Together in Battle is the latest entry in the Telepath RPG series and the followup to Telepath Tactics, which I reviewed… a decade ago, wow it’s been a while. In the intervening time I’ve gotten a lot more experience with tactical RPGs through binging the entire Fire Emblem franchise, so I have broader knowledge to compare it against.

Together in Battle is structured more like a roguelike: Characters, maps, and events are randomly generated except for a few story-related battles. To this end there is now a life sim aspect where you can only do a limited number of things per day, and your characters regularly drain food and money. I can see the reasoning in this — it makes sense to try something qualitatively different rather than just making Telepath Tactics again. Unfortunately, I don’t think it accomplished what it was going for nearly as well this time, and overall left me feeling oddly disappointed.

Before anything else, I have to say that the game looks and feels bizarrely amateurish. Coming off of Fire Emblem’s sleek UX, I was staggered by just how clunky and awkward everything felt. You can’t cycle through available weapons during the attack preview like you can in FE (even though this game uses FE’s breakable weapon system, so avoiding overkills is pretty important). There’s no way to see everyone’s inventory at once, so if you want to check who has what you need to click through every character individually. Though you can view character details (including their inventory) at any time, you can only view and manage stored inventory at certain points, and the button to do so is on the opposite end of the screen. There were a distressing number of inventory-related bugs on initial release, and though they’ve since been fixed, there is no excuse for letting such glaring issues make it into a release build. This is especially galling when I had the exact same complaints about the inventory system in the original Telepath Tactics 10 years ago, but the designer somehow still seems to be struggling to get the inventory system functional. Oh, and speaking of my same complaints, the game still uses the same bafflingly unintuitive autosave system as back then, where creating a manual save moves the autosave to that slot instead of making an actual hard save.

The presentation is also somehow worse than the original Telepath Tactics. The game now uses sprites on 3D rendered environments, which… makes sense from one angle I’ll get to later, but aesthetically looks awful.

The character sprites are okay, I think, but the environmental features also being sprites is just uncanny. (Not captured here, but they also use pixel distortion to emulate ambient movement, which, as always, looks horrible.) The fully-rendered tiles just draw attention to how flat and artificial the objects look. To make this worse, some objects (such as walls) are 3D models, which makes the sprites look like unfinished placeholder assets. I know the dev wanted to be able to show elevation better, but I can’t help but feel there was a better way to do this.

This extends to the UI icons, which also look like unfinished placeholder assets. I mean, just look at these. They’re so blocky and low-res they look like they’re from a completely different game than the sleek hand-drawn elements in use everywhere else. (It doesn’t help that they’re very obviously repurposed battle UI icons rather than being unique.) I don’t know if the developer ran out of art budget or what, but this just looks bad.

In contrast, the art style for the character portraits has gone a lot more photorealistic, which again lands in the uncanny valley for me. So many wrinkles. I’m especially weirded out by the winking expressions — and, yes, that’s supposed to be a wink, not a cringe. The portraits seem to use the same graphic for all expressions with closed eyes, and I’m baffled why the artist thought that would work in such a realistic style.

The display also glitches if you try to load it at 1440×1080 resolution, but what else is new.

The game just generally looks and feels like it’s someone’s first game rather than their… what is it now? Eighth? I sympathize — I struggled a lot with UX in my game — but Stern has been making games for decades and has a team of artists on payroll. I really can’t understand why he hasn’t gotten a handle on this by now.

But while the form is questionable, the substance is… also questionable.

The game’s biggest point of failure is that, as per usual with roguelikes, the generation algorithm just can’t produce content that’s engaging enough. The randomly-generated battles mostly just felt like tedious and repetitive busywork while I waited for the actually interesting story-based battles. This probably has to do with how complex the battle system is — there are so many elements in play and so many ways to approach any given problem that the generation algorithm just can’t produce maps complex enough to use all of it. As a result I rarely felt intellectually engaged — the same strategies broadly worked every time.

Part of this is that I was almost certainly overleveled. I think the life sim model might have given the player more freedom than the designer was able to tune for; it’s very easy to fight a ton of arena battles and overload on money and experience. (I was never remotely at risk of running out of either money or food.) In fact this is something of a vicious cycle, as there’s not much to do other than the arena except damage control, which means that if you play well you’ll end up fighting even more. By the end, even the final battle was pretty trivial, and I literally oneshot one of the final bosses. Admittedly I only played on the standard difficulty, so I don’t know how the harder modes stack up, but I mean… it’s the standard difficulty, so I’m pretty confident in believing this is a standard player experience.

The game probably should have given you a fixed number of battles instead of letting you fight any time, or at least put heavier restrictions on when you could do so. Into the Breach, another roguelike tactical RPG, gives you the same fixed number of battles every run, which prevents you from grinding and I think works a lot better. Of course, doing this would require coming up with something else for the player to do on off days, and I can’t think of much in that regard.

The random generation also (unsurprisingly) interacts poorly with the writing. The randomly-generated characters run into the exact same problems I identified in Abomi Nation: The designer wanted to make these characters feel like real people you could get attached to, but random generation just isn’t up to the task. Each character is defined by a single personality trait that results in them saying the same canned lines over and over again, which only highlights the fact they’re shallow facsimiles. (This is particularly awkward with the golems, who really do act like mindless automatons now, even though it is a major plot and gameplay point that they must have minds because they’re affected by mental attacks. It’s a far cry from Flint mourning Helena’s death in the original Teleapth RPG, which was one of the most genuinely moving things in that game.)

