Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Lost Valley

The campaign has a great atmosphere, the secluded mysterious valley setting is lovely, and the factions this time are actually meaningful (oppressor, oppressed, political rivals, business people.. ) and you will have to take side. I had a few laptop freezes, even on minimal settings, and the campaign could use some polishing (if a certain giant sends you to a certain facility and you come back to report with an additional friend you made there, why would that make him angry?). That is why I give it only 5 star instead of 7 :) I usually avoid DLCs as the plague, but this is not some overpriced eye-candy, it is a new campaign with a fair price.

The first half of this expansion is great, with intersting battles and a cool new setting of warring factions in the name giving lost valley. Sadly the later part is a mess with a lot of bugs (including major stuff like a ending screen that does not reflect what you actually did in the game), a rushed story and boring battles. But still a recommendation if you loved the main campaign as much as I did.

This campaign is undoubtedly better than the original Solasta campaign. It gives the player a lot more freedom to do what they want. Quests are given by different factions whose goals are often conflicting. You end up with quite a few quests on the go at once. You can't please everyone so you have to pick and choose what you do. This is all good in theory. You have more freedom and can explore the setting as you see fit. It feels a lot more like a tabletop D&D game - a good one where you don't get railroaded. Unfortunately the system is too shallow and badly implemented and it ultimately becomes a frustration rather than an enjoyment. It's too easy to upset one faction or another. A lot of time it seems to happen without warning or explanation. You end up having to reload a lot if you don't want to cut off a lot of game. In the worst example, there are 2 factions with goals that don't appear to conflict and if you keep them friendly, there is a quest to get them to ally. However, even if you do this, once you get to the end of one of their quest lines, you lose all your reputation with the other faction and can no longer do their quests. Nothing in the game explains why this happens. The ending is very disappointing. It can end up a total anticlimax depending on which faction you end up working with, not even getting an end boss fight. It is also prone to bugs, incorrectly showing you things that didn't happen in the play-through. Most of the game will of course be spent in combat. This is fine for the most part, but it gets tedious after a while, especially towards the end when fights even lost the promise of useful loot and experience. Combats with no challenge and no reward are just a time sink. It wouldn't be so bad if there were more options to speed things up. One thing you can do is to use the custom difficulty settings to increase enemy attack and damage rolls and reduce their HP.

Like the title says, I had a few quest breaking bugs, and the game isn't very clear on how the faction quests will sometimes lead to failing other quests. For example, I had the Rebellion and the Forge make a truce and was doing quests for both of them, when all of a sudden after defending the rebels I spoke to their leader and the Forge lost 70 reputation and became hostile towards me (I reloaded and didn't speak to the rebel leader). There is a large area out on the fringe of the map, which I cleared due to having quite a few quests tied to it. Soon after the Forge says they heard rumours of that place, and I had to go back there as if I had never seen it before in order to progress the quest. Finally, after I cleared out the last battle, the quest description says take the Staff out to the first area then come back. I go out and the game ends with Mask as the new Rulers. Choices seemed to make little sense I and believe the implementation of quest overlap was ambitious but they left too many loose ends (lack of testing). The other big "oopsies" they left in the game was what looks like line of code in multiple areas instead of descriptions. I had a bow that every time I landed a hit some code line would come up like "descriptor;\damage enhancement" (or something like that), and a spider camp had no description, just some "random;\encounter;;spid." You get the idea. They're asking $17 for this. I suggest you buy it for under $10. Its not terrible, but it is very rough and feels unfinished in my opinion.

You're probably wondering why I gave a game three stars that I couldn't actually finish due to bugs that are still present more than a year after release. I'll explain: I had a great time with this game for the majority of my playthrough. And if they fixed the ending that currently displays a black screen that crashes the game, I would have given it four stars. Apparently there are choices one can make in the game that result in an game crashing error during the ending that the developers have known about for more than a year, but have not fixed. As a result, I won't be buying their next module at least until there are assurances that I won't spend 30 hours playing a game that can't be finished. I understand they are a small developer. But I am still paying real money (albeit not very much) for a working product. There should be no combination of options that results in a broken ending in any game released to the public. And in the worst case, that error should be corrected right away, not sat on for a year. Pros: Decent graphics, wonderful implementation of 5e rules, passable atmosphere and world building, straightforward and easy to grasp gameplay, great price, meaningful (though not overly well explained) choices to make Cons: No ending if you should make the wrong choices (and I don't mean from a plot perspective), silly forced diversity in a fantasy world where every general is somehow a muscular woman (honestly more of a problem with the original campaign), occasional bugs like slowdown until you restart the game To sum up, this will be a fun and engaging RPG that I would easily rate four stars if only they fix the ending... eventually.