Strategy games can broadly be clumped into two main categories, turn-based strategy and RTS or real-time strategy. There really aren’t many other approaches to the genre than these unless you include tower defense as strategy gaming. Unicorn Overlord from developer Vanillaware and publisher Atlus bucks the standard approach to strategy game design in a number of ways, merging several approaches to strategic design in a unique way to create a game that feels fundamentally different than other strategy titles.
As the first game in a new franchise and a new style of game from Vanillaware, there’s a lot riding on Unicorn Overlord. By now you’ve probably heard the praises heaped upon the game by most outlets but let’s set all that aside for the moment and take a look at the game itself. You play Prince Alain, crown prince of Cornia, which has fallen under the thumb of the ruthless dictator Galerius, who has subjugated every continent on the planet in the span of only a decade. Alain and his companions have managed to survive all that time and now it’s time to try to fight back against Galerius, forming the Liberation army and starting to take back the continent, one town at a time.
Unicorn Overlord takes an interesting approach to strategy gameplay. While it is ostensibly an RTS game in many ways, you’re still formulating party members in fighting units, equipping them, and managing their skills and abilities like you would with a turn-based strategy game. Additionally, you’ll be liberating towns and running errands to reinforce each area you’ve conquered. There are plenty of side quests too, so don’t expect to be resting on your laurels while your troops do all the heavy lifting. Gameplay breaks down into three main areas. First is exploration. The overworld is mostly open in your starting continent but some areas are guarded and you’ll have to level up to survive combat in them. You can walk into areas with stronger enemies and they’ll attack you until conquered, which means you should be wary of going too far, too fast. Second, you’ll need to commit to combat in some of those areas, entering either main or side quests where you’ll wrest control of towns and villages from Galerius’ forces. Finally, you’ll need to fulfill additional objectives to boost the strength of your conquered towns, mostly by finding items hidden all around the landscape.
The simple structure of Unicorn Overlord belies its complexity however. While you’re only doing a few things, the way you approach them is both organic and nuanced, allowing for a surprising amount of variety from battle to battle and area to area. Initially, you’ll only have a handful of units at your disposal but as the game progresses, you’ll obtain a wide variety of units with unique powers and abilities, allowing you to adjust your approach to combat and expand the tactics at your disposal. Unlike other games, you can control the size and disposition of forces with subdivided groups, allowing you to reform units as needed to deal with difficult foes. Some pairings work better than others however, so you’ll constantly be fine-tuning your units until you arrive at configurations which are more effective.
Unit structure is far from the only customizable element in Unicorn Overlord however. Individual abilities can be prioritized in combat, equipment and weapons can both be changed and village guard assignments can be switched out based on needs or interactions. All this amounts to an extremely customizable fighting force that creates significant versatility for players. Considering the rather different tactical approach to gameplay, management takes on a key role that’s often absent in other strategy games. Unicorn Overlord is neither a turn-based strategy game nor an RTS. Instead it’s a sort of fusion of the two which takes the best of each approach. Battles consists of your units either taking the field or being deployed to the field through the use of Valor points. Each battle starts with a few valor points, allowing you to summon units which are not predetermined NPCs onto the field. To summon the rest of your forces, you’ll have to defeat enemies in order to earn additional Valor Points. You can hold a maximum of 10 Valor at any given time, meaning that over the course of the battle, you’ll want to use up those points as you earn them.
Summoning units is only one way to use valor though. It can also be leveraged to use commanders’ special abilities. These can range from providing the first attack in combat to healing enemies to boosting experience gain for a single battle. Part of the reason choosing cohesive units is important is because having the right commander abilities available at the right time is important as the game becomes more and more challenging. On top of that, soldiers in units that spend enough time together can have rapport conversations, adding additional character development throughout the game. While it doesn’t boost stats, rapport adds an extra dimension to the plot of the game, making Unicorn Overlord that much more immersive. You can even have Alain marry someone if you wish, assuming their rapport is at maximum, but sadly it doesn’t add nearly as much to the overall plot as it should.