(Random generation also resulted in an extremely awkward cutscene of a depressed lissit mourning her dead lover named “Klo’aca”, which was a hell of a tonal whiplash. Maybe keep the joke names out of serious cutscenes, Craig?)

A few new elements were added to the gameplay (though apparently they originated in a remake of Telepath Tactics that came out in 2022 but I missed somehow). One is that characters have a new stat called “reflexes” that can make them turn to avoid a backstab a set number of times per round. Only a few classes get this, but I very much appreciated it on assassins, whose gameplay style of moving behind enemy lines often got them backstabbed to death in TT. The final boss also gets this, preventing the player from anticlimactically oneshotting them with a backstab as in TT, which is very fair. I still oneshotted them anyway, because they had no such protection from the other new addition:

The engine has been overhauled to support terrain elevation as a core mechanic rather than it working on a case-by-case basis as in the original Telepath Tactics, and to synergize with this, characters now have more ways to push and pull characters, including a new “kineticist” class that specializes in this. (Functionally they’re the same as the “mentalist” class from TT, but now mentalists have been reskinned to specialize in mind controlling enemies.) I think the designer may have gotten a bit too enamored with this mechanic, because my experience is that movement manipulation (and kineticists especially) break the game in half. Pushing characters into each other does damage to both, and while this is usually less damage than an attacking ability (it’s only equal to your base attack stat with no increments or modifiers), if the ability you used pushes characters multiple spaces the damage stacks. Kineticists have moves that push a target 3 spaces, which translates into damage equaling three times their attack power, far exceeding the damage output of any other psy move. This is how I was able to oneshot the final boss: They foolishly spawned at the edge of the arena, which counts as an obstacle for the purposes of push damage. Rookie mistake, chump!

This is all without even mentioning that dropping a character into water or from high elevation both damages them and forfeits their turn, or that pushing a character into a chasm kills them outright.

You could do most of this in the original Telepath Tactics too, but this game gives you way more opportunities to abuse it. In addition to the new elevation mechanic, maps are generally smaller and littered with both hazards and obstacles you can fling people into. My kineticist cleaned house in every map while my other psy fighters mostly twiddled their thumbs. I get the sense the designer got a bit too excited with showing off this new mechanic and wasn’t able to fine-tune the balance by release time.

Less significantly, shadowlings can now be any psy class instead of being their own class, which makes a lot of sense since that’s how all the playable shadowlings have worked throughout the franchise. Unfortunately this means you have almost no reason to use human psychics now. Shadowlings have unparalleled mobility, while humans can… wear light armor, which does practically nothing. I’m not clear what the intended balance was supposed to be — I assume humans were supposed to be more durable, but human psychics still die to a stiff breeze, so that’s not it.

(Sadly, lissit do not get this treatment, and their only psy-related class remains the worst one. Barudit at least get Sabrina’s trap abilities, which are still extremely useful.)

So the presentation is sloppy and the gameplay is uneven. What about the story?

There is actually a story beyond just “You are a gladiator,” fortunately. The player character enters the tournament with the ulterior motive of recruiting characters to fight against the evil mining company of the previous game; however, this interesting hook is basically irrelevant to the actual plot, which is that someone tries to assassinate the local ruler and you have to figure out who. Despite being framed as a complex mystery that needs to be carefully puzzled out, I found it surprisingly trivial. There is basically only one actual twist, and it only adds extra information instead of recontextualizing existing knowledge. Though you can accuse multiple suspects, the real culprit is obvious from the start and their attempts to throw you off-track are so staggeringly incompetent that all they do is make their guilt more obvious. Everyone is exactly as they appear to be and the motives are extremely straightforward. I found this weird when the series’ writing has previously been quite good. Maybe the designer just isn’t very good at writing mysteries?

The eleventh-hour secret villain was foreshadowed and incorporated into the plot reasonably well, though I thought their motivation came out of nowhere — the setting is consistently portrayed as egalitarian and we see plenty of women in powerful positions, so the sudden reveal that this society is actually super misogynistic was incongruous. I initially thought it was going for more of an ableist angle, but the epilogue doubles down on saying it’s specifically unmarried women who have no social safety net.

I did like the ending — saving the king’s life gives you the political capital to push him into enacting real reforms that change the country for the better, which I really appreciated after so many of the games I’ve reviewed recently have been drenched in centrist and traditionalist propaganda. (I chose to make him crack down on the Nazis, because that seemed the most pressing issue.) The monarchism still annoys me, though. I was hoping there would be follow-up on the early hint that the king was actually adopted or an imposter, but that thread seemingly got dropped.

The initial hook ended up being the weakest part, and I get the sense it was only included as a reference to Telepath Tactics. The level of choice we’re afforded in the game just doesn’t make sense with who we’re told we are. An abolitionist shouldn’t even consider breaking a strike, enabling bigotry, or abusing their employees (and you can be so abusive, my god). The only thing we know about the player character is that they’re a hero — not just generally a good person, but someone actively risking their life for a specific cause. Yet this has no bearing on their behavior or opinions; once the game starts they’re a blank slate who does whatever you want them to. I also expected there to be some hidden mechanic of feeling out whether recruits were sympathetic to your cause, but if there is I didn’t find it; my recruits unanimously agreed to join my terrorist organization without a second thought in the ending. Maybe that’s different if you tanked their morale, I dunno.

So overall… I hate to say it, but I think this is the first game in the series I can’t recommend. It really feels inferior to Telepath Tactics in just about every way. I respect that the designer tried to experiment with something different, but the experiment was a failure. As much as Telepath Tactics 2 might feel like treading water, I’d honestly prefer that for his next game.