I see practically no one talking about this game, so I figured I give it a bit of a write up.

Tahira is a turn-based tactics game funded on kickstarter and heavily inspired by The Banner Saga (a game I consider one of my all time favourites). It's about the princess of Avestan, Tahira, who has to lead her people as they are pushed from their homeland by the villainous Astral Empire. The game is largely Middle Eastern in theme, with a bit of Indian/Tibetan influences. The Astral Empire itself might be a little Sci-Fi, since it was once a galaxy spanning, spacefaring empire that fell into ruin, supposedly because of the peoples of the planet and continent the game takes place on. That hint of sci fi, most visible in the laser cannons seen in the screenshot above, is intriguing but underutilized.

In general, the writing isn't very spectacular, and can be prone to cliché. Tahira and her closest ally Baruti are fine, but the other two main characters, The Hammer and The Claw, are bit annoying and not as endearing as was likely intended. Also, some way of looking up some lore like the map in The Banner Saga would be appreciated, since all the different places and kingdoms being thrown around in conversation made me feel a little lost.This game definitely is part of a series, and it ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, which kind of takes the steam out of the game. It didn't really feel like I was approaching the climax, but I thought I might be, and then the credits hit and confirmed my suspicions.

Perhaps the biggest appeal is the art, which is all beautifully rotoscoped. If I had a criticism it's that while the art in gameplay is excellent, the backgrounds and portraits aren't quite up to the same standard. Portraits range from good to kinda creepy, depending on the character and the emotion. The backgrounds are good, but a little plain, lacking texture and variety.

On to the gameplay, and here I have a lot to say. It does a couple of interesting things, but I have to start out with a major criticism: There aren't very many unit types in this game. There are 3 enemy types, and 4 playable units. There is one unique, named character of each type, in addition to generic versions with the same abilities, but worse stats. Tahira is the exception, she has no generic version. Even then, the units don't feel too unique amongst themselves, with two of the units being quit similar (high health, decent attack, good at pushing people around, can hit 2 units in a row). Eventually, because you don't have many unit types, and the units themselves aren't that different, the tactics can get a little boring.

This lack of unit variety hurts, but they handle it in quite an interesting way. Unlike Xcom, where your whole team gets to move in a turn, and unlike The Banner Saga, where one of your units moves, then one enemy unit moves, and so on, Tahira is sort of a hybrid. Basically, all units of a given type move at the same time, including heroes. However, if you don't activate a unit on their turn, you can activate them on any subsequent turn for your units, so long as you do it before the end of a turn cycle (when the turn order resets from the beginning). So Tahira, who is near the start of the turn order, can take her turn almost at the end if you wanted. This is a neat system, but the fact that you can just delay people's turns seemed to undercut the system a little, especially since the first unit to act (the light mercenary) was almost always better left for later in the turn cycle, since they could combo kills together on already damaged units.

So while the unit variety and turn system causes some issues, the stage design keeps things fresh. There is a good degree of stage interaction, you can hid units for surprise attacks that are able to interrupt enemy turns, you can push enemies off ledges. Perhaps my favourite element, is that combat encounters usually come in stages, with each stage having a new map or a twist on the previous map. Your progress (unit health, number of units) carries over, so losing units on stage 1 of an encounter can come back to bite you when your forces are a bit thing in stage 3. I liked this, but I can see it causing some people to have to repeat large sections of gameplay.

I guess as final thoughts, I liked it, but it's clear that although it aspires to be like The Banner Saga, it doesn't quite get there. The writing, art and gameplay are all good, but not excellent. As a whole it works okay, but each element feels just a little lacking, which nothing really standing out and defining it. I'm excited to see where the sequel goes, because these feels like a decent base to build upon. I bet a Tahira 2 or 3 could be really awesome. If anyone else has played it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

@brackstone: Thanks for writing this up - this is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for since I spotted this. How long is it? I don't have a tremendous amount of free time, so if it's about the same length as Banner Saga that's great.

Another thanks for spotlighting this game; had heard the name before but never looked at it closely.

@wagrid: I'd say it will depend a lot on your difficulty level/how good you are. I played on the second highest, and I'd probably say it took me 12 hours, maybe a bit more. The thing that will make it vary heavily is that if you perform poorly on the first stage of a combat encounter, it could potentially make stages 2 and 3 progressively more impossible. On the normal difficulty, ten hours sounds right.

Though i saw some things about this game that led me to give it a closer look, it was hard for me to look at the art and not compare it negatively to the Banner Saga. Not a reasonable standard to hold it to, I realize, but it was just too similar in design otherwise not to make that connection.

This looks interesting, but i just bought banner saga this summer and have yet to play that. If it is as good as i think i will probably check this one out too.

@brackstone: I'm pretty experienced with turn based games, and will probably play it on whatever the equivalent of normal is, so it sounds like it should be pretty manageable in terms of time commitment. Thanks duder!

Of course, there is an argument for playing Banner Saga 2 before I played an inspired by (loved the first one).