I love tactical strategy games, like XCOM and Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem and all them. So I was already pretty much on board with Tactichord’s whole thing the moment I saw that it was a tactics game. But when I saw that it was built around a glam metal band just getting started and that the attacks were power chords, bass bumps and crucial drumming, well.
The story is the kind of story that is very careful to take place just before cell phones became common, because a lot of things just aren’t issues when you always have a phone with you, wherever you go. So, this takes place in (I believe) 1995.
You play as Diane, a bullied teen who was shoved into a locker by a bunch of mean girls, whereupon she gained the power to control insects and became the supervillain “Skitter”. Whoops, wrong story. In this story, Diane is an aspiring bassist sent to become more socialized by joining the school band, which, at the time she joins, consists of a lone flautist who Diane briefly befriends but soon dumps when, after being tricked into being dumped in the middle of a city late at night… in the rain… with no phone nearby whereupon she could call her dad… she stumbles into a lit-up church where a glam band with a severe bass deficit, Gemini, is practicing.
(Is Diane a bad person? She also teaches a grade school kid bass at the local music store, but when her bandmates come by, she gets into an impromptu jam session with them, tossing him aside. Later, when they play at her school, her student has decided he hates her now. Diane doesn’t notice.)
One part of Tactichord is Gemini’s rise to power. The other part, the larger part, is a tactical combat game.
The band members initially start out with two action points (later: more) that allows them to do any combination of moving and attacking. Attacks are either quick strums of music that build “heat”, or special moves that spend heat to unleash epic attacks — such as the lead guitar sliding through some haters, the lead singer drawing in haters with his powerful lyrics, the drummer spinning out and sending haters into the rafters, and Diane just bouncing away on her bass, forcing haters to feel her groove.
Additionally, turning kids into metalheads builds your cool factor, while getting hit, especially by little kids, drops it. Your final rating depends on your cool factor, so it’s worth it to avoid getting hit to get those sweet, sweet S+ ratings.
Each round of combat, you get to choose how the featured performer for that round (usually four or less in the demo) does their thing — choosing lyrics for the singer, or shred/riffs for the guitarist, and probably bass/drum solos in the future. At the end of the entire combat, which can have several phases, the game stitches all your decisions together into a music video. Which is pretty cool, although it can get a little repetitive as the same lyrics come up again in different tunes, but of course they need the practice.
I’m not sure why the music video features Apple // assembly language. There was a blog or something I remember from awhile back that would look for random code in movies, TV shows and such and try to figure out where they were from. It was a safe bet they never had anything to do with what was happening on the screen.
The final battle, by the way, was against a bunch of old biddies who had all sorts of nasty things to say about the band, before they’d even heard them. The ask was to turn them into fans by singing a sweet, non-offensive song that would warm their cold hearts. But, you could also sing lyrics that would confirm their every evil thought about the band.
Guess which one I had them play 🙂
As for difficulty: The demo is not difficult, although it is just the beginning of the game. The tempo is: the game gives you a new ability, you use that new ability in the coming battle, and so on. By the end of the demo, everyone has at least one special ability, the singer has two. The survey you take when you finish the game suggests various keywords that might appear on the Steam page, and “puzzle” is one of them, so it might continue that you keep gaining bandmates/abilities throughout the game.
Another part of the puzzle: the final score. The real challenge is to get an S+ rating by being super cool and not getting hit much by haters (before they inevitably become fans). I think I got the S+ rating only twice in the six chapters; I’m sure when the full game comes out and I replay this, I’ll be more careful about positioning people.
I do miss being able to mouse over enemies and seeing exactly how far they can move the next turn. That would help a lot, but, it is what it is.
All in all, a good game if you like glam metal, visual novels and tactical RPGs. I mean, who doesn’t, right?
