Battle Brothers

Like the game. Do not like the plentiful, pointless cut scenes that mean nothing, lead to nothing, and usually read like they were written by a group of horny 13 year olds. Would be nice to be able to turn them off.

I can see why people like this game, it presents an interesting European Mythological world while you lead a band of sellswords to wealth, fame, and glory. However, this game has a few major issues which completely ruin the experience for me, I am someone to can overlook the gameplay if the world and stories are interesting, usually, anyway, this is one of the few games where I can't do so. My complaint revolves around the combat system in the game and how it functions, first of all, it's very very reliant on RNG and its depth is greatly exaggerated because of RNG. As an anecdote, I was fighting a group of bandits as part of a caravan mission, a beginner level quest, the bandits consistently hit everything, from melee to range. As far as I could tell they were not very high-level enemies, they where is cloth and padded armour and came at me with short swords and bludgeons, and a single archer. Despite me using sheild wall, spear wall, and standing on high ground, the bandits would simply walk up to me, and cut my guys down with great ease. My archer would soon fall as well afterwards from two well-placed shots from their archer after mine missed all of his, mind, I was only outnumbered by a single man, not including the caravan NPCs with me. The worse part of this is that we know we have better systems to use that almost completely marginalizes RNG in games and brings it back to more of a skill-focused game rather than something that can be completely thrown away from a bad dice roll. We saw it in used in Phantom Doctrine, and it worked really well making the game purely about equipment, positioning, and weaponry. Also, no, the disclaimer in the corner of the screen saying this is a "hard game" doesn't make stupid systems okay. It just makes the game come off as unaccommodating, which isn't something you want the *game* to do. I'm sure your mom is very impressed with your ability to grind thought stupid RNG, good job.

I specifically wanted a difficult tactical game. This dumps you into the world with no ramp up, and no direction. I had nothing to do but wander around blindly. Most of the placed don't trust you enough to offer work, and there's literally nothing on the map to interact with. I bought into the scrappy band of misfits trying to get started, but I lost every starting character over several fights, then every character I had at that point over the next few. Ultimately I got a caravan guard contract and the 7 people I managed to scrounge up and barely equip, got slaughtered to the man without taking down a single one of the strong and well equiped bandits. You can't hire or equip one person like those bandits for what the 4 day caravan job paid. I didn't enjoy my first run at all. I may try again, because other people seem to like it, but I'm not very hopeful.

It’s like Xcom in medieval setting, but worse in every way. Is very repetitive, the same straightforward tactics works every time with little adaptation. It’s not really hard - it’s just random, and you can do little to mitigate the risk (On my 1st playthrough I lost less than 1 men per 10 battles, no need of reloads, so I’m not a frustrate.) There is no real progress - you get better stats but almost no useful skills changing playstyle. Lot of tedious mechanics. And no manual whatsoever, so I recommend to start by visiting wiki and reading abut game mechanics. (I would never guess by myself how “stars” work. It has quite good flavour and writing – by even here not good as Xcoms.

The idea and premise behind the game is great. I do enjoy running around in the world and visiting the different cities hiring mercs and checking out the stories and events. The adult themes/writing is a most welcome element and glad to see in the game. The mission setup and map travel is really interesting, though it would be nice to have horses/carts for faster travel and options instead of just 1 speed. This game really suffers under great ideas being poorly implemented. But the worst park in my opinion is the use of RNG the way that they have. RNG counts more than your skill or tactics in this game. Sure a good strategy helps, but not enough to overcome the RNG problems. This game of course suffers from the usual ignorance most medival games do when it comes to combat. I don't ask that games be "realistic" but I do ask that they not be absurd as well. Stupid things like... Archers that can't shoot after being attacked and have to "escape" to an empty space before firing, or units being able to infinitely attack when you try to move backward a space. Having to choose between a shield wall or spear wall when doing both at the same time is the "correct" mechanic. Fully armored units being able to move as far as units without any armor or becoming just as tired when moving making encuberance mechanics appear comical. 80% Accuracy often misses even 2 times in a row for me, but 30% accuracy hits as often as 60~80% and commonly hits 2 times in a row, how does that even math, my brain hurts seeing it happen so often? This is a sign of a really low quality RNG implementation. I still plan to keep playing the game and enjoy the World/Setting, but why did they go and have to damage they game with inane difficulty gimmicks. That's not fun, thats just unfun!