Wolfstride

Genre: Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!)

Wolfstride is an RPG released in 2021 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. This game has players following the lives of a down-on-their-luck team who own and operate a mech used in competitive mech fights as they aim to climb the tournament ladder to become champions.

Wolfstride is a bit of an odd RPG in that in a game about mech fights, it feels like you only spend maybe 5-10% of your time in-game actually fighting. The rest of the time you’ll be wandering around you town, chatting amongst your team and other townsfolk, and running menial errands.

To the game’s credit, the characters here are excellent, with your main trio being the flippant and secretive manager Shade, the gruff and pessimistic mechanic Duque, and the determined, optimistic, and somewhat dim-witted pilot Knife Leopard. The trio’s interactions with each other are fantastic, as are their interactions with the game’s strong supporting cast. And what’s more, these are further buoyed by some excellent voice acting all-around.

Rounding out the presentation are black-and-white visuals with 2D pixel art characters and backgrounds along with manga-style character portraits that do a great job setting the game’s tone. In addition, this is backed by a soundtrack that fluctuates from moody to whimsical depending on the scene, but generally has a great jazzy tone overall. Some examples include GW, Rain City, and Nebraska.

When you get into a fight, you’ll find it’s a pretty strategic dance that involves positioning properly from left to right to best utilize distance for attack and defense, while aiming at weak spots on your opponent and managing your time and resources. It starts out frustratingly simple, but after a few fights you get more options and can start really digging into some interesting choices in battle.

So all of this seems pretty good, right? Unique and interesting combat, great characters, a good presentation… sounds like an all-around great game, yeah? Unfortunately, here’s where we need to talk about pacing, which does a nasty number on this game at seemingly every turn.

The game starts with a framing device involving a character called Foam Gun, who we know nothing about and seems to have little connection to the story. Foam Gun serves as one of two mysterious narrators constantly interrupting things with comments that don’t make any sense and just seem to waste time. And I really, really wish this were the only example of this game wasting players’ time.

I mentioned earlier that you’ll be running errands and talking to multiple characters. However, to do so, you have to run around town, cris-crossing back and forth, sometimes uncertain of where exactly you need to go. And while each location is accessed from a map menu, almost every location also has a long stretch of road you need to cross to get to that location.

It would be one thing if the area you’re traversing allowed for exploration and discovery, or served some other purpose, but mostly it’s just there to take up space and time. A lot of time. I spent so much time in this game just running across boring stretches of road just to get to the next requisite brief bit of conversation before getting sent to the next place I needed a requisite brief conversation. Frequently playing this game, I found myself frustrated with the videogame equivalent of “this meeting could have been an E-Mail”, which in this case is “this tedious trek across town could have been a cutscene”.

I could also complain about how long it takes before you get some meaningful choices to customize your mech, but by that point I’m already fed up with the way this game wastes the player’s time.

I really wanted to like Wolfstride. It has amazing style and character, and a clever and unique strategic RPG battle system. But the absolute contempt this game seems to have for players’ time just cannot be overlooked. If you are extremely patient, you may find a lot to enjoy in this game. But everyone else is much better off leaving this one in the junkyard.

tl;dr – Wolfstride is an RPG where players follow a team of people who own and operate a mech in fighting competitions. The story, characters, and presentation are all strong here, and the combat is unique and interesting. Unfortunately, the pacing is an absolute disaster, and this game seems to be designed to waste players’ time. If you’re an extremely patient player you may find a lot to like here, but everyone else should skip this.

Grade: C+

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