We recently got wind of a turn based strategy game called Militia which is coming to Steam.  The game looks pretty interesting as a casual game, and I certainly hope it eventually makes its way to both Android and iOS.
There is nothing super innovative here, but I’m a sucker for goblins, magic, swords and all that stuff, so the theme alone has peaked my interest. The minimalist style pays homage to the games of the early 80s where imagination was a key part of the experience.

The game has you attacking enemies on a grid with different attacks, ie the spear icon attacks ahead 2 cells, where the axe attacks in a 3 cell series. Every turn the enemies re-position themselves and attack, until eventually you kill them or they kill you.

I had a chance to play a beta version of the game on Steam, It was fun enough for the type of game it is, perhaps a tad bit repetitive. I could be wrong but, I feel like there may have been some glitches: Every now and then I killed an enemy, only to have it return in the same spot straight away. Did it respawn? Does it take several hits to kill? I have no idea.

It’s also worth noting that the game was built in Unity – which for a game of this style is not the tool IMO. Unity is pretty bad with texture quality and has no real scaling system which maintains texture fidelity. I played this game on a 4k monitor, and text was very blurry and jagged. Even with a more common resolution, text quality was pretty ordinary.

As a Unity developer myself, I am all too familiar with its limitations. I personally would have built a game like this in an engine that supports Dynamic Atlas Scaling, such as the Starling Framework (cross platform).

When making a minimalist games, you really need to focus on pixel perfect detail and polish to have a chance at standing out.

All in all the game is simple yet fun,  i’ll be sure to give it a shot once it officially drops.

The game has a lot of potential, and is still in beta, so its imperfections can be mostly overlooked. I look forward to seeing it evolve!

Here are some developer listed features:

• Single-player ladder/ranking system for endless play.
• An elegant, challenging game experience that’s easy to start and hard to stop.
• Smooth, clean, minimalist graphics.
• An awesome soundtrack from Mark Sparling.
• More units and graphic styles to come, as well as “challenge modes” and Steam achievements — all in development!