Battle Brothers

The strategic map and RPG elements fail hard, so there is still room for improvement, but Battle Brothers is better than the Jagged Alliance and XCOM on the tactical level. The DLCs for BB are good to support the developers, but I would not recommend those to people who are new to Battle Brothers.

This is not a bad game: It nice graphics and sound and solid game mechanics. No bugs, no crashes. Probably runs on fairly low spec hardware. But it is not a good game either. What you do is pretty limited in decisions and actions and those repeat over and over... The beginning is the hardest and also rewarding when you manage to get past to a point where things get much easier. But then it is just grinding for XP, items and money over and over and over again. The battles themselves are well made and you have a variety of different enemies and beast coming up. But when you do the 20-100 battle vs undead it is not that fun anymore. They get better units as you progress. But it is not that different. Also a lot of time you run back to the point where you got your mission to collect money. And the distances between the goal and start get much larger later. It is not really fun. I have played until I had most of my people at level 7 of 10. And I see no reason to play on... Also the game was much cheaper, when I bought and the DLC - I have two of them, seem to be overpriced and do not really get discounted on sale.

Think of this game like the Diablo 2 of tactical turn-based games. It's basically a Mount & Blade TBS with monsters and you're running a company of sellswords. The combat has a very addictive punch and it's extremely satisfying once you start to figure out how to stand a chance against enemies, but you're going to die a lot while you're learning. Something about looting the bodies you just slung all over the land is very very very addicting. It's an open world so you can play the game however you want on different difficulties. I typically don't have the patience for TBS games but this one's different and I can play it for hours without getting fatigued. There are so many good things to say I don't feel like typing it out. Watch a stream or two and see if you like it, then pay full price because the game is simply a masterpiece without all the slog that most other TBS game seems to suffer from. It's also always different, you'll have to approach every encounter differently. If you like TBS games this one will return on your investment for many many years.

Me, as like many others on forums am having scaling issues with the game making it 100% unplayable. Mouse offset is so huge it's impossible to change any settings to even lower the scaling (which appears to be the problem). Extremely poorly made because this has been reported often and devs don't care.

The message that the devs would no longer work on BB left many in wonder: How good BB might have become? While not an easy message, I think they made the right decision. The game was not on a path to become great. It was better to start over and work on a title where (hopefully) all elements work together. So why? The first demo of BB contained a few single battle scenarios. These were excellent with beautiful head-figures, tension, last man stands, general routs and meaningful weapon and armor choices. All was in the demo, before they made the campaign, a sandbox to create continuity between battles. Most problems of the campaign can be fixed with additional content and minor changes. Examples are meaningless walking in an empty world, text-based events with a mere yes/no option that can leave your best archer with one eye, and a tedious grind for gold. However, the biggest problem is that tactical battles simply don’t work with a campaign. An overconfidently picked 3-skull contract puts you in a fun and tense battle, and with many useless and dead men. It takes half a day (real world time) of 1-skull contracts and boring pushover battles to make up for some of the losses. The devs call this, in one of the tips: Losing is fun! The battle was fun, yes, but the recovery afterwards feels more like a campaign reset. The risk of some contracts is not worth it, is another tip. I’m running from fights that might be won, but likely at severe cost. Where is the fun in that? I hope that the devs stopped investing in BB for this reason, only. Focus on their next game to make it more than the sum of its parts. BB’s demo was a straight 4.5 out of 5 for me. Unfortunately, the campaign brings it down to a lousy 3 stars :(. Imaging how BB would be if, instead of a campaign, they made 100 very unique scenarios? Various setups, troop compositions, equipment layouts, battles focusing on mechanics such as morale, aiming for the head, shield walls, etc. That would have been great!