Tooth and Tail is an Arcade-Style Real-Time Strategy game set in a world of animal revolution. Wage war with customizable factions, featuring units like mustard-gas skunks and flamethrowing boars.
From the creators of the IGF-winning game Monaco, Tooth and Tail distills the Real Time Strategy genre down to a few buttons and eight-minute matches.
The team is describing it as an arcade-style real-time strategy game which caters to an audience who like the digestibility of mainstream RTS’ but don’t have time for the genre’s propensity for causing migraines.
“Like with Monaco, we focused on simplicity of controls. Your commander controls your army indirectly – two analog sticks, ABXY, and two triggers are all you need,” say its makers in an official blurb. “I like to say that if you can get the controller out of the way, the player can more directly interface with the fantasy and their strategy. Yup, it plays just as well on kb/m, but we really like using the controller as a design constraint. And for the record, fuck shoulder buttons. Those things are terrible.”
In early 2014, the studio’s Andy Schatz described the then-Armada to us as an RTS you could feasibly play in a party setting and “the first great gamepad RTS.” The aim remains the same. It’s a streamlined RTS, which means matches are a maximum of 12 minutes long and you can play at a competitive level after just a game or two. “More real-time chess, less competitive cow-clicker,” they’re saying.
Tooth and Tail's singleplayer plays like a bite-sized StarCraft campaign
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Pocketwatch Games founder Andy Schatz once described Tooth and Tail to me as the Mario Kart of RTSes. The studio behind Monaco is aiming for a more accessible take on the RTS genre, designed to play comfortably with controllers, on a couch, and even with split-screen versus mode on PC. It's definitely a simplified experience, but the opportunity for deep micro and macro is still there—a fact that's clear from the game's already lively competitive scene within its closed alpha.
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Tooth and Tail is also going to have a full singleplayer campaign, which I played an early version at PAX East last weekend. It feels like a bite-sized version of the StarCraft story campaigns, which makes sense given the game's goal of condensing that experience down into a more digestible form. I played through three levels, all connected by a larger story and a communal tavern where I got new missions from the various animals in Tooth and Tail's Redwall-meets-WWI setting. Each mission switched up the regular rules of the game in one way or another, limiting what units I could build or changing my objective from killing an opponent to surviving a set amount of time, and none of them lasted longer than a few minutes.
The first mission was called The Bonepit Riots, and dropped me into a chaotic battle already in progress. I had to skirt my pre-built army around the enemy's and kill their leader instead of a central base, but I couldn't build anything past what was already on the field. The second mission had me turtle up and defend a single windmill, but I was only able to build immobile turret nests against the AI's waves of exploding toads and poison-spitting snakes. They both felt like moments that would play out in multiplayer (a big fight, defending against a siege, etc.), isolated and tweaked until they could stand as a challenge on their own.
But the most interesting of the bunch was a mission called The Long Thirst, where I needed to survive three nights in a desert. Each night the enemy army would come hunt me down as I tried to defend myself, only able to build land mines and moles—a unit that doesn't spawn from a building and can be built individually anywhere on the map. But with no windmills, the only way to get food to fund my army's growth was to go hunting for lizard enemies scattered around the map during the day.
While the first two missions were more twists on a typical Tooth and Tail match, The Long Thirst really showed off the potential of campaign. The gameplan and pacing was so different from playing the PvP, and it's exciting to see Pocketwatch isn't afraid to mess around with the strategy pieces it's already built, even for a mission that was only about five minutes long. It felt like a mission concept that could be extended into a 20 minute level, but Schatz told me they generally want to keep missions short and sweet in keeping with Tooth and Tail's style.
Tooth and Tail - RTS Distilled - launches on September 12th, pre-order available on July 18th on Playstation 4, Steam, and GOG.
Lead the revolution with an army of flamethrowing Boars, mustard gas-lobbing Skunks, and paratrooper-puking Owls. From Pocketwatch Games, the creators of Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, Tooth and Tail is a Real-Time Strategy game featuring an extensive Single Player Campaign, Online Competitive Play, Split Screen, Replays, and more.
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