The creators of Tails of Iron, Odd Bug Studio, debuted their game in 2021 to a very warm welcome from the press and players alike. The protagonist of the first part of the rat saga was the young king Redgi, who, as a result of a treacherous attack by frog troops, had to don the crown and embark on the path of revenge for his father’s murder.
Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter greets players with a similar trope in the plot. Our hero, Arlo, is sent to an outpost by the Northern Border – the Winter’s Edge – because he is a bastard, the illegitimate son of King Redgi. Arlo grows up, masters the basics of battles and hunting with his new “father”, and so on until Winter’s Edge is attacked.
Previously, Winter’s Edge already repelled the Dark Wings’ attack, after which the surviving enemies had disappeared. As it turned out, they had lived on Mount Cauldron and were waiting for the opportunity to strike again. The outpost’s inhabitants had driven the Dark Wings out of their land, but they had not forgotten nor forgiven their defeat and were thirsty for revenge.
Using magic and the element of surprise, the Dark Wings burst into Winter’s Edge and slaughtered everyone they could. Our hero, Arlo, was out on a hunt with his foster father Lord Avor to fight back the despised Needback – and teach players the basics of fighting in the process of battling this tutorial boss – when the attack happened. The two found themselves in the middle of slaughter as Dark Wings used giant bats and magic to topple the outpost.
In the aftermath of the battle, now orphaned Arlo is left in tattered armor and with his father’s crown on his head. As the heir to the Warden of the Wastes, he must revive the settlement, find new comrades and unite other animals in the fight against Dark Wings.
The game initially greets you with a choice of difficulty, offering three appropriately named difficulties to choose from. The veterans of the first Tails of Iron can immediately crank the difficulty up to the max to get an interesting challenge. For the rest, I’d advise to stick with the easy or the medium levels until you get used to controls and the battle flow.
And yes, everything in the game is stylized under the animal theme. From the very beginning we are greeted by a colorful main screen, showing that we will play, albeit a gloomy, but a fairy tale.
The first few minutes of the game will teach you how the controls and movements, how to choose equipment and weapons, improve them, and further subtleties of the game. For example, collecting berries from ice bushes replenishes the healing flask with an invigorating tonic, which will allow you to heal during combat. The hook will allow you to quickly overcome some obstacles, and Lord Avor will tell you the basics of the combat system. Light attacks, enhanced light attacks, heavy attacks, shooting, blocking and counter-attacking are what Arlo will use during the game.
First, let’s talk about gear.
The game offers 4 slots for armor: Helmet, Body, Shoulder and Shield. Each of the armor elements will have its own characteristics. Weight, resistance, various elemental characteristics. Defense is divided into protection from fire, lightning, poison, cold. Resistance reduces overall physical damage, and elemental defenses reduce damage taken from the respective magic and elemental attacks of enemies.
Weight affects the attack speed: lightweight armor – and you will attack quickly, dodge quickly, run quickly. Medium weight is balanced all around, and heavy weight will allow you to take little damage (after all, the heaviest armor is the most protected), but you will also attack more slowly to pay for this protection.
The same applies to weapons – each has its own damage, weight and elemental damage stats. There are 3 types of weapons, light one-handed, allowing you to chop up enemies at a fast pace, heavy two-handed, with powerful, charged attacks and ranged, allowing you to kill enemies from afar, by the way, also having charged attacks.
Ranged weapons consume ammunition, which must either be found on the bodies of enemies or bought, and also inflict elemental damage – poison, burning, freeze or stun. Rarely do you find barrels with arrows, allowing you to replenish ammunition.
The shield is capable of both protecting Arlo from enemy attacks, shots, and even some magic, and with a successful counterattack, stunning the enemy or boss, allowing the rodent warrior to inflict numerous blows on them.
And as for the types of weapons… swords, axes, spears, bows, guns, crossbows, glaives with heavy hammers… There is plenty to choose from. Additionally, the visuals are pleasing to the eye, because each weapon strikes in its own way. You pierce enemies with a spear, chop them like trees with an axe, and cut them up with a sword.
And finally, our hero will be given the opportunity to use magic, represented by a total of 4 elements – Fire, Lightning, Ice and Poison. There are also consumable items, jars – quickly removing elemental dots, mines of several levels of strength – capable of damaging even bosses well, a sharpening stone – improving damage for a certain number of hits.
