Siege Survival: Gloria Victis

It's pretty much "This War Of Mine" in isometric and in medieval age. You search for resources during night, hiding from and avoiding the guards, and build your "home" during day, where you prepare meals, grow crops, etc. In night you can also encounter small story events. There is a bit of a twist, because you don't only have to take care of yourself, but also of the soldiers in the castle, that also need food and weapons and arrows. Your caslte is being attacked every few days and based on how well you supported your soldiers, the fight will go in their favor or the enemies'. If your soldiers lose too often, you lose aswell. You also lose if your people starve or get sick/hurt too badly. There are 2 scenarios with different levels of difficulty, and in NG+ you can really ajust everything about the difficulty with various sliders for lenght of game, diffulty of fights, amount of fights, amount of guards etc. The first scenario is european medieval setting, the other one orientalic. Good idea is that "Midland", where you belong to in the first scenario, is the enemy in the second one. Both scenarios differ a little, but not much really. The game is executed ok, I didnt encounter any bugs. Animations are a bit clunky, e.g. every time you set a move order your character "stutters" a little. It tries to be somewhat emotional, but fails pretty badly with it. I just didnt care about anyone. Just like TWOM this game is about an important matter - life of civilians in war. But TWOM didnt catch me, because of the shallow and repetetive gameplay. And its the same for this game. It really was ok for the like 12 hours I played it, but I didnt find the incentive to play the second scenario because its just more of the same. Be a bit wary how you use your torches/shovels in the beginning, as it may get you locked (no more resources to build shovels and no way of progressing to other areas because of no shovels).

inspired by This war of mine, but the game offers its own vision in a med universe.

The game is challenging, and because of that, the immersion was deep for me, perhaps deeper than in TWOM. I was really nervous about getting enough resources to the soldiers in time. I was biting my nails during every battle. At night I was searching desperately for valuables and was kicking myself for not drawing a map of already-visited containers. I was exhausted! I almost failed multiple times. At last, when I was losing hope, the game rewarded me with some hard-earned victory. This is what I expected from a survival game and I got it. Why four stars? The economy is pretty chaotic, all three traders did not seem to make any sense, they all want food but that's what I want too. Some buildings never see a use and are quite optional, while others need to be upgraded ASAP or else you are bound to fail. The night patrols are predictable and boring.

That's in the title: real time doesn't fit with a management game. As you're in a hurry, you have to alraedy have played 20 hours to know the game and be able to play (I mean, being untertained).