Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs

The game is surprisingly good in the most important aspect: the tactical battles. All the heros are very different from each other (and very interesting to play with) and the battles are brutally hard (ok, some of them) (and you can play on a lower difficulty level, if you wish). Which might also mean I have spent too short time at the town, preparing for the fights. Anyway, the pleasure of seeing the Fomorian Ancient, reading its stats, freaking out, coming up with a strategy, and finally kicking up its butt was... noticeable. Also, the in-game humor is not always cringeworthy. On the other hand, the game is also full of minor bugs and problems: 1. Achievements do not always activate when they should (for example, I have an achievement for finishing the fourth chapter, but not for the first three...). 2.Additional victory conditions do not always activate when they should. 3. The fishing minigame is awful, will they pay for my mouse? 4. The inability of saving at will is bad - I understand the reason why one cannot save before (or during) every text adventure, but one should have an ability to Save_and_quit at any time (ok, maybe not during battles, but between any dungeon nodes). Such a save could be deleted on reloading, so no save-scumming would be possible. As it is, there are times when we have to choose between quitting and losing all progres from the last save, coming back to town to save there (losing several days in-game), or playing forth through several more battles, which could easily take an hour of more. 5. Another thing I would change is the crafting kingdom quests - I'm not going to craft 10 basic weapons, it just doesn't make sense. If I do not fight in the battles - I do not have money and materials for crafting; if I do - I have plenty of weapons from spoils. Crafting many trinkets makes sense, some of them are very useful and you can give them to every hero, but every weapon is used by one hero only, no way 10 of them (in other words, all of them) need a basic weapon. The kingdom quests should reward you for the _useful_ things you do. 6. And the loading times were already mentioned by other reviewers. I believe at least several of those points will be addressed by the developers. Then this will be a five star game for me.

This is a very well-made game. Great voices, fun characters, great dialogue, well-written story... But what betrays this game is the anti-player RNG - If you don't have a guaranteed hit, you pretty much have a guaranteed miss. I usually miss at least twice in a row even with a 85% chance to hit. Then I sit there and watch the enemies as they almost never miss a single hit. RNG needs a serious fix, but everything else about this game is marvelous.

The concept, the graphics, the music - it is all amazingly neat. The game provides a great variety of activities. You can explore the world, fight monsters, have mini text-based adventures, and even a bit of camping. You can build up your city, do a bit of diplomacy, and visit various places in your realm. They even managed to make turn-based combat fairly fun, more on this later. So, why the 1 star? The game crashes. I've tried to play it on Mac and several different Windows machines. Result is always the same - a random crash in a random place, usually after the combat/text adventure, but always inevitable. This would not be too bad if there was auto save upon entering each location and not just in a camp. Imagine a dungeon of 8 nodes where the camp is roughly in the middle. You did some fighting and exploring, now you save the game to minimise damage from the next crash but you still have a few nodes left to fight/explore. Guess what's going to happen. This is simply unacceptable and this is why it's a terrible idea to not allow progress to be saved more frequently. The combat, as I've mentioned earlier is fun. It is also incredibly intense as too much depends on chance. The enemy forces frequently outnumber and outdamage you and the only reason you win is there is no AI as such. In many cases you can kite/outsmart the opponents. Some situations are pretty annoying like when all of your characters get stunned and all you can do is watch them die and you can only resurrect your toons at a camp and only one per camp. The adventures I've experienced so far only have one camp and many fights after it. So you end up deliberately loosing battles to restart them so you still have all of your characters. As much as I have enjoyed this game, the crashes are simply too frustrating.

As a Kickstarter backer, I'm really happy about how this game turned out. In basic terms, this is primarily a tactical RPG, with some text adventures and a whole bunch of stuff to upgrade. The tactical battles provide a good level of challenge and great variety in characters, equipment and abilities. All the things you can upgrade and develop between battles (your town, personal bonds, and characters) provide a constant feeling of progression. This is a game of many features, none of which are groundbreaking on their own. However, they are all well made, work well together, and combine to make a game which is very enjoyable to play.