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The act of wanting to play a turn-based strategy generally assumes a few personal traits of
the person playing them, notably a sense of patience and a will to learn and understand
rules and concepts that are generally counter-intuitive. Unfortunately 'The Pantheon Cycle: Shrouded
Aspect' by Gilligames seems to assume you have a near infinite amount of patience and
a very understanding persona to be willing to accept some of its quirks.
First of which is the extended audio breaks between sections of the game used to explain
the story. While I'm all for background stories and understanding motivations, the lack of
development within the game itself is strange, especially when characters are considered
all but expendable.
Combat plays out in a fairly standard way for turn-based titles, though there's no limitation
on who can go first, making some ability combinations incredibly game-breaking if you can keep them
alive long enough to reach that stage. More importantly, the interface is disturbingly
lacking in useful details like showing just how far you can move, how many action points
were spent in the process or similar details for enemies. Thankfully the enemy AI isn't
so clever as to exploit these holes in your knowledge and can be easily rallied by using
powerful combinations such as permanently taunting them on to a single beefy character.
As turn-based strategies go, 'The Pantheon Cycle: Shrouded Aspect' actually has an interesting
story and (when you're not exploiting it) a battle system that incorporates some unique
ideas. Unfortunately there's just no motivation to stick with the game unless you're a seriously
huge fan of strategy titles.