This week I decided to take a step out again and play a tactics-like. Nextfest is the place to step out and play games that they never really play. War of Velana takes something familiar and keeps it going. This week is War of Velana.

War of Velana is a strategy RPG from Loreweaver Creativeworks. The game is slated to be released for the PC sometime in the future.

War of Velana takes its story right from every single RPG ever created: A bunch of young delinquents follow the bad guy to an ancient evil tomb, watch the baddie release said ancient evil, and now the delinquents have to turn into the heroes and stop the bad guys.

War of Velana is an RPG, where you have a party of five: knight, mage, healer, paladin, and warrior, and you can level them, equip spells, and equip them with their own gear.

All of this comes full circle in the tactics-like combat system. In the demo, there is a large swath of land filled to the brim with baddies and you need to navigate the land to defeat them.

It seems that speed plays a part in which a character goes first and during that character’s turn, they can move a certain amount of spaces and either attack or use an ability. When attacking little cards come up, like in War Groove or Advanced Wars, and a little fighting animation plays out. It’s fun, nothing whimsical, but it does the job.

Pixel graphics and RPGs really do mix really well. The demo has a nice-looking small village, a mountain, and inside said mountain. Characters and baddies have enough detail to make them easy to distinguish while on the battlefield.

So far so good. War of Velana is fun and the story is engaging so far. The demo was about an hour long and I had fun the whole time. There are times when playing games from a genre that you do not play and War of Velana was that game. I am excited for when War of Velana releases as I will be buying it.