Reinventing Tactical Combat in ‘City of the Shroud’

Adam Mathew
Games PC Gaming
Games PC Gaming

We love a good gameplay experiment, and you can always count on the indie scene to provide the weirdest ones that work. Abyssal Arts aimed for something different when kickstarting City of the Shroud for PC in 2016. It set out to reinvent the wheel of combat. By…using a combat wheel. We’ve awarded early points for being so meta.

They’ve more or less taken the best parts of a tactical RPG like Fire Emblem and crossbred it with a combo-based fighting game like a Dragon Ball Z title. Everything is real-time, the beatdowns are a mix of wire-fu backflips and fantastical explosions, and – most importantly – it’s just bloody good fun.

The time has finally come to take the first episodic journey into the engrossing world of Iskendrun, thanks to Abyssal releasing the opening chapter of what promises to be a sprawling four-part epic. We’ve been under the beta shroud for quite some time now and are happy to reemerge and report that this unorthodox adventure ought to be on your radar.

Battle ranged movement combat
Combat is real-time but also favours tile master tacticians (also known as tile-o-philes).

City Slicker

Before we get into the nitty gritty of it all, allow us to give you a quick Google Street View of Iskendrun. It’s got a lovely cel-shaded aesthetic and an exotic Middle Eastern flavour running through the architecture, plus its peoples (and creatures) are more than a little left-field…

Portal-spawned demons and swashbuckling swordsmen coexist with gunmen who have a penchant for animalistic, steampunk armour designs. It’s a refreshingly bizarre cultural melting pot where you’re just as likely to get cursed with Corruption magic as you are sniped, or shot in the face by somebody doing a backflip with an assault rifle.

Zem NPC city leader dialogue
Expect walls of well-written text in your future. And liars. And murderers.

This cross-dimensional Mecca of madness is barely held in check by five vastly different city leaders. You start the game as an unaligned nobody who accidentally stumbles into a moment of obligated heroism. End result: all factions notice your combat prowess (which is closer to miraculous luck) and the in-fighting forefathers decide you’re a lot more important than the faceless country bumpkin that you really are.

From here the job offers come flooding in from the Merchants, Priests, Syndicate, City Guard, and the Rebels. Aid one faction and you’ll annoy another. Standard popularity contest rules apply.

Being the Hot New Import

Dialogue skippers beware: the choices you make in the game will trigger major upheavals in this world. Mind you, there’s always a Global Power Balance meter on hand to guide you — essentially a five-tier poll that gives you a cultural snapshot of the city.

It’s great to be able to see how the wind is blowing so you can try to affect a course-correct before wading into the next fight. We also appreciated the NPCs plainly telegraphing the riskier alliance choices to us.

Party group companions allies
Your party will be eclectic to say the least. See the guy on the end? We're huge fans of his huge fan work.

If you do decide to toe-dip into this Steam title, be aware that it’ll be more of an up-to-your-knee-dip. The inaugural chapter is jam packed with boss battles and secondary quests, and the story-influencing system means you can effectively replay this five times for five very different results.

As we said before, Abyssal says that as it doles out the chapters the overarching narrative is going to be meaningfully shaped by the player data that comes back. That’s a great idea for a bullet-point list, but only time will tell on how drastic the changes will be.

I’ll Have the Number 7 (Hit) Combo

What is fully formed and ready for appreciation right now is the hybrid combat system that eases you into the isometric violence slowly. Clicking around on blue movement tiles will shift your range boundary, and going out of your way to scoop up randomly spawning green tiles will net you with bonus Action Points (AP). The more AP you’re packing, the faster you can beat the snot out of people.

Your average fight involves holding your mouse button over a foe to spawn the Combo Wheel, then you’ll need to cue up to seven attacks by flicking your mouse in the four compass directions, almost like a d-pad. Time will resume upon left-click release and your tee’d up beatdown will begin.

Better yet, if you’ve memorised a specific combo of basic attacks your assault will result in moves with unique effects (e.g. crowd-controlling headbutts or a Mega Punch that can drill damage through an enemy and into the buddies trying to use him as Team Human Shield).

Combo Wheel combat combo
The combat Combo system in all its glory. It's a fresh concept that's the wheel deal.

This gets real deep, real fast. In no time you’ll have a mob of party members whose skillsets will need to be well leveraged in tough brawls. Marshalling your forces, maintaining optimal ranges and quick-flicking out input commands while under pressure from real-time counter-attacks is intense and addictive stuff.

Interestingly, Abyssal has listened to player feedback received while doing the convention rounds. The most requested option made the cut in the form of a Wait mode. It’s a nifty time-out function that lets you take a breath and scroll through the battlefield (in case you need to readjust a failing strategy) at which point you can shift party member control to key up a 7-hit combo on their behalf. It’s a creature comfort that (micro)manages to become an indispensable improvement.

Huge Fan Service

Honestly, we went in to the City of the Shroud as clueless tourists and in no time found ourselves hooked and looking for long-term accomodation. This odd-yet-gratifying combat experiment was worth the science. That and we love the fourth-wall-breaking humour sported by our dysfunctional party full of sarcastic grifters.

As for which side we’ll take in the larger fight – we’ve got no pro tips for you today. Should you ally yourself with silver-tongued religious hypocrites, blind idealists, greedy profiteers, fascist bureaucrats or the sketchy troublemakers who hang out by the docks picking peanuts out of poop?

There wasn’t any one faction we were rooting for over another by the close of our first chapter in this. City of the Shroud looks set to descend into chaos no matter how the chapters roll out and the community votes with their save files. All we know for sure is that we’re in. We’ll be at ground zero in the streets when that proverbial crap hits the fans.

Adam Mathew
I've seen and played it all – from Pong on a black-and-white CRT to the 4K visuals and VR gloriousness of today. My only regret after a decade of writing and 30+ years of gaming: hitchhiking's no longer an option. My thumbs are nubs now.