Exorder is a self-described not overly complex turn-based strategy game. It released for PC earlier this year and released October 16 for the Nintendo Switch.
The game isn’t very complex at all, and this lack of complexity actually holds it back from being a more interesting and engaging game. However, let me first get into the game itself.
Exorder is the most basic of turn-based strategy games. You click on a character, move them within a certain number of squares on the grid, and then attack any nearby enemies to deplete their life bars to zero. There are a variety of troops that you can recruit along the way that have their own abilities or attack types (melee, ranged, shield push), and some of them can capture certain locations on the map, while others cannot. Locations serve as your income and enemy spawn points. Capture a castle and/or house, and you get a certain amount of money to use for recruiting more troops during the battle. Neutralize an enemy base to prevent them from spawning. There are also fountains that you can move your troops next to for health recovery(which can also occur at houses). Defeating enemies will also give you a small amount of gold that you can use to recruit more troops.
Exorder has a pretty solid story setup for the campaign- your father is the king, and upon his death, you must fight your brother to lay claim to the crown. After you defeat your brother, he is recruited by a longtime opponent and our story goes from there. As is usual, I will leave it up to you to discover the rest.
Each mission in the campaign begins and ends with a cutscene that moves the plot forward, and you can watch or rewatch them as many times as you’d like. After you watch, or skip, the cutscene, you are then placed in the battle with a few other troops and given an objective. Usually, this first objective is easy to achieve, but objectives can change or just be added on to as the fight progresses. Exorder, is a game of patience. Even moreso than most turn based strategy games, Exorder requires a lot of waiting and accumulating resources. You must capture every location you come across to amass the wealth necessary to easily overcome the horde of enemies that the game throws at you. You will lose many troops in one hit, and your character, Breyla, must survive. This usually means that you will be taking your turns with Breyla defending a position that restores her hit points after she has engaged in direct battle while scattering your other forces to try to neutralize enemy bases and/or accumulate more resources. The game becomes too much of a grind too early on, and a lot of it could have been fixed by incorporating more role playing elements into it. Exorder offers a multiplayer mode to go along with the single player campaign, but I was not once able to find an online opponent to play against. As such, I cannot include it in this review. After that, the game offers some challenges to be overcome, and they are even more of a slog and grindfest than the main campaign.
Exorder has excellent and intuitive controls for touchscreen, but they are incredibly cumbersome when playing on the big screen. Using the analog sticks to navigate the map can be so much of a chore that it feels almost impossible to select certain troops if they’re in the wrong diagonal from your current plane of cursor selection on the isometric field.
Exorder is a fine example of a game where everything in it works fine, but it’s just not that engaging of an experience. There are a lot of turn-based strategy games on the Switch at this point, and so Exorder feels unnecessary.
