Posted on: March 24, 2018
gaynorvader
Games: 147 Reviews: 7
Disappointing
I'm going to start off with the good. The idea behind the combat abilities are good. The spell cards you start off with are well balanced and thought out. The world setting is interesting and immersive. The strix mechanic is cool, much like a food mechanic in other games and really makes you think about when to heal your wounds and when to press on. The art and soundtrack are really good and the voiceovers are a nice touch. Now onto the bad. The combat, which holds such promise, is completely undermined by a few mechanics. Each unit gets a turn, so if you focus down enemies, the remaining enemy units start acting more often. You can't use the same tactics against them, because allowing a unit to be reduced to 0 health means they'll gain a severe wound, reducing their combat effectiveness and costing you precious strixes to heal. More powerful spell cards have too many drawbacks to be useful (even though you need to wait more turns to use more powerful cards, many have large drawbacks in addition to this). The battles are often very swingy. Some enemies do massive damage at long range. Some even ignore your defense. Nearly all have spell cards that are equal or better than anything you can have, despite the lore painting them as rare. The travel is poorly done. You are offered blind choices. An example; one of the 3 paths you can take on the first travel choice you get in the game results in you losing about 1/3 of your strixes. Another fault is, if you make unlucky choices, you can run out of strixes. On my first playthrough, this happened to me and maybe an hour into the game all my characters were at death's door and I had to start all over again. Finally the conversations are pretty stilted and can be hard to follow who you are selecting choices for. Also suffers from the uninformed choices of the travel. Meaning you can select to wrong option and lose morale with a character, reducing their stats by 10%. All in all, I'd avoid unless you're a big Banner Saga fan.
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