Time for another review!
Once, a few years ago, I thought of a great name to go under for these that was a guro-themed parody of one Youtube video game reviewer or another. I've been trying to remember it ever since.
Let's talk about a game that doesn't seem like it should be an experiment: Continent of Slaughter, the turn-based tactics guro game.
Turn-based and RPG guro games are a lot rarer than you might expect, most of the non-tech-demo part of the field is 2d action platformers and VN's. I think that's a missed opportunity, it's a lot easier to justify a slower pace and a constant stream of new dead women in a strategy game than it is in nearly any other. I'm already using one hand to jerk off, guys!
And for our current example, well, as a strategy guro game, I'd call it a "good start". It's quite unrefined.
You play as one nation on the titular continent of slaughter, which has recently fallen into all-out war on all sides. It has three parts, an economy phase, a maneuver phase, and battles.
The economy phase is self-explanatory. You have castles and cities which you spend resources to develop, increasing their resource output and defense bonuses. You also raise new troops and upgrade existing ones.
The maneuver phase is the one where stuff happens. In real-time, you move your troops around the map and down the various roads connecting the forts and cities. When your troops meet the enemy, either on one side of a stone wall or out in the fields, a battle starts unless you autoresolve.
The battle phase pits your army against the enemy's in a scenario that is deceptively complex but ultimately very simple. If your army is wiped out, the enemy takes the fort or continues moving as they were, and vice-versa if you wipe out the enemies. You set up your units on the field, push go and everyone attacks their chosen target once. In battles, your goal is to pit units against enemy units who do not have favorable type matchups. This causes your units to deal more damage and take less, thus improving how long they can stay in the fight until they become ineffectual, and eventually, completely destroyed. There are also distance modifiers but those are far less significant and I barely noticed them, same with terrain modifiers that do not affect the 19/20 battles that take place at a fort.
The game flow is complicated at first but you quickly realize how it all works. Your goal is to keep your forts garrisoned to repel enemy attacks while building up forces to take enemy garrisons. You consider which fronts need more units and then field ones which counter the army composition of that enemy. You try to minimize surface area for the enemy to attack to minimize how thin you need to stretch your forces. Read the tutorials, don't be afraid to open the charts in the game files, and even though most of the interface is in Japanese all the important parts are easy enough to grasp.
There's also a story. The first time you play, you have to play one specific nation that has short VN sequences talking about the politics and the violent tendencies of your leader. After winning that campaign, you get to play the other nations, which have no story content.
In practice, there are some issues. The standard campaign has you playing as arguably the weakest faction, and you are only able to win because the stronger enemies rarely fully commit to attacks, instead sending their squadrons piecemeal. The battles are fundamentally about endurance so this is ineffectual if you have a reasonable army composition ready to meet them. Battle balance is worse.
By the mid-game, every enemy army starts approaching a composition of being ~75% cavalry and spearwomen. It's a good composition, cavalry attack early and counter every unit with ranged attacks, while spears counter enemy cavalry and are the most durable units in the game. The only viable way to fight this composition is with a lot of spears of your own, which peel away enemy cavalry turn-by-turn before you come in with beast warriors and infantry, which can deal with spears faster but are vulnerable to being hit with cav before they can attack (infantry) or spammed down with massed attacks or wizard spells (beast warriors). Units lose combat power based on damage taken, one poor attack probably won't hurt them but one strong attack can make them vulnerable and weak, so letting the enemy counter you too hard can cause a lot of unnecessary losses and remove too many rarer specialist units from viability early. By the end of the game, every battle has the same formula of attritioning away enemy cavalry with massed spear attacks before slowly cutting down the remaining enemy spears who take so little damage per turn no matter what. My armies almost always had 1/3 to 1/2 of their numbers being spear units and when I was truly tested by enemy forces I rarely felt like my mistake was not being diversified enough, it was frequently the opposite.
The story is also weird. The game's localization is the most "functional" I've seen. I couldn't get a handle on the characters or the events, and the way it's told is by having the characters talk in Japanese text while a second text box in English summarizes what they're going on about, sometimes explaining entire conversations in a single line.
So the gameplay was okay. What about the guro?
Well, the units are groups that get turned into red paste where they stand as they lose soldiers. Each unit is represented by a commander, who has a randomly-generated collection of parts and who becomes beaten and bloodied when they are defeated. The amount of alternate graphics keeps the violence somewhat fresh. I've seen women with oddly-colored skin before, but having the cavalry be centaurs is a bold move. There are also special guro cg's for when you beat story content, mostly earned by taking enemy cities so you can see their rulers be put to the sword. The downside is that giant bloody stab wounds and the occasional disembowelment make up the entirety of the violence roster. If you aren't into that, there's not much for you. If you are, well, my first campaign had a total casualty count of around ten thousand (and units only have ten women each), so you'll never run out.
Slaughter Continent is a rough strategy game that's fun at first but becomes a slog before the end, and has a limited selection of kinds of guro, but does what it has well. 6/10, wish there was a sequel.