Review: WE ARE THE CARETAKERS Needs More Care

Strategy games can be full of fantastic choices, great stories and some well designed characters. We Are The Caretakers offers quite a lot of different mechanics in an indie strategy game, but as of now, it unfortunately tries to balance too many different aspects and doesn’t execute any of them terribly well.

The game feels similar to Age of Empires or even the first missions of Warcraft 3, taking various groups around, exploring, following a story, creating teams to deploy and getting into fights. It is pretty straight forward. The thing that sets it apart is that combat is turn based like a JRPG. The mix of the two genres is a great idea, but both systems are sub-par.

Let’s talk about combat. Turn based combat can be great. If the fights feel impactful, the characters feel unique and the rewards are significant then a turn based game can be amazing. We Are Caretakers may give players lots of experience and materials, but there is little of significance to do with it. The actual fights aren’t thrilling. Even battles where I was fighting for my life, it was lots of the same attacks and missing a lot of attacks (on both sides). Combat just never felt satisfying, the animations were mostly bland and battles felt like obstacles to make the game’s run time longer, not challenge or force me to use strategy or intelligence to win.

When it came to making teams and sending them to explore, their movements were purely functional and slow. I never got excited to explore new areas, conquer land or find cool items. The slow pace of exploring and the time it would take to explore or scout an area padded the run time.

Another aspect of the game was capturing enemies, adding them to your group by bribing or convincing them and then throwing them into teams to use on missions. It is a great idea we’ve seen used well in other games. However, the characters that you can obtain here look exactly like the people you already have, do mostly the same moves and don’t really have any better stats. So then poses the question, why even have this function included?

I think We Are The Caretakers has an interesting premise and some great combinations of gameplay mechanics. But putting all these pieces together is hard, and it shows. I think the game could be greatly improved and much more polished if it gave up on a couple of concepts and focused on a basic RPG approach or focused on exploration and map management or have it be entirely focused on the story. While the art and ideas here are quite good, the lack in polish of just about every game mechanic is impossible to ignore.