All Walls Must Fall

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

All Walls Must Fall is a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG first released on PC in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. The game takes place in a cyberpunk future where the Berlin Wall never fell, but growing tensions have led to a nuclear bomb flattening the city. Players take the role of an agent working for a government organization charged with traveling back in time, investigating the source of the explosion, and preventing it by any means necessary. More specifically, players are tasked with directing a ground unit in their movements and making use of time manipulation to direct them on a successful course of action.

The presentation here is decent, but nothing mind-blowing, with procedurally-generated 3D environments from an isometric view. These look decent, but extremely samey – you will walk through rooms in similar-looking clubs over and over again. Apparently everything in cyberpunk Berlin happens in night clubs. Fittingly, these clubs are backed by a techno-esque soundtrack, though this too starts getting very repetitive very quickly.

The core concept behind this game is excellent – players direct a single unit in an XCOM-style Strategy-RPG, with options for using stealth and persuasion just as much as violence. However, your agent has a trick up his sleeve in the form of time-traveling abilities: Make a bad move, or pick the wrong option in a conversation, and you can rewind things and even make use of your newfound knowledge to open up new options. In between missions, players can upgrade their agent’s abilities to customize their loadout to their liking. At its best, this game has players building up the perfect time-travelling agent and using these time-manipulating tricks to smoothly move through a facility like a pro and feeling like an unstoppable force to be reckoned with.

Unfortunately, far too often your efforts will be foiled by your solo agent’s inability to fend off multiple attackers at once, something your time-traveling tricks don’t seem to help much with. It becomes even worse when you face an organization with seemingly the same abilities as you, resulting in getting swarmed by enemies who can instantly appear anywhere and teleport to safety instead of taking damage when you fire at them.

It also doesn’t help that this game’s controls are unnecessarily confusing. At least a few times I had to use up my time points to rewind a bad action I never intended to make. This game does allow players to make use of the touchscreen instead of the gamepad if you like… but only in game menus, not actual gameplay.

I’m frustrated that All Walls Must Fall has the problems it does, because there are some really great ideas here. XCOM with time manipulation? A remorseless time traveling agency that acts with lethal impunity because they see themselves as a righteous force averting nuclear catastrophe? Avenues to pursue multiple different solutions to problems? All of this sounds fantastic, but more often than not, this game seems to stymie its own potential, leading to an experience that’s unfortunately more frustrating than it is liberating. Fans of Strategy-RPGs still may enjoy taking a look at some of the ideas this game presents, but most should save themselves the, er, time.

tl;dr – All Walls Must Fall is a Strategy-RPG that has players controlling a time-traveling agent looking to avert a nuclear bomb in an alternate-history cyberpunk Berlin where the wall never fell. Some of the story and game mechanics here are really fantastic, but the gameplay holds these back, both due to some design decisions that strip the player of utility, as well as control and interface issues. It’s still worth a look for fans of the genre, but most are better off skipping it.

Grade: C+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are MB, Andy Miller, Johannes, u/RamboFox, Exlene, Eli Goodman, Ilya Zverev, and Stov. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}