Today I wanted to take a look at We Are The Caretakers, a game that I really want to like but it’s a bit tricky… It is basically a sci-fi turn-based squad management RPG where you assemble the protectors of your planet and the wildlife on it. Unite and defend the world against an extraterrestrial threat, fight for the future, and keep up your reputation. There are a lot of different games in place and 10% of the game’s revenue is sent to the Wildlife Conversation Network’s Rhino Recovery Fund, so I figured I should finally cover it on here as well.
Developer: Heart Shaped Games LLC Publisher: Heart Shaped Games LLC Genre: Early Access, Turn-Based Strategy, Squad Management, RPG, Sci-Fi Release Date: April 22nd, 2021 Reviewed on: PC Available on: PC Copy was provided by the publisher.
The game follows a campaign of sorts where you complete missions by disarming traps, scouting sectors, taking care of wildfires and fighting poachers. Then you return to base and expand your team, take care of the poachers and criminals you detained and do some research but…
It all feels a bit clanky. I feel like the game still needs a lot of polish before I’ll like it. The combat has this mechanic where you need to manage the threat level but you also can choose to break the enemy’s will by decreasing their mental health or you focus on damaging their health and killing them through the stamina damage. It’s interesting but at times feels a bit slow and confusing? I had a hard time figuring out whether or not an enemy is weaker to Stamina or Mental Health damage. There are a lot of different classes and you have to manage your squads and level up the different members of each squad, increasing their stats, passive abilities, and even changing their classes…
I feel like it’s meant to work in a certain way but I can’t see that way just yet. I think the campaign could be a lot better if there was more freedom for the player. Missions popping up in different places and you having to send out squads to different areas kind of like in the XCOM games and manage the Rhaun population… I feel like that would be a lot better than this mission-to-mission concept that we have here. Another issue I’ve been seeing is that detained enemies don’t always give you logical options to use on them… When you bring down their Stamina or Mental Health to 0, you can perform a Finisher on them and imprison them, which is cool, but the issue here is that when you do that, you get a dialogue that says stuff like “This one was driven by simple needs of the coin” or whatever and your options end up being “let them go with a warning”, “not now”, or “bribe them (-200 coins)” which doesn’t make any sense at all. There are times where people don’t wanna cough up information and presumably, you’d be able to torture them at the cost of reputation or bribe them at the cost of money or do something else… but instead, you get other options that just don’t make sense. Sometimes, it works well and it’s cool… Most of the time, I just click on whatever gives me more credits or more research or whatever. It’s really not that deep…
And I personally would have liked a deeper story, a deeper character system, stats that get explained, or more choices… but all of that is stuff that can still change over time. We Are The Caretakers is still in Early Access and while I found it somewhat fun… it’s been mostly weird really and I hope that it receives more updates. I’ll probably revisit this one again in a few months and I’ll see if it improved or not, especially as I really enjoyed the afro-futuristic aesthetic of the game and the idea behind it. I mean, eco-friendly games get a bad rep nowadays, so having a badass premise like this one is actually kind of cool and again, I really want to like it.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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