There's a lot to love about this game. It has a fantastic score, great art, and some really cool lore and atmosphere. The final mission design is really neat and innovative in a way I've rarely seen in strategy games. It tries to bring the RTS genre, one of my personal favourites, to a wider audience.

But it just wasn't fun or rewarding to play, at all. It's distressingly far from being fun.

Now I knew that this wasn't going to be a typical RTS, so I tried to temper my expectations. And for the first hour or so, I thought it was kinda neat. But very quickly, playing each new level became an exercise in grinding frustration. I think a lot of it comes down to this: Tooth and Tail tries so, so hard to "distill" the real-time strategy game experience that it ends up making compromises that just don't work.

The key conceit of the game is that this is an RTS where your character does everything your mouse cursor would in another RTS - command units, plant buildings, claim resources, etc. This makes the game playable on a gamepad. It also means that you can't divide your attention across the map, even for scouting purposes. You can scout, or command attacks, or build, or claim resources, but you can never multitask. And unless you're returning to your existing base, you can never switch your visual focus instantly to another part of the map.

Imagine playing an RTS game where you need to use the WASD keys to slowly pan your camera around the map instead of clicking on a minimap, and you can only interact with things in the exact centre of the screen. And you can't pan the camera over forests or cliffs. Oh, and also, weather and terrain effects slow your camera down too. Fun, right?

This might not be such an issue if the fundamental scenarios you're playing through weren't designed in the spirit of the RTS genre. You're still getting attacked on multiple fronts often by multiple enemies. You still need to juggle production in your home base with commanding troops on the front. But shifting your attention between different points of focus is glacially slow, you effectively can't divide your forces to engage on multiple fronts (you can issue orders to specific classes of units, but even then all units of that type are affected), and the gameplay is paced so frenetically that tiny errors or miscalculation spell doom.

That's not to mention the fact that your production buildings eat resources automatically to produce units on a timer, so you can't prioritize production orders once you've got your facilities up and running, meaning the more you build the less control you have over what actually gets made.

I'm sure this game will be fun for some people, and clearly a lot of hard work went into making it. But as an avid fan of most RTS games, I went from being kind of interested to hating the gameplay within the span of a few hours, and I'm not entirely sure forcing myself through the whole campaign was worth it.

Damn good music, though. Go check out the soundtrack if nothing else - Austin Wintory is a master in the space.