Battle Brothers

Battle Brothers is a wonderful game. I have played it for the last couple of years, again and again, and my gang of mercenaries still has not uncovered all the secrets the map I am playing on holds. But it's not the events or special mission and secret places that make this game such a joy to play. Its the hard tactical combat and the variety of melee weapons and perks on your mercenaries that make every battle a ton of fun. Note the word battle: While most encounters are more like skirmishes, the game is very capable of pitching more than just two groups of oppenents against each other and occaisionally allows for massive clashes. The graphics are nicely drawn, the color palette ist well chosen. The music is decent and the writing is good enough to allow for a chuckle at times. And I agree with other reviewers that all the add-ons make this game even better and also that if anything, the game lacks a storyline. Then again, it makes up for that by replayability because maps are generated at random. Also, I want to note that this is not obvious: The genarated maps make sense and you will feel right at home on them after a while, totally forgetting that they are a result of some random seed. In my opinion, there are few things that would improve this game apart from a storyline: The integration of battle sisters, since I see no reason that a gang of mercenaries should be all male. Also, I would certainly like a multi-player option that allows for different mercenary-bands to clash. Plus, I am not too sure about the level-cap and wouldn't mind seeing additional perks. Still, Battle Brothers is an excellent and challenging strategy game with a low-fantasy setting that everybody interested in the genre should give a try. I simply don't know what games to compare it to and I don't think anything quite like it has been done before.

This game draws inspiration from Mount and Blade for the dynamic over-world map and X-COM for the squad-based turn-based tactical combat. Unlike M&B, the over-world map is procedurally generated and therefore different each new game. This is a double-edged sword, as one could say that it improves the re-playability but at the same time, the player could feel detached from this generic world. Writing is of good quality, music and sound design is good overall, and the graphics have this board game feeling. The gameplay features a neat implementation of turn-based combat with a reasonably deep skills tree, but it becomes repetitive quite quickly: - The number of viable strategies are quite limited, so the combat approach will end up quite similar for each encounter. - The number of viable builds for your brothers are actually quite limited, perhaps 3 or 4 max, - Encounter design is not great: lack of enemies variety, enemies tactics are quite similar. The monster factions are ok, but the human factions feel all the same, with no distinguishable features, just different gear. This could have been tempered if the over-world had felt more lively, but it appears to be quite bland, with little distraction (although random events are good), and quests lack of variety as well.

The game is fantastic. It has a lot of gameplay mechanics and a potential for hundreds of hours of playing. The only downside of this game is it's so much advertised difficulty. The point is, as you probably know, that this game is quite hard. Even on beginner difficulty you may sometimes struggle in battles. Lots of people think that it's actually a nice thing, and so I thought myself before I played the game. But after some time I realised that this incredible gameplay mechanics diversity is unreachable because of the game's difficulty. You are just afraid to experiment, try something new or just go away from the road, because you are afraid to be killed. Every single creature in this game has a potentiall to kill your character, no matter how strong he is. And every single time you want to, for example, try out a new fighting strategy - you are afraid that characters that you want to survive will die. Moreover, the rewards for completing quests (which are sometimes just suicidal) aren't that high. Not once I took quests from a noble houses after which almost only a half of my party survived. And for sacrificing my men to orcs, I get ~1700 gold, which is barely enough to buy myself one decent two-handed axe. Sometimes even caravan escort missions are more rewarding that those risky noble houses missions. The game is great - stylish visuals, nice audio, fantastic music. But the balancing is quite weird and the difficulty is a bit too high. I don't say the game should be as easy as a walk in the flower garden, but too much of stress prevents you from experimenting and doing things that make games fun. Sadly, there are no mods that fix that. And even beginner difficulty feels rather unrewarding.

It's a very engaging, tactically smart team management game, wirh good music and great level design. Tactical challenges are this games' beating heart and they are really great. Team development is also fantastic, albeit a bit random. The game gains a lot with both Warriors of the North and Blazing Deserts DLCs and I recommend buying them both. Graphics, economical and storytelling aspects are all pretty weak here, to the point where setting economical difficulty to easy is the smartest choice since it lets you focus on fun stuff, which is combat. And while we're at it, combat difficulties should be called normal, hard and hell instead of easy, normal and hard. Overall, it's a solid 8/10 from me. Not infinitely replayable, but I gladly replay it about once a year.

If you like a tough game that challenges you at every step, look no further. It can be a harsh game, unfair, more so than XCOM even. The AI cheats, and kills your men in ways that do not make sense. However any triumph no matter how small feels like a major victory, and I never get tired of unlocking an achievement, even when my company gets wiped in the process. If you are having trouble, there are many guides online: Youtube, Reddit, Wiki-Fandom has a lot of content for you. There is a build for you out there and a background you will prefer playing. It gets hard, even on easy mode. Just don't give up.