Battle Brothers

This is the best game I have ever played in my 36 years as a conscious gamer. The world building is fantastic, the sound design and music is better than in most AAA games and personally I love the art style and graphics. The gameplay is challenging and does not hold the hand of the player. One might find this frustrating, I loved to figure things out myself without following some flashy arrow like in many other games. The game for me never felt unfair. The RNG can help you or screw you over, but there are many many possibilities to bent the RNG in your favour. The game has a good scaling feature in that contracts scale with the level and number of brothers in your company up to a max. of 12 mercenaries. When you lose high level bros, contracts will become easier again - but the higher payout from your already gained renown stays! The wilds and dangerous lands beyond civilization do not scale back, however. After crippling losses, you will need to cling to the civilized parts of the map and build back up with contracts before you can go beyond the fringes of civilization again to plunder riches beyond measure and fight the toughest opponents. I sank over 650 hours in this gem and many more are to come.

Simply put, for me the best turn-based game of the past few years. Is it perfect? Of course not, there are some issues, I wouldn't include the missing modding compatibillity as such thou, but well yes no modding for this game. The game has great graphics, mechanics, soundtrack and gameplay, in some way reminds me more of Jagged Alliance than X-com. For all the 200ish hours I spent on it it felt to me like playing a pc version of The Black Company.

If I had to resume the game in a single word it would be : Unfair. The game claims to be "difficult", and yet it's not. The game is ridiculously simple once you get the base mechanics. Unfortunately it's one of these numerous cases where the devs mistook "unfair" for "difficult". The enemies don't play the same game you do : Your characters have limited perk points to improve themselves, the enemies don't Your characters suffer from "fatigue" which cripple them the longer the fight goes on, the enemies don't. Your character don't have half the action points your opponents get per turn. Oh and the AI blatantly cheats as well, and since the game doesn't allow you to check your ennemies status it's basically free to do so anytime it wants as it's very hard to figure out which part comes from the monster's abilities and which comes from the game messing itself up to boost up it's "difficulty". I've seen basic bandit thugs acting 3 times in a single turn while nothing sets them apart from other basic bandit thugs, it suddenly decided it wanted to repeat his turn 2 more times for no apparent reason. If it came from special Boss-type opponents I'd have accepted it, but it wasn't, it's just some random dudes activating god-mode from time to time. On top of that, everything is RNG based. And anyone who played a tactical relying on RNG for action success can already guess how terrible that makes combat. Besides since damage is RNG based too, even if you manage to hit your opponent you have no guarantee to do any significant damage. Your characters land 1 hit out of 10 and when they manage it they strike with the power of a wet noodle, meanwhile the bandit thug casually OS your soldiers one by one without a single miss. I wish I'd have something positive to say about the game to compensate... But I genuinely don't. If you're a hardcore masochist, you'll probably like this game, but if you're anything else pass it up, it's too unfair to be enjoyable.

The game is a disappointment IMO. There's the tactical chess like battles that are decent but there's little else. The town are shallow and offer just a place to gather quests ( you can't even rest there). The quest are bland and uninteresting (classic fetch or kill all enemies). The world is rather small and feels almost dead. It's just an endless grind for exp and money with very little satisfaction.

Getting older (nearing my fifties already...), I still like games but I am much harder to satisfy. It is not uncommon for me to buy a game, try it an hour or two and never touch it again. Battle brothers was one of those games. I've tried it for a few hours and was not impressed by it so I've stopped playing. For an unknown reason, I've tried it again maybe 6 months later and wow... This is one of the best games I found in years! To be real fun, please do not cheat and play it in ironman mode. This is the ultimate experience. The game is difficult even at it's easiest level but is so fun. There are so many ways to construct your team and adapt to your foes. For me this is a must have.