Wintermoor Tactics Club (Nintendo Switch) Review

Although Wintermoor Tactics Club seems relatively simple at first, it is a rather charming experience. The story is somewhat bizarre but nonetheless intriguing and splattered with comedic elements that can cause quite a few chuckles. The main character is called Alicia, and she is a student at the prestigious boarding school Wintermoor Academy. Alicia is part of the afterschool Tactics Club, in which she and her friends play the tabletop game "Curses and Catacombs", or C&C for short. As such, students enjoy their different afterschool activities, until the somewhat bizarre headmaster announces the "Battle of the Clubs". This involves a snowball tournament between all the clubs in the school, including the Psychic Detectives, Horse Club and Monarchists, until only one club remains. Every losing club will have to disband.

So much for the setup of the story. However, while bizarre, it is also somewhat intriguing, as it is unclear whether there is a bigger, hidden goal behind this tournament. As it turns out, the Tactics Club is able to use their abilities from the board game in the actual snowball tournament. Battle strategies can be practiced and discussed by playing C&C, while the actual tournaments, which are fought between two clubs at a time, serve more as a break between chapters.

By completing side missions and advancing the story, new abilities can be unlocked. This can be somewhat confusing at first but soon reveals itself to be very simple and straightforward.

The battle system is set up on a grid. Characters are placed at the start of a match and each character has their own stats that dictate how far they can move, their attack range and strength, and special abilities. It is possible to choose different difficulty settings, which is always an appreciated feature.

The battles themselves are great fun and definitely well thought-out. Tactics fans will truly enjoy these. The only downside is that battles tend to be relatively short, especially at the beginning. The controls are somewhat different and need getting used to. It is an interesting approach though, and as such cannot be put down as a negative but rather as uncommon. It therefore requires a tad more thinking on the player's part.

One downside is definitely the long loading times when playing on the Nintendo Switch, especially when changing location. This can be incredibly annoying when running an errand during a side mission that requires going from one location to the next. It generally takes a while to boot up, and it would have been nice to have more battles and a little less extensive storytelling. The story seems to drag at some points, being incredibly slow with a lot of conversation between characters. This would not be a big problem if the battles to break up these conversations were more frequent and a little longer. While it is always possible to replay a battle at a later point by visiting the game table, it is not quite the same as advancing the story or completing a side mission with a nice battle.

The different characters in the story have been nicely developed, each having their very own characteristics and peculiarities. The locations in which the story takes place are not extensively big, and there are not many different locations either since it is set in a school. However, each location has been carefully designed and the work put into them is very apparent. Wintermoor Tactics Club is definitely one of the titles that does very well on the Nintendo Switch as it is good for playing on the go.