Alder's Blood: Definitive Edition

I'm rather enjoying this game. To me, its somewhat reminiscent of Banner Saga and Darkest Dungeon if they made a Deadlands game. Its definitely an Indie game, so don't expect something super polished, but it's a refreshing concept and I think the execution is sound. That being said, I don't know how many people will read this, but I feel like it's only fair to the devs to point this out. The comments you see about burning through "dozens of characters" and "knowing every soldier is doomed from the start" are misleading. It's entirely possible to play the game and not lose any characters (there's actually an achievement for it.) There are mechanics that you can use in dire circumstances that do have long-term negative effects on your characters, but the game makes it very clear that you should only use these in emergencies. Also, in missions where you're not required to kill things or only to kill certain things, murdering all the enemies on the screen will also lead to corruption. The game is a STEALTH RPG, and is meant to be played slowly and cautiously. Bottom line, don't let the reviews deter you from this game. If it looks interesting, try the prologue (its free.) Wait for it to go on sale if you're still on the fence. Regardless, it's definitely worth trying out if you like turn-based, tactical RPGs set in darker/post-apocalyptic settings.

There are still a few bugs, which are more or less disturbing. But it has a great potential and an interesting premise. It is a post-apocalyptic steampunk setting and the art design seems to scream "I loved Darkest Dungeon" - which made me very curious. I don't regret buying it and recommend it to everyone who loves to play an X-Com/Phantom-Doctrine-Style Game in a Darkest Dungeon optic and a grim atmosphere!

I admire what Alder's Blood is going for and I hope to see more from this dev. To be clear, Alder's Blood does not offer the worst examples of randomness and timers I've seen. But to me, they are without a doubt the worst elements of Xcom-like turn based squad management games. Others have already completely destroyed this concept for me. Dealing with dice rolls and arbitrary time restrictions is not strategy! Timers and random chance are a fake way to create engagement, for those that have no better ideas on how to make their gameplay in depth or interesting. This is not to single out Alder's Blood, I understand that these are genre conventions. But games like Mechanicus and Hard West offer much more interesting alternatives to random damage. And titles like Sanctus Reach or Templar Battleforce generally spam more enemies at you instead of imposing timers (though I still dislike timed reinforcments, I do prefer this solution over other penalties or a simple fail state). My issues with the genre aside, Alder's Blood can have a frustrating interface. Enemy detection for instance requires constant mousing over instead of simply showing. Trying to select another hunter will sometimes cause the selected hunter to walk to his ally instead, depleting his stamina and paralyzing him for the next turn. Trying to activate objectives from afar causes your character to walk over, which is a problem if you're not sure if your character is adjacent to the objective or not. Especially combined with the aforementioned enemy detection issues, this can cause your hero to start walking, get exposed and get killed. Instead of activating the objective safely, as you thought he was going to do. Someone less frustrated by similar issues in previous games in the same genre would have enjoyed this game more. As it stands, 3/5 is all I can give this.

The atmosphere and writing is great, but gameplay is a muddled mess. Game contains a ton of options for engaging in combat, and then actively discourages you from engaging in combat by having no rewards for doing so, making your Hunters very fragile, making stealth an overpowered option, and slowly corrupting your Hunters if you do decide to kill enemies. As a result the best way to play the game is to... Not play the game. Get a single hunter with high stamina and movement + low scent, and just run past all of the enemies on every map. You can beat the whole game like this. You get a lot of people frustrated with playing the game like a normal X-Com clone for obvious reasons; the game mechancis punish you for doing that. But playing the intended way is just a complete waste of game mechanics. Anyways, story good, would have liked to read it as a novel. Medicore as a video game.