One of the hardest parts about playing Unicorn Overlord is its name. Whenever I’m playing it on the go with my Switch, I inevitably will get asked by someone “Hey, what game is that?”
And early on, I felt uncomfortable with that question and found ways to duck it or be vague. I’m a pretty secure man overall, but telling someone that I’m playing a game called Unicorn Overlord was inevitably going to get me some looks and comments that I didn’t want to deal with.
But then, as I reached the end of the game after nearly 65 hours of gameplay, I just didn’t care anymore. Is Unicorn Overlord a weird name for a game? Sure, it kind of is. I really don’t love it. But it doesn’t matter because this is a fantastic video game. This game is so good that I’m now not shy about telling strangers and work colleagues that I’m playing a game called Unicorn Overlord. I feel that way because this is now the king of modern-day strategy RPGs for me, and easily one of the best games in a year stacked with great games.
Ogre Battle 64 is BACK
The biggest way Unicorn Overlord differentiates itself from most of its counterparts in the genre is by throwing away the turn based approach that most of them have. Instead, it opts for a more “real time strategy lite” approach. All of the characters in the game move around in real time, but you don’t have to worry about buildings or town management like a standard “RTS” game. It’s a lot like Ogre Battle 64, a classic from the Nintendo 64 era.
I quickly found this to be a much more engaging approach than the turn based systems that most of these games have. First off, there are no long and boring phases to sit through where you watch your enemy act. You are always engaged and doing something. The real-time approach also means that the game doesn’t have the odd dance that a lot of turn based strategy games tend to have. In most Fire Emblem games for example, I will find myself going to the very edge of an enemies attack range in the hopes that they will be dumb enough to make the first big move, so that I can swarm them with my nearby allies. Sometimes enemies will bite, and sometimes they refuse. While I like these games in a lot of ways, it can feel a bit frustrating when being aggressive and pushing ahead can leave you at a major disadvantage more often than not.
With the real-time movement in the game, almost every fight is on equal footing. There are exceptions to this, being close to enemies or allies with ranged properties allows them to get involved in fights, and enemies who just lost a fight are also vulnerable, but I never felt like I was trying to cheat the enemy AI in fights the way I often do in turn based games.
Formations are FUN!
While movement in the game is certainly important in many aspects, the core of the game ends up mostly being about creating the best possible formations with your units. Rather than one on one battles like most games in this genre, Unicorn Overlord once again goes with the Ogre Battle 64 approach where you need to create formations of units instead. Creating formations in the game is so deep, yet easy, and fun.
You start with 3 units per formation and eventually expand to 5. The game also gives you dozens of different unit types, so you have an unbelievable amount of options to consider when crafting formations, especially once you get to those 5 unit formations. There are rock-paper-scissors elements to the units, so they all have strengths and weaknesses to different enemy types. While I often tried to make formations that were balanced, occasionally, it makes sense to create formations that are more focused on one unit type so that you are overpowering against certain enemy types. The game gives you a lot of easy ways to test out formations you just created, so it’s very simple to make an adjustment, quickly ascertain if you think this new formation is going to be effective, and then alter it again from there.
Unicorn Overlord also gives you a lot of control over how your formations fight with its own “gambit” system. Over the course of the game, all of your units will unlock many different skills, some offensive, some defensive, and some healing. Since you don’t control how fights play out (battles would take forever if you did), the game essentially allows you to program your allies to respond to each situation. For example, I had a healer who also had some offensive spells, and I had them programmed to heal my allies anytime their HP went below 75%. I found that by doing this, my healer was almost never getting any offense in, and was healing my allies when they didn’t need to be healed all that badly. So I ended up adjusting her parameters so that she only used a certain healing spell when allies got below 50%, and suddenly, my formation was much more powerful.
Whenever I acquired skills that were more effective against specific units, it was very easy to program my attacks so that if my unit saw that specific enemy, they would use that ability that counters them. All of the programming is organized really well, and I found just about every option I could possibly want, so it was super easy to set everything up. Systems like this can often feel very cumbersome and overwhelming, but that isn’t the case with Unicorn Overlord.
