Gorgeous presentation can’t cover shallow tactics and a poor translation
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Annulus makes a great first impression with its slick, grimdark graphics, lavish cutscenes, and orchestral soundtrack. Unfortunately, the impressive presentation can’t cover up for a disappointingly shallow tactics experience and a truly atrocious English translation. Due to the poor localization, the Game of Thrones-meets-Cthulhu mythos storyline is nearly impossible to parse, and basic functions of the game go completely unexplained.
The core of Annulus is its tactical turn-based battles, which do look very nice: rain soaks the ground as drenched, heavily armored soldiers clash with twisted creatures from beyond reality. A rock-paper-scissors system determines advantages between unit types, which include cavalry, spear infantry, swordsmen, and special units like mages. Some of these come with special abilities that can be activated every few turns, like the lance that strikes two squares in a row.
Combat doesn’t get particularly interesting over the course of the first chapter, although it would have been quite a bit tougher if I hadn’t gone poking around and figured out on my own that I needed to recruit new units at my camp. There’s no initiative to consider, since each side moves all their units during a turn and can do so in any order. Fights mostly come down to taking out as many vulnerable units as possible during the first turn and then weathering whatever the enemy has left before finally mopping up in turns two and three.
I was only able to pick up the most general ideas going on in the story, due to a sometimes indecipherable localization. There’s little to no introduction to any of the many characters that show up almost immediately, and beyond there being a conflict between the “north” and “south,” I wasn’t clear on why anything was happening. At one point, a villain referred to my team of northern soldiers as “dirty Yankees,” which was an odd term to hear in a high fantasy game.
For as flashy as the visuals are, there just isn’t much else going on in Annulus, especially given that the state of the English translation makes it impossible to get absorbed into the narrative. I’d give this one a pass for now.
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