Songs of Silence will likely pull you in with its gorgeous art style and interesting looking battles, but ultimately it is a fairly simple strategy game with a moderately short campaign.

Songs of Silence's gameplay is broken into its strategic elements, and its battle scenes. The strategic elements have lots of familiar features: captured locations provide resource income, defenses, and allow you to recruit units. All armies must travel with one of your allied commanders. During battle, each army automatically fights, and you can play commander abilities to help sway the fights in your favor. Despite the appearance of cards in the UI, there are no card based mechanics - anything that appears as a card is just an ability from a character or a location.

The game does have a detailed set of mechanics for how units work - armor, armor penetration, different damage types, and so on - but in practice, it generally boils down to big expensive units = good. There aren't really any points in the campaign where you're challenged to take advantage of favorable matchups between units, and I don't really think I ever noticed any favorable matchups anyways.

The campaign sees some moderately interesting writing, involving what's a sort of battle of three worlds, with you taking control of two* of three factions throughout the 8 missions. I played on the Balanced (medium) difficulty and generally found it to be pretty easy, and you can make manual saves if you're unsure of what you're doing. The levels are designed with lots of little bits of lore, and often optional allies to recruit, so the attention to detail is certainly there.

Despite all of this, I found the game to be a little underwhelming. The final boss of the last level is surprisingly trivial and really left me wanting more. Songs of Silence is a decent game but I can only really recommend buying it on sale. Still, if you often find yourself turned off by complicated strategy games, this might be a great pick up for you.