If that still sounds like too much, take heart. As the game went on, I became increasingly lazy with programming my units and started to only tweak things if it felt like a formation was really underperforming. The games default programming is usually at least passable, even on the “tactical” difficulty, which is a step above normal (I highly recommend you at least play on tactical, as normal was pretty dang easy).
Fresh as a Unicorn
One of the biggest accomplishments for Unicorn Overlord is how fresh it stays from start to finish. Despite the 65 hour run time, I never got bored with it. I believe it is able to stay fun throughout for a few reasons. First off, the game consistently introduces new units to you and never fully stops (it naturally slows down a little at the very end). Having new unit types to experiment with constantly kept the formation building engaging every step of the way. I also love how often the game changes up its mission sizes. As you can imagine, there are some massive battles that can take you an hour or more to clear. These are a blast, but they can also be exhausting. Unicorn Overlord slips in dozens of little 5 minute or less missions that allow you to really feel like you are making progress, even if you only play in short bursts like I often did.
The game is also one of the most fun games in the genre when it comes to what happens in between battles. Oftentimes, games in the SRPG genre are either all menus or stick you in one home base after every fight. Unicorn Overlord lets you explore the entire world map, much like any normal RPG, just on a smaller scale. There are side quests and even hidden items on the map, but nothing overly involved or intense to find or do. I had a great time clearing the map to help my units get a little stronger, and it did a great job of breaking up the action, since you still do spend a lot of time in menus in this game. The only time I didn’t love this was when I got near the end of the game, and realized I had to grind a few overworld tasks in order to max out all of my formations to five units, and get every unit the one “promotion” that they can receive.
While this is less of a strength, Unicorn Overlord also changes things up here and there with its bigger missions to keep them interesting as well. There is one mission where a “fog of war” mechanic pops up. Some maps have tons of traps, or way more mountains. Some maps give you tons of catapults or ballistas to use against enemies. This forced me to change up how I approached the movement elements of the game plenty of times and kept me interested during some of the bigger battles.
I do think that some maps can be more annoying than fun, however. Moving your units isn’t always quite as precise as I liked, and there are plenty of times where a unit would hit a trap even though the route I had mapped for them looked like it would avoid it. In some of the big maps, where I’d have all 10 of my potential units on the field (you will fight a surprising amount of battles without feeling the need to have more than 5-6 units out there), it could get really annoying to constantly stop and move them. Especially when traps on the field require precision. You also can’t see the full map at times for the bigger levels, which really makes maneuvering everyone a bit of a slog. These are all minor nuisances, though, and never detracted from my fun for very long.
Yo, Where are the Unicorns Though?
The only element of Unicorn Overlord that truly falters is the story. It’s just very generic and uninteresting, with tons of characters that also fall into boring tropes. It took me 3+ months to beat Unicorn Overlord in part because it was the perfect short burst game for me, but also because I almost never felt like I “had” to keep going, because the story just didn’t have me engaged at all. To be fair, there are very few games in this genre that do this well, but the game devotes a surprising amount of energy to the story. Despite this, I did get very fired up at the end, as the game really gives you an epic conclusion that feels worthy of the journey you just went on, but I was still always wishing things were just a bit better here.
Almost all of my other issues with the game are minor and more in the nitpick category than anything else. Unicorn Overlord smartly does not let you get too over-leveled, as it limits the amount of EXP any unit that is four levels or more above the enemy can gain. But if you are way under-leveled, you don’t receive any bonus EXP. I found that if one of my units didn’t get used for a bit and got under-leveled, it was a real slog to try and naturally build them back up to everyone else. The game does offer certain levels that you can replay to essentially EXP farm, but I would have much preferred to have better avenues to do this while playing the normal missions.
Despite this, Unicorn Overlord stands alone at the top of this genre for me. The gameplay systems are about as close to flawless as they could possibly be. It defies some of the norms of the genre while not deviating too much, making it fewl both familiar and comforting, but also fresh. I will scream from the top of my lungs that Unicorn Overlord is the best game in this genre for years to come, and absolutely no one can stop me.
Score: 9.5/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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