Tooth and Tail - a furry-themed Arcade RTS game from the creators of MONACO.

Tooth and Tail (originally announced under the working title Armada, and for a time also known as Lead to Fire until finally getting its official title last year) is an arcade real-time strategy game created by Pocketwatch Games, known for their top-down stealth heist game MONACO.

The game is set in a WWI era animal kingdom, which is in the middle of a peoples' revolution, hell-bent on upsetting the food chain. But it's not as simple as "herbivores vs. carnivores" - the warring factions are all of mixed ethnic (taxonomic?) makeup, because a good ecosystem of course needs to be well-balanced. So it's a four-front battle between the working class (who take "eat the rich" very literal) and aristocrats, clergy, and militarists. Not at all unlike human civil wars, only that here the losers are going straight to the larder. A rotten sense of humour pervades the game, with skunks that bottle their own noxious musk up into gas grenades, and owls that transport living mice in their stomach and then hawk them back up over the battlefield as half-digested suicide troopers who blindly attack anything in their path before melting into goop. It's Redwall meets Warhammer, and it's glorious.

The gameplay is where things get really interesting. As mentioned before, T&T is an arcade RTS game, and "arcade" in this case means short and fast-paced battles, hyper-condensed mechanics with an absolute minimum of micromanagement, and suitably simple controls. In fact, the game is playable - and indeed meant to be played - with a controller. People who remember the SEGA Genesis classic Herzog Zwei (or its modern counterpart Airmech) will see some inspiration in the control scheme: Rather than commanding troops around with a cursor, the player directly controls a flag-waving scout that runs across the battlefield and calls units directly to their position, captures territory, and builds structures. However, unlike in said games you don't get to actively attack enemies yourself, and you also cannot fly, which means you have to abide by the terrain, and completely rely on your troops to follow your orders and defend you. On your way you seize grain mills as outposts, and build farmland around them to produce food, which in turn lets you build structures for defence and unit production. Your outfits are small, situational, and pretty much always directly led by your scout, rather than simply acting on their own once sent out into the fray, and a large amount of the game's strategy comes from balancing the economy between supplies and troops (known in military lingo as "tooth-to-tail ratio", which is what the game's title refers to).

And finally, here some gameplay footage. There's also a pre-alpha test build available on Steam, to which you can sign up in the official dev IRC.

edited 8th Apr '16 6:35:54 AM by TAPETRVE

It's certainly a unique sort of game. I like the imagery and the lore they're building up, and how they gave each of the characters their own backstory, like Marrow (the mouse with the red flag) cutting off her arm in order to feed her followers.

That's a really dark thing though, with the church. No wonder the rebellion broke out.

Well, it does have a rather cynical tone overall, with all factions being morally corrupt to some extent. I do hope they don't go overboard with it, though; I'm tired of the whole tired and lazy "tumblr commies/anarchists going postal" trope. Especially after the Frank Miller-esque mess that was the Vox Populi in Bio Shock Infinite.

edited 9th Apr '16 3:34:07 AM by TAPETRVE

Well here it's more like there's three different revolutions going on at the same time: The blue guys just want to be rid of the church and don't care about anyone else, the reds are tired of being trodden on and want to get rid of everyone else, and the greens are attempting to restore order by any means necessary.

Thing is, that lore bit is just placeholders. They already changed things up again, so don't count on all of this being part of the final game.

Wow, really? I looked through pretty much every T 'n T post on their blog last night XD

Quite a bit has changed in the few past months. Marrow now took over the name of Hopper, whereas the latter is simply called "Green", which is probably a placeholder.

Ah, okay. Wonder why the name-change.

Hopper got a different name, apparently because it was considered too friendly (it's still a remnant from her prior version, where she wasn't a one-eyed shrew). Apparently plans are to now name her "The Quartermaster", which would certainly her role as chief of the Secret Police.

So, Andy Schatz said in the chat last night that the lore pillars are still up. Eager to see what they come up with, but for now it's PAX 2016 prep, and focus on the core mechanics . The multiplayer part is already solid as fuck, not least thanks to random map generation. Sadly I'm still completely shite at the game .

edited 10th Apr '16 2:31:55 AM by TAPETRVE

Super-bazungolf article over at RPS.

The game is out now.

Likely going to get it on PC.

Worth it.

Aargh, so many good games out at the moment. I want this, but I still haven't gotten Pyre and I've barely scratched the surface of DOS 2. How worth it is worth it?

I'm here because of TotalBiscuit.

I'm looking at this too! But sadly (?) I got billion other things I need to play, so I'll wishlist it for now.

Oh god, Pyre. I need to get on THAT game too... :(

edited 28th Sep '17 8:26:35 PM by Malco

I have both...but Total War Warhammer 2's occupying my full attention right now XD