One is the most disappointing number

Trying to claw its way out of the pit

Time to pick a side...

It's rare to get new RTS games these days and even rarer to get one that tries something new and different. Tooth and Tail manages to be a game that has mainstream appeal while also stripping down much of the mechanical complexity that has been deeply ingrained within the real time strategy genre. Yet, while it expands on what has historically been a very rigid genre, it suffers in key areas due to some of these unique design choices.As with any new game, I jumped in to Tooth and Tail's single player story mode before looking at much else. It was appealing at first, especially with the Soviet Union-inspired aesthetic and story telling as well as the odd anthropomorphic animal characters living in this endless war over the freedom and, most importantly, food of the land. The mission hub areas are dense with bits of the story and inspire the player to try and figure out what may or may not be going on behind the scenes with every creature's hunger for meat and desire to not be turned in to it. However, it didn't take long before things started falling apart.The first time I really found myself disappointed with the game was a mission that required me to go around finding and freeing a bunch of captured allies. The problem (in this particular case) wasn't the goal of the mission itself, but the fact that, since each map is procedurally generated, it can create some exceptionally bad designs that require you to find your way around some ridiculous obstacles. Since this mission required you to scour the map for several of these small prisons, you essentially have to find every single tiny hidden route. As you can see in this screenshot, it took me somewhere between 5-10 minutes of running circles on the map to find the last camp hiding behind a one-unit wide gap between trees and rocks.Sadly, this wasn't the last time I had a significant issue with map and mechanical design. As the game progresses, they move away from the standard 'destroy the enemy base' design and the objectives, map design, mission mechanics, and AI capabilities start heavily conflicting with one another. There will be instances where you will lose a mission several times because you had a poor roll of the procedural dice on that particular map and it made objectives extremely difficult. Other times you'll be required to abandon the normal play of the game to do things that seem wholly different from core game elements. You'll be doing things like collecting boxes of resources to spawn your army while somehow avoiding killing the units that generate these resources despite them attacking you on sight – and somehow avoiding them entirely if the map happens to put them directly between you and your real enemy. One of the most frustrating situations is when your opponent seemingly has no requirement for resources and can also place spawning buildings in nearly any spot regardless of their commander even existing. While you're held down by normal restrictions of the game, you have to essentially battle an AI that can do whatever it wants. This leads to missions you lose in ways that do not at all seem fair.The multiplayer of Tooth and Tail is an entirely different story. Whether you're playing ranked, unranked, or local multiplayer, you're finally completely out of the realm of strange game-breaking rules and uneven balance, and the procedural maps no longer play as big of a role in whether you win or lose. You start out able to pick six types of units/buildings from the full assortment in the game and you'll only be able to use those selected to try and defeat your opponent. Then you run around building up mills for resources and collecting your army for what usually ends up being a raucous melee of crazy animals duking it out the way nature intended. Matches are generally short, I believe I finished all of the ones I played in under 10 minutes, and it makes it that much easier to want to play more of it – even if you suck. The only issue is, of course, that this is an Indie game and it's exceptionally rare for any Indie game to maintain a strong multiplayer following as the release day fades into the past.I really wanted to like this game. The art style, the environments, the entire visual design was great. Even the soundtrack is mostly appealing. There's a general sense of quality in many pieces of the game. Yet when I play the story mode, I feel like one group of people designed a really cool game that has core mechanics that function exceptionally well, but an entirely different group of people were left with the task of trying to make a diverse single player experience that ended up all over the place and went hard against the grain of the other group. That's most likely not the case, but when it seems like that, there's obviously an issue. If I could assure everyone for all time that the multiplayer would be populated, I'd probably be more on the side of recommending this game. With the value provided via the $20 price tag, it's almost worth it for that alone, but Tooth and Tail really falls apart as a single player game and I can't look past that. I understand that the developers may be able to go back and try to make the single player more approachable, but for me to really enjoy it there will need to be some changes all the way down to the central design of many missions and the entire procedural map design component. Without that, I can't recommend this game.If you'd like to see more of my reviews, check out my curator page here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/EndyoGaming#curation