Immortal Tactics: War of the Eternals

Introduction

Immortal Tactics: War of the Eternals sets out to add something new to turn-based tactical combat: alongside the usual movement and action phases, it layers in a third — environment and reinforcement — where hazards trigger and enemy numbers swell before control passes back to you. It entered Early Access on 15 July 2022 from Kenisoft Game Studio, a small team building its reputation largely on this one release, and it has earned a genuinely strong reception for it, sitting Very Positive at 85.5% across 83 English-language reviews. What this review has to weigh against that warm reception is a fact anyone considering a purchase deserves to know clearly: by this review's own check of the public record, nothing about this game has changed in more than four years.

A genuinely inventive core system

Set the update history aside for a moment, because the praise in this review's sample is specific and consistent enough to take at face value. Multiple reviewers single out the environment-and- reinforcement phase as the game's best idea — one calls it "absolutely game-changing," describing how being too slow to clear a battlefield before that phase triggers can turn a winning position into a losing one, while a well-timed clear avoids it entirely. Another reviewer, who says the game became one of their favourites in the genre, praises how procedurally generated battlefields within themed biomes keep encounters varied despite a comparatively small roster of units and leaders. A handful of specific accessibility touches — a simplified font option, the ability to turn off half-value damage figures, hints attached to most achievements — draw their own unprompted praise, an unusual level of care for a release this size.

A single update, then silence

Here is where this review has to shift from describing the game to describing what happened to it. Checking the title's own Steam news feed turns up exactly one entry in its entire public history: a post titled "Castle Area now Available," dated 1 September 2022, roughly six weeks after Early Access launch. There is nothing before it beyond the initial release, and nothing after it at all — a complete silence that has now lasted more than four years on a game still carrying the Early Access label. A review posted in February 2023 independently corroborates the timing: the reviewer describes a specific bug that permanently softlocks the game, states the developer's bug-report thread had gone unanswered "since last September," and concludes plainly that the developer "seems to have abandoned ship." That single data point lining up exactly with this review's own news-feed check is about as close to independent corroboration as this kind of story gets without a direct statement from the studio.

How far the content actually goes

Steam's own achievement data adds a concrete measure of how little of the game's later content — including the one update it ever received — actually got played. The "Castle" achievement, tied to that September 2022 update, sits at just 2.5% of tracked players, and a further advanced-difficulty achievement for the same area sits at 0.0%, meaning effectively nobody in the tracked population has completed it. Earlier achievements taper more gradually — 74.2% for an early collectible, down through the 30s for mid-game milestones — a shape broadly consistent with a game whose core loop holds attention for a while before most players either finish what's on offer or move on, well before the game's thin post-launch content comes into view at all.

A visual style reviewers can't agree on

Few things in this sample split opinion as sharply as the presentation itself. One reviewer specifically calls out the pixel art, background animations and music as a highlight worth loving on their own terms. A different, much harsher review calls the same hex tiles "the worst... I have seen in my entire life" and compares the character designs to "a jellyfish who have put a suit on," arguing the visuals alone make the asking price feel unreasonable. Neither view is obviously wrong — retro, deliberately minimal pixel art tends to divide audiences exactly this way, and this review's own read of the sample is that the split tracks fairly closely with how much a given player already likes small-scale, unpolished-looking indie tactics games as a category, rather than reflecting some objective quality problem either side has missed.

Final Verdict

Taken all together, Immortal Tactics: War of the Eternals earns its Very Positive reception on the strength of a genuinely clever combat system that several reviewers rightly call one of the more interesting ideas they've seen in the tactics genre lately. What keeps this review from recommending it without real reservations is everything surrounding that system: an Early Access product that, by this review's own check of its public update history, has not changed in over four years, paired with a specific, unresolved softlock bug report from a player who says the developer stopped responding around the same time updates stopped altogether. The game underneath is worth the praise it gets; whether it's worth NZ$18.49 today depends entirely on how comfortable you are paying full price for something that, by every available sign, is never going to become the finished game its Early Access label still implies. Wait for a steep discount, or for the developer to prove this review wrong with an update, before treating this as anything more than a gamble.