Combat has its own nuances as well. Unicorn Overlord is definitely not the most difficult game and you can quickly exploit its design to give yourself a significant edge in battle. For example, while each unit has a certain number of moves available until they’re exhausted, you can spend additional money on items which boost your moves, provide additional damage and XP, and revive characters. In the default difficulty, there are no limits on how many items you can use in battle either, letting you essentially buy your advantage. That’s not the only cheap trick you can employ though. Once a unit is expended, they cannot move until they rest. Each battle drains an action point from a unit, but you’ll quickly notice that you can switch from unit to unit as long as they are in close enough proximity in battle. If an enemy comes close to two or more units or vice versa, you can simply jump to the most effective unit to counter them with the shoulder buttons. Oddly, exhausted units are still accessible through this switching, allowing you to exhaust more powerful units close to strong enemies and then whittle them down or destroy them outright with no cost to your action point reserve on other units. Construct effective enough units and you’re waltzing through even some of the more challenging battles with ease and that’s before you even start messing about with balancing skills and extra equipment!
Once you’ve worked your way through most of the first continent, you’ll be given the option of multiple pathways based on your personal preferences. As the Liberation Army’s forces slowly spread across the continent, you’ll be able to choose which direction to go and what fights to take. The more side missions you do and the more experience you gain, the faster your units will upgrade and class change and the more points you’ll have to work with to expand your forces. Doing so will let you slowly steamroll over the Emperor’s forces with impunity. Oddly, for a massive conquering army, the Empire is surprisingly inefficient at taking back lands. Many strategy games, especially RTS ones, have an ebb and flow tidal design where enemy forces push back when you take areas and you’re forced to manage both your attack routes and defense simultaneously. That’s not the case in Unicorn Overlord. Once an enemy is pushed out of an area, it’s essentially yours to keep and the Empire isn’t massing to attack those upstart rebels in proper Imperial fashion. That’s a bit of a shame as it would have added an extra dimension of strategy but the gameplay is fun enough that you’ll forget about it soon enough.
Actual unit-on-unit battles are particularly interesting because they’re an entirely hands-off affair. Once you’ve used any leader abilities and items you want, you start the battle and the combatants play out their preset abilities, attacks, and defenses. There’s no menu selection, nothing to really do other than watch the sparks fly. You can speed up combat with a shoulder button fast forward or skip it entirely with the minus button on the Switch too. You won’t see who takes hits or does well if you do that but some battles are foregone conclusions and time is valuable these days! Once you’ve reached battle distance with an enemy, there’s no cancelling out either, so you’d better be in it to win it. Leaving a unit weak and not moving out of range fast enough is a sure-fire pathway to disaster for your forces as you’ll get drawn into another battle as soon as the enemy forces are able. The same goes for trying to sneak by an enemy too closely. If you’ve not arranged your units for effectiveness against the enemy, it’s a quick way to lose combatants that are weak to enemy forces.
Balancing combat with exploration is also fun. Alain can run across the overworld and occasionally into enemy territory, allowing you to unlock additional side quests and acquire more playable characters, bolstering your ranks and padding your experience levels. There are items hidden across the landscape as well including treasure, money, goods, and weapons making exploration worthwhile. Some areas hold much higher level enemies and you won’t be able to liberate them until much later but others you’ll make quick work of, adding fun tidbits of story to the main game experience. Unicorn Overlord excels at providing a vast web of detailed interactions that slowly build a whole picture of the lands ravaged by the Empire and the impact your actions have. Until you conquer an area, an infinite number of enemy troops will be spawned to fight you, allowing you to essentially farm experience to your heart’s content. It’s not as fun as full scale battles but if you want to level up fast, you can simply switch out Alain’s party members and level them up bit by bit through grinding. It’s not the most glamorous approach but it’s somewhat effective.
