Shacknews Top 24 Games of the Year 2024

#8 Game of the Year 2024 - Unicorn Overlord

If VanillaWare knows how to make a bad video game in a genre it hasn’t touched before, we haven’t seen it. Dragon’s Crown is a solid acrcade-style brawler, Odin Sphere is a fantastic action-RPG, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is an amazing sci-fi narrative adventure with strategic elements, and Unicorn Overlord is a sprawling strategy-RPG that takes the best parts of yesteryear’s Ogre Battle and modernizes it enough to make it stand out as one of our favorite games released this year.

At its core, Unicorn Overlord is an incredible story of a young lord’s mission to gather allies and unite the nations against a malevolent tyrant and his overwhelming power. The game is filled to the brim with characters to recruit, some having relationships with one another that makes their stories exciting to unravel. The game also features a massive abundance of classes for you to mix and match into squads.

You see, you don’t have any one character fight at a time in Unicorn Overlord. Instead, in battles, you send out squads as a singular unit to engage in combat with enemy squads and take over control points in stop-and-go real-time strategy. The composition of your forces is of important consideration as pretty much every class in the game has strengths and weaknesses. Figuring out how they best synergize is a big part of the fun.

Between these features, a beautiful art style, enjoyable music, and a compelling story, Unicorn Overlord’s strategies shine, making it easily one of our favorite things to come out of VanillaWare so far.

Unicorn Overlord is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms.

Shack Staff

Shack Staff stories are a collective effort with multiple staff members contributing. Many of our lists often involve entires from several editors, and our weekly Shack Chat is something we all contribute to as a group.