It’s a hard life, being a rat. No one thinks you are cute, you get all the blame for the bubonic plague, and you have a tendency to get embroiled in vicious blood-thirsty wars with rival armies of animals. For an example of the latter, look no further than the first Tails of Iron, which pitted Redgi and his anthropomorphic pals against ferocious bands of fearsome frogs. Now, with the frog menace having taken their last ribbit, it’s the turn of some undead Bats to invade a Ratty Kingdom. Thankfully for Redgi, this is not the southern kingdom that he rules over, instead, it’s the Rats of the North who get brutally murdered by an invading army. And they do, in outstandingly gory but oh-so-cute fashion, in the cataclysmic opening to Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter.
For those who didn’t have the good fortune of playing through its fantastic forebear, Tails of Iron 2 is best summed up as a 2D Souls-like. The diminutive player character – a bearded, brutally-violent, yet surprisingly cuddly rat named Arlo – must hack and chop their way through a vast interconnected environment, taking on hordes of massive foes. The foes are glorious to behold, painted and animated in an arresting visual style.
This time out there’s an overarching wintry Game of Thrones aesthetic, which proves a suitably arresting theme. The species and enemies are far more varied and creative in this outing; cannibalistic were-owls, enormous killer snakes (from Arlo’s perspective at least), and undead wyvern-riding bat shamans are all a joy to dismember. Indeed, the vast array of baddies keep proceedings fresh as the hours of play tick by, demanding that the player is constantly identifying new attack patterns, finding the chinks in their foe’s armour and exploiting them to finally emerge bat-tered (pun absolutely intended) and victorious. The satisfaction these hard earned triumphs earn results in quite the squeak of exultation.
Make no mistakes, Tails of Iron 2 doesn’t pull any paws. This is a tough – and often deeply unfair – game. Arlo is pitted against ridiculous odds, again and again, running a gauntlet of overpowered opponents before the next save point is reached. Though, I’m pleased to report that Tails of Iron 2 benefits from a much-needed focus on accessibility.
There’s a very welcome easy mode that slows down enemy attacks, allowing a player to learn the attack patterns of enemies, improve their skills, and then reapply their newfound abilities on higher difficulties, if they so choose. Even better, easy mode can be toggled at any time, ensuring middle-aged gamers with fading reactions can still make it through to the credit. Something I’m deeply thankful for.
In combat, Arlo has to roll to dodge red coloured unstoppable attacks, just like Redgi before him. Yet something has gone awry with his ability to parry yellow-coloured attacks, the controller inputs feeling floatier and less precise than in the original game. Parrying now rarely works, all too often resulting in Arlo being mashed in the face with a mace. In fact, so naff is the mechanic that I entirely ignored parrying, opting to dodge every attack instead.
Avoiding parrying takes some of the complexity out of the original game’s rock, paper, scissor, approach to combat, leading to a less engaging experience. Still, at least the combat benefits from being more dynamic. Enemies are much more prone to dodge and weave around the combat zone, using flight to soar above Arol’s head or tunnelling to dig beneath Arlo’s paws, all of which serve to keep Arlo on his claws; mitigating some of the sedentary combat encounters that plagued the original.
Where Tails of Iron 2 really falls in comparison to the original game is due to a nasty bout of sequelitis bloat. It’s an affliction that plagues many an anticipated sequels, presenting as a cornucopia of unnecessary gameplay mechanics bolted, Frankenstein Monster-stye, onto the once lean framework of its predecessor. Take the new system of gathering resources to build new weapons and tools by way of an example; as it’s mostly pointless. Why bother making your own gear when the items found in chests, received for completing quests, and discovered discarded on oft-decapitated corpses, are so much better? Despite the game demanding I recruit blacksmiths and build forges through its main story quests, I rarely availed myself of their services. A shame, as an entire day-night cycle has been implemented for this outing, requiring you to hunt at the correct time to find certain enemies, yet – in my playthrough at least – I barely bothered with any of it.
Then there’s elemental damage. Every foe you meet will harness different elements to attempt to kill you. The idea being that you should gather resources to build specific armour that offers the appropriate elemental resistance. The problem is that no matter how awesome the armour looks, it’s still totally useless. Whatever armour you wear, pretty much every enemy will kill you in two hits. Why bother with armour when you are best off being nice and light to help dexterously dodge attacks? Again, an initially interesting mechanic is rendered moot through haphazard implementation.
Tracking was a much-highlighted addition in preview footage, with Arlo able discern foes traits before he meets them by observing the environment. Yet in practice this amounts to little more than finding one footprint and then being told everything about the enemy, including all their elemental weaknesses. Meanwhile, the grappling hook, which proved a tantalising tease in my preview, remains frustratingly limited in its usage, providing Arlo with a slightly faster means of navigating the environment, but little else. Those hopping to use the grappling hook to explore environment of greater height and scale will be left disappointed.
In short, this squeakquel is more of the same, which is a good thing, but it’s also lumbered with a bunch of underwhelming gumpf that doesn’t work as cohesively as it should, and that’s most definitely a bad thing.