It’s also gratifying to build up towns and villages, bringing supplies and gaining the thanks of the people. Doing so increases your honor and that honor translates into upgrades for units and other valuable commodities. You’ll gain a renown boost too which will eventually help to unlock the ability to upgrade further. You’ll get bonus items and money for your war chest too, so it’s not something you want to skip out on. Every time you build up a town, you’re treated to a fun little fireworks display as a celebration. If you station a guard there, towns that you have liberated provide additional income from battles as well. Even fully upgraded towns provide additional honor, allowing you to further flesh out unit sizes and utterly decimate the enemy.
Visually, it’s no surprise that Unicorn Overlord is a masterpiece. Vanillaware is known for their art style more than anything else and the refinement of character designs, backgrounds, and the overall style of the game is simply fantastic. Designs match well with the storyline and characters and unlike many of Vanillaware’s previous releases, outfits and character assets are dialed down a bit, limiting the overt sexuality and moving more in line with the thematic experience Unicorn Overlord provides. It’s a serious story and that sort of design work would detract from the experience somewhat. The artists over at Vanillaware are definitely clear on that and the balance between unique style and the needs of the game is clearly evident. On the whole, the game feels like you’re truly entering a medieval era and even the GUI interface fits smoothly into that mindset, raising immersion levels for players and creating an organic strategic experience like almost no other.
Audio is even better if that’s possible, with an epic, powerful soundtrack full of strong brass instruments and firm, powerful beats that’s sure to make your toes tap to the rhythm. This is a soundtrack that you’re going to want to check out online or even grab a physical CD of if that’s your thing. Sound effects are smoothly integrated too, something that’s becoming rarer these days. All the little noises, the clinks and clanks, the wooden creaks, all speak of expert foley work on behalf of the sound team and as a result, combat sounds more natural and realistic (or as realistic as fantasy combat can get at least). The voice work is also quite impressive in Unicorn Overlord with a full voice cast for every playable character and the enemy forces. The acting is honestly better than the actual script, leaving you wanting even more out of the story than you’ll get and it wouldn’t be amiss to say that players are going to want more time in Unicorn Overlord’s world. Very few games have voice work as robust as that you’ll see here and it’s a true delight to see such range without the cheesy ham-handed overacting that the genre is typically prone to.
There really aren’t any downsides to Unicorn Overlord either. Design flaws are mostly small exploits which make the game a bit easier than it should be and veteran strategy players will likely want to crank the difficulty up but load times are fast on the Switch, the visuals are always on point, the game mechanics are solid, the GUI is well-made, and the audio is top-notch. It’s rare to see any title, even a major release have this clean of a design across the board, but Unicorn Overlord absolutely nails virtually every aspect of gameplay and manages to stay fresh doing it. Will the formula get a tad stale over the course of the game? Maybe a little. And could we use a slightly more stressful standard difficulty? Sure. But those are minor quibbles at best and the long and the short of it is that the entire gameplay experience is fun, engrossing, and extremely high quality in every aspect.
There’s no question that Unicorn Overlord is a smashing success both in creating a new IP and in actual gameplay. This is the kind of game that strategy/RPG gamers are always hoping for, something that shakes up the genre while still staying familiar and true to form to welcome long-time players. With a significantly different approach than other recent strategy games such as Triangle Strategy (review here) or Miasma Chronicles (review here), Unicorn Overlord is something fresh and new from a veteran studio that clearly has gamers in mind. At $60, you’re paying a AAA price, but you’re paying it for one of the best and most entertaining tactical experiences available on modern consoles and you’re going to get every penny’s worth of play out of it. This is a must-own game for any fans of Vanillaware, strategy games, or even most RPG fans so don’t pass this one up!
This review is based on a digital copy of Unicorn Overlord provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Unicorn Overlord is also available for PS4, PS5, and Xbox.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
