First off this game is absolutely beautiful to look and listen to. It pulls you in with wonderful graphics (both scenery and use of abilities) and a nice score and voice acting (most characters at least). This game is a micromanage combat RPG (really more of a tactical combat game) with 8 characters to use (4 at a time) with a good amount of abilities w/ skill trees that allow for easy to understand and employ combos. There's a simple but effective loot and equipment aspect to the game. There's only 4 equipment slots as opposed to a dozen or so for other games. I love this because it allows you to focus on getting a few great items instead of worrying about an entire litany of items that are required to make your character effective. Combats start off very straight forward and become more and more complex as the game moves along forcing you to develop and evolve your strategy. It also forces you to know the capabilities of each character as they will be split into 2 groups of 4 from time to time and certain characters are critical to success in certain combats. It'd be wise to save a lot, as loading multiple times is probably in your future (that was a pro to me... I can understand how that'd be a negative for others.) Now for the downsides... It's extremely linear. The story seems both contrived and bland. They clumsily try to build character relationships but they too are forced and hollow. There's no real "role" playing aspect to this game unless the role is "destroy everything". It's also combat after combat for most of the game. For the most part that means that there is no replay value to this game as it will be the same song and dance unless you want to switch up your skill trees. All in all I was very pleased with this game. I don't know how many hours I spent on this game but I enjoyed every minute on it. It was a great tactical game that allowed me to kick down the door, kill the monster, loot the room, and blow off steam.
I picked this game up on a GOG.com sale and I didn't know anything about it... So I went into the game with zero expectations and ran into the best game I've played in a long time. It has amazing art, a top notch soundtrack, a brilliant narrator (seriously might be the best thing about this game), and constantly changing weaponry, tactics, and foes so combat never feels stale. All the weapons and special abilities are all viable and are capable of finishing the game with, so you don't have to worry about a weapon that you like becoming obsolete later in the game. It is pretty short (took me less than a weekend to beat it) and the story is pretty mediocre. There's no real role-playing factor in the game (so don't get fooled by the genre) other than the end where you get to choose one of four endings, but there again, the narrator totally makes up for it. I'd strongly recommend this game.
This is going to be much like my review for the original Braveland. This game is a fun turn-based, hexagonal board game in the mold of Heroes of Might and Magic with a map progression in the Mario level selection screen realm. There's no real story and the game is pretty straight forward and linear. Only three times do you get to choose something different, the first two you either chose left or right at a fork in the road that leads you to the same path, and the third is how you want the end of the story to read. There's also a quiz after the second to last battle with 3 questions that will reward you with a prize if you answer all 3 correctly. There are no second chances if you fail. So pay attention during the game. There are 3 difficulty settings. You get to level up your hero (that never fights) but that increases the potential size of the armies you control. You can acquire 4 types of gear that benefits your armies. You have to spend money to recruit most of your army. Money is obtained mostly by defeating the enemy and minimizing your losses during combat. THERE IS MUCH LESS MONEY PER COMBAT THAN THE LAST GAME. So there's more of a grind. There are 3 separate respawning points that you can grind out on to get more gold. There's about 35-40 different enemies (some from the original) that you can run into and they each have their strengths and weaknesses that blend together with other enemies. Almost every unit you have gets a special ability at some point. This game also introduces talent/spell trees to give a little more flavor of what strategy you want to take. It's a lot more interesting than the last game but the game still only takes about 3-5 hours. It's worth it if you get it on sale but I wouldn't pay the full asking price for a game that you can beat after you get home from work and before you go to bed.
This game is a fun turn-based, hexagonal board game in the mold of Heroes of Might and Magic with a map progression in the Mario level selection screen realm. There's no real story (Your village is razed and sacked... get revenge!) and the game is pretty straight forward and linear. There are 3 difficulty settings. You get to level up your hero (that never fights) but that increases the potential size of the armies you control. You can acquire 4 types of gear that benefits your armies. You have to spend money to recruit most of your army. Money is obtained mostly by defeating the enemy and minimizing your losses during combat. There's about 20-25 different enemies that you can run into and they each have their strengths and weaknesses that blend together with other enemies. Almost every unit you have gets a special ability at some point (except peasants.) You have 5 spells that you can eventually use in combat (from direct damage spells to buffs.) It get redundant pretty quickly but the game only takes about 2-3 hours. It's worth it if you get it on sale for 50% off or more but I wouldn't pay the full asking price for a game that you can beat after you get home from work and before you go to bed.
