being put off by bad graphics and being obsessed by good graphics. To be fair though, the flip animation of the assassin was top notch, I loved watching it every time it happened. And of course it’s hard to make pretty graphics in a completely top-down perspective, regardless of how skilled you are.
But as I said, I’m just happy to see more strategy RPGs, and while it’s not excellent, it’s at least a solid entry to that genre that got me addicted to it for a small time (which is also how I feel about the latest Vandal Hearts game).