Battle Brothers

Battle Brothers is a fun strategy game where your men dying is as common as using the restroom or checking social media. It perfectly captures the quick brutality of death in combat and cleverly uses many different systems to simulate close quarters battle. The art design while offputting at first in screenshots, quickly grew on me. The music is absolutely wonderful, this is the kind of stuff you might find yourself wanting to listen to in your freetime. So why is the game 3 stars instead of 5? Well it's simple really. The game is very opaque in design. There are things going on behind the scenes that the devs didn't feel was neccessary to explain. For example, why does some armor drop by not others. There is a reason for this but the game sure didn't care to ever let me know. It was only with using outside sources and looking at youtube guides that I became fully aware of how much the game was hiding from me. There is something to be said for discovery and exploration in video games. Hand holding has become a major complaint over recent years, so I can certainly see the appeal of something that literally doesn't tell you the rules, but there is also something to be said about brick wall design that can only be over come by repeatedly banging your head for hundreds of hours or resorting to spoiling the discoveries anyway with hand holding online tutorials. For that, this game fails and succeeds. It succeeds at being a great game but fails at letting you actually play it. The challenge felt less like it was coming from managing resources or even battle, and more like it was coming from the developers who decided puzzles are most fun to put together while you blindfolded and sitting in the dark. Like Monopoly hiding the fact that you can buy property so you are forever rolling dice, I grew tired of spinning my wheels around the board. And what good is discovery if I need outside sources to learn what's going on anyway? It's okay to tell me the rules

That's a problem with nowadays games: the're bugged. I've been playing for 15 minutes, I entered a town, left, and then tried to re-enter it, I can't, the game gets stuck on the map screen without displaying the town screen. Appart from that, the game feels extremely... cheap. All in all it's not the worst game here on GoG, but not the best either. I'd rather play M&B Warband.

I would avoid this game if you want a deep strategic squad base game. I got into battle brothers because I've played quite a few squad-based strategy games and looking at the game's systems it just seemed like a perfect game but turns out everything is dictated by a heavy-handed RNG system. First, you start a new game and the map will be randomly generated and the RNG can be heavy enough that the very seed you are in is unplayable. But lets assume it isn't then maybe the towns that have spawned in your seed might also make it unplayable, maybe your starting brothers are so bad that you would want a restart or maybe your seed has only bad brothers (for a time) and the occasional death-stack at the start of the game because some villagers got butchered by monsters and fed them. Maybe you roll poorly in fights and maybe it doesn't hit the body part you want, maybe you randomly get wounded or you roll dmg so low you end up not killing enemies in 2 hits but 5-6 hits, maybe you hit your own characters and maybe you don't drop anything. The core idea is that you are meant to mitigate some of the RNG but never all of it, which is a fine pillar to build a game off but you NEVER go this hard on the values. Also, the strategic elements of the game are too shallow (besides the terrain elements, like hill battlemaps or forest or just night-time for instance), say you want to go high ground to gain an advantage on your attacks, you will get up to 10% chance to hit, why even bother if a single hit can send you back to the main menu? The weapons are nice however, there's close to 20 different types which are distinct and matter a lot on how you approach combat, however it is a tier system, tier 2 is better in every way and tier 1 is now obsolete kind of jam. If you don't mind the graphics, a simple strategy system, very little music and general soundscape, if dont mind the story being very light and if you don't mind save scumming this is a fine game albeit not spectacular.

Sorta like playing D&D with a murderous DM, or perhaps a campaign in the Game of Thrones universe where characters you like often die. I will say, I have taken the time to learn and appreciate the game; however I wish it came with even lower difficulty level settings for new players, and those looking to get lost more in the story. I had to start over quite a few times while learning which monsters would wipe the floor with a low level group of mercs.

This game is a turn based tactical strategy simulation where you manage a team of mercenaries in a semi-open world. Each mercenary can be customized in terms or look and equipment. They gain experience from battle and have customizable stats and abilities. Each company you create has its own background and evolving story. Each choice you make slighlty changes how you play each company and how renowned your company becomes in the game world. Gameplay has a steep learning curve where 'losing is fun.' The curve can be flattened quite a bit if desired as there are many commmunity guides on optimial ability/skill trees or map seeds. There is a vibrant modding community with a handful of total conversions as well as quality of life changes. All DLCs are worth the money. They add more company backgrounds, more items, more mercenaries and more quests.