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Turn Based Ink Battles With Animals?

2K View2023-02-05

Inkulinati is an interesting game that ive come cross this year. This game put a huge spin on the turn based combat and made it definitely a lot more strategic.

Inkulinati is a game that expects you to do a lot of thinking. Odds are the realization will come midway through the academy, where the game teaches you the ropes of its turn-based gameplay.

Combat in this game is definitely a doozy since it requires major thinking to really get the ball going. Combat is split up in a couple of ways, ranging from ink dripping at specific turns, to the apocalypse crashing down in turn 5 and even the sleep mechanic, which spells upon any unit who enters the battlefield to immediate fall asleep and cannot make a move until next turn. The matches play true to turn base fashion and it give me card game vibes to the style.

Combat revolves around head-to-head duels between forces usually lorded over by tiny Inkulinati, who can either manipulate the action using giant versions of their own hands or draw up armies of creatures with different characteristics and abilities using their supply of living ink. Said ink is earned by positioning your troops over blots that will pop up randomly on the page as things progress. Each Inkulinati and unit on both sides receive one turn per chapter by default, with fights rumbling on until either everybody on one side, or just their Inkulinati, has run out of health and bitten the dust.

A run in Inkulinati begins with the player choosing from a small pool of characters, deciding if they want their three starting units to be dogs or rabbits, choosing a hand power, and picking a color for their team. Which by far is so different to me about these beasts and ink monster combined. From there, they are dropped into the world to proceed through randomized webs of nodes that include matches, stores, story beats, and player decisions. Along the way, players are able to grow their arsenal of units and powers to help them grow and adapt throughout their playthrough.

The rogue-lite structure of Inkulinati works well enough to support its experience, but the game’s real triumph is its strategic encounters themselves. There are two types of combat encounters that players will face. Most are “beast” encounters that see the player dealing with a specified group of enemies on a map, while every web of nodes throughout the run ends in a duel with another Inkulinati.

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