Wow, episodic gaming kinda sucks. First, Republique just ends up being the same gameplay loop with no variation or difficulty curve (gave up after ep. 3 out of boredom), then Hitman 2 literally only gives you one target and one small house in an empty map for the first episode, being little more than a glorified demo (I didn’t even get Steam cards), so I abandoned both of them and played another game:

This is a turn-based tactics game. Each arena is an 8x5 grid with your team on the left side and enemies scattered around the rest of the board. Most enemies don’t attack on their own; they only counterattack when damaged. What sets this game apart is that your characters can only move to the right (and most have low max health), so you’ll need to use your limited ranged attacks and get enemies to (counter)attack each other until you can use melee attacks safely and reach the other side of the grid.

This is a decent foundation and could’ve lead to a really good game, but it’s ruined with one design decision: enemy placement is randomized, so instead of making players really think about their abilities and the enemies’ AI, each level just kinda blurs into the next, ultimately not being much better than Braveland. Even the final world and final boss weren’t all that noteworthy. What makes this worse is that some levels task you with killing a number of a certain type of enemy, then proceed not to spawn said enemy, so you have to fight through that entire grid just to reroll and hope the enemy shows up next time.

The RPG mechanics exacerbate this issue. If the level isn’t as monotonous as the rest of the game, it’s because the difficulty spiked to the point where you don’t know if it’s even possible with what you have or if you need to level up more or get more party member slots. Then again, sometimes, it’s blatantly obvious that you’ll need to increase your attack before you can progress in the level (as some optional levels have a large defense-up modifier for enemies).

The only other thing I can think to mention is it has that RPG trope where one of your party members leaves due to events in a cut-scene, but even this isn’t that big a deal since you can just hire another unit of that same class to replace the one that left (and you keep experience even if you lose or quit the level you’re on, so grinding to get it up to the rest of your party’s level doesn’t take that long, either).

Not recommended.