Tooth and Tail (2017) review

For almost as long as real-time strategy games have been around, there have always been developers trying to squeeze down and distill the genre’s appeal onto consoles. Unfortunately, even the best of these efforts come with caveats.

Without a mouse and keyboard, it’s hard to make the micromanagement-heavy gameplay of an RTS manageable, let alone palatable. Following in the footsteps of games like Sacrifice, Brutal Legend and Halo Wars, Pocketwatch Games’ Tooth and Tail feels like comes closer than ever to realizing this. However, its narrow focus can often leaves you frustrated in the process.

The Pitch

Indie developer Pocketwatch Games only have a single title under their belt but it’s nothing short of an exceptional one. 2013’s Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine. With Monaco, Pocketwatch were able to marry the chaos of a 4-player cooperative party game with the tense system's management of a tip-of-your-toes stealth experience. Tooth and Tail sees them turn their attention to another classic genre: the real-time strategy game.

Set a world Redwall-esque world of slightly-pixelated anthropomorphic animals, Tooth and Tail sees four furry factions set against one another by civil war.  The libertarian Longcoats, the populist Commonfolk, the fascist KSR, and the theocratic Civilized each offer their own ideology and take on the story’s central question: who gets to decide who is eaten?

The world of Tooth and Tail is colorful in its characteristics and dense in its allegory, giving players plenty to chew on between its short, fast-paced levels. These levels are more often 5-10 minute sprints rather than the 30-40 minute marches you’d find in classic RTS games like Starcraft or Age of Empires. In a way, this structure best reflects the broader ideas at work here. In form and function, Tooth and Tail is an exercise in trimming and stripping down everything you want out of the RTS experience to its essentials.

As Pocketwatch themselves put it, "Tooth and Tail is a popcorn RTS for veterans and newcomers alike."

Of Mice and Men

Jumping right into the thick of things, each level of Tooth and Tail sees you take control of a Commander under the employ of the game’s four factions. As Commander, you’ll run around a unique, randomly-generated battlefield and raise farms to generate resources. In typical RTS fashion, the goal here is usually to spend these resources by building up an army and then razing the bases of your enemies to the ground.

Unlike most RTS games, you won’t really have a direct hand in this latter side of things. The combat in Tooth and Tail feels almost entirely automated. There’s no micromanagement or long-sprawling tech trees. You simply build the structure that corresponds to the unit you want, wait for them to (automatically) spawn, then wave your flag to get their attention and lead them into battle with the next enemy you encounter. There’s some room to maneuver – by rallying specific types of units to your Commander at a time – but that’s about it.

There’s an elegance to this streamlined experience to be sure, but it can also feel frustrating. Often, whether you win or lose a map is going to come down to building the right units. Largely, it’s here that Tooth and Tail loses its grip on its ambitions.

As with many of these kinds of games, there’s a rock-paper-scissors logic determining what units are strong or weak against one another. Invest in the wrong composition for your army and could very well be wiped off the map by an enemy you outnumber 3-to-1. 

With four factions and dozens of different units on the roster, there’s a huge amount of depth present. Unfortunately, the game's single player campaign doesn’t tutorialize this ever-present aspect nearly as well as it should. Early levels of the game do a good job of introducing individual types of units but don’t really why you should or should not use them.

The absence of tech tree in Tooth and Tail means that there’s not an obvious or intuitive hierarchy of strength to the units in your army. It's very easy to overlook or forget that the choice of one over another can doom you without even knowing it. This problem is further exacerbated by the accelerated pace at which everything unfolds.

Compared to a regular real-time strategy game, everything in Tooth and Tail happens on a much faster timeline. This means you get to the "fun part" much faster. However, it also leaves players with much less room for error. It’s all too easy to mess up your economy early on and not realise why. 

The close-up perspective of the game – with the camera locked to your commander at all times – doesn’t really help either. Much like the cast of Tooth and Tail’s romp through bloody revolution and Grimm politics, the player never really gets a good look at the big picture until it's too late. It shouldn’t surprise that these shortcomings don’t mix well with Pocketwatch’s sink-or-swim approach to unit balance.

Rat In A Cage

While the fast-paced, relentless rat-race of Tooth and Tail’s levels is definitely the main event, the single player experience is a little beefed up by the hub-areas you’re able to explore between missions. Here, your Commander can talk to NPCs and gain a better picture of the world and the different factions, figures and ideologies that inhabit it.

Even if just a brief intermission before the inevitable return to the battle, these short-but-sweet sequences felt filled with much of the same sort of humor and cadence I remembered from my time with Monaco. Still, the meat of the game is in the battles and this is where things often felt the most rotten.

Technical issues and trial-and-error marred my time with the game in a way that’s hard to shake. Sometimes animations would break, other times the random-generator behind the game’s levels would give me problems that simply could not be solved.

The Bottom Line

Tooth and Tail's 6-to-8 hour campaign is fully-featured enough that you’ll likely have had your fill of it by the end. Assuming you’re able to make it there.

In the modern canon of more-accessible RTS experiences, Tooth and Tail gets a lot right. It also gets a lot wrong. It’s frustrating where it should be fun, curtailed where it should be compelling and buggy where it should be brilliant.