To Arms!

Let's, for the moment, pretend games are food. To Arms! is a thick, unevenly cut steak pulled fresh from the grill. It has its char marks and gristle, but it's nothing if not hearty.

Like Vermicide, To Arms! appeals to two distinct and sometimes conflicting gamer bases. It chunks in long sections of character development and plot with brutally hard battles, forcing the player to make full use of the fifteen available save slots.

The plot is heavily influenced by RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, using the mud-and-blood fantasy setting as a jumping-off-point for a different kind of story. It follows a level-headed, principled man and his jaded cousin as they try not to fold on the crappy hand fate has dealt them. This isn't a particularly heartwarming jaunt through middle Europe, but then neither is the source material. The supporting cast is well developed, and even though the prologue episode is short, it does an excellent job of evoking the story about to develop.

From a gameplay perspective, things feel kind of sparse. There aren't a lot of interactables (which cuts down on the compulsively-inspect-everything-in-the-room-just-in-case phenomenon,) and the plot doesn't ever jump its rails. In some ways, this makes the little decisions like what skills to develop and what items to stock in your inventory that much more important. I found myself thinking long and hard over whether I needed an extra buckler, instead of shrugging and grinding a few more spiders so that I could buy an armload.

If none of the above has particularly put you onto this game yet, then that's because I haven't talked about the combat. Fights in To Arms! are heady and visceral and everything that combat in an rpg should be. They echo the mood of the game perfectly, and feel more like men desperately hacking at each other in the rain than anime princesses throwing sparkles from across the battlefield. I've never had a routine battle in a game get my blood pumping before this, and To Arms! deserves considerable credit for that.

Strangely, for a Max McGee title, my biggest complaint comes from the story. To Arms! episode one feels like those first hundred pages to an epic fantasy novel, where you're still learning names and the plot hasn't quite gotten underway yet. The setting itself is lovely and stark, but that characters that populate it haven't had enough time to show the player who they are, and so it's hard to form a connection with them.

As with an epic fantasy, the solution here is more words. Another episode would cement quite nicely into the foundation that Deceive, Despise, and Murder Men established. And it would have the fringe benefit of hooking me up with more jaw-crunching, gut-stabbing, name-bellowing fight scenes, which is where the angry soul of To Arms! lies.