The game’s visuals are striking, not only in the form of combat movements. The game is incredibly stylish with unmistakable dark fantasy vibes. Each location is drawn perfectly. Live backdrops, animated weather, beautiful and diverse biomes. You can go to snow-capped mountains and snow will fly under your feet, you can see flags waving during a battle with the boss, and warriors of 2 types, Rodents and Bats, fight behind you.
Every location feels alive and diverse, the snow sparkles, the rain makes the location wet, the wind raises the leaves, and the dark caves and ravines look not just like an ordinary location, but really beautiful. On any given background, there are always many details and interesting bits to look at.
The OST, and the sound itself in the whole game, is also made in a fantasy style with some animalistic twist. Conversations between animals in the form of different musical sounds, from trumpets and lutes to a flute. Adult Lord Avor “trumpets” his phrases, and Arlo responds with a whistle of a flute. Throughout the game you will listen to pleasant music, in peaceful zones – calm and quiet, in battles it can change to something more dynamic and intense with drums and heavy brass. And individual musical tracks of battles with Dark Wings are also distinguished by animations, in the background the music is played by a brutal team of Dark Wing punks or rockers, strumming guitars and drums. The rest of the sounds of the game quite atmospherically fit into the overall aesthetics.
Both the artists and the musicians did their best, and I really want to draw attention to their work. The voice of the game’s narrator is the famous Doug Cockle, known for his role as Geralt in the Witcher trilogy. Yes, that very same voice. The narrator in the game is somewhat similar to the narrator in the game Bastion, describing everything that happens in the game with our hero Arlo. The game’s plot is both well told and well shown, it moves steadily, instead of intermittently running along or crawling.
The variety of armor and weapons is amazing, a huge selection of them will give you a lot of options for battles. It is strange, though, that you can change armor and weapons at any time in the game, and not only in safe zones like in the previous game. Sometimes the battle with the boss can look strange, since in the first phase Arlo has one armor with protection from ice and a weapon for fire. And then in the second phase, when the boss changes his attacks, you swap the armor to the one with protection from lightning/poison and the weapon to lightning damage, which stunned the boss.
The resource grind in the game is made very easy, you do not need to spend hours looking for the necessary monsters, it is enough to complete the missions, and you will have enough resources to upgrade armor/weapons and for construction in the Winter’s Edge.
There are many small secrets in the game, closed caves with equipment, halls with additional resources, and simply forgotten crevices that are difficult to get into, but all these secrets will benefit you in the progression of the character.
The companions are presented in an interesting way, at certain points in the game you will have quest partners, and, surprisingly, they are NOT useless in battle: they can deal a lot of damage, stun enemies, and sometimes can kill a couple of opponents without you. It’s just a pity that the companions are tied to quests exclusively, it would be interesting to play with them not only within certain tasks.
Of the drawbacks of the game, the plot is exactly the same as the first part, was it really impossible to change it at least a little, shake up some details or plot points? I will not say that this is a significant negative point, but as for me, it is still a drawback. I would like to see the development of the story, and not its repetition in a new round.
A very peculiar transition of difficulty in battles with bosses: the first few bosses can quickly kill you, but once you get the 3rd level of the forge and improve your equipment, the bosses begin to hit extremely weakly.
Tails of Iron 2 features the auto-replacement of consumables. For example, after using a mine that I myself assigned to a certain cell, for some reason the game inserts something there at its own discretion, and not another mine.
The game has side quests, like hunting for monsters like in The Witcher 3. But in words it is better than in practice. In reality, players simply need to get to the designated place and either kill enemies, or kick the boss around and, after knocking down a third of the boss’s health, it will run to another location. Rinse and repeat, the boss can be killed only after the 3rd meeting.
However, I will say that even these hunts do not look boring, because the enemies react to your attacks. They can retreat, counterattack, jump back or attack you to intercept, which pleasantly spices up the gameplay. Although by the end I had cases when my armor absorbed more damage than some enemies inflicted on me, even with their uber attacks with magic.
Rebuilding Winter’s Edge after the devastation, you will invite other animal clans there, and each invitation will be visually displayed. The appearance of new animals at the base, new elements that can be both found and bought. Elements of decorations will appear in the Edge as they are found, and this is nice. When you buy a bas-relief or a flag blueprint from a merchant, they will appear at the base.
Those looking for hardcore and challenging the top difficulty will be pleasantly surprised and forced to use special tactics for each of the bosses. However, be prepared for the fact that you will have to constantly improve your equipment and try on things from killed opponents.
