The game is very basic on pretty much every level. Very limited system for upgrading cities, very few strategic options, almost no control over the battel map (or even the ability to tell what's going on). You can get pretty much everything out of it that there is to get in about five hours. It seems like it's as straighforward as figuring out what is the best kind of unit and then filling your highest level general's army with it. It's kind of baby's first 4X without most of the 4x features.
This game is very bare-bones as an RPG, which would be fine if it at least did combat well and stuck to that. Unfortunately, it insists on wasting your time by pretending to be a real RPG, and making you sit through constant dialog sections that barely give you any choices at all and were written by someone who had no idea what they were doing. The dialog is so bad that it almost sounds like it was generated procedurally. Characters often don't sound like they're actually responding to each other. The lines themselves are cliche to the point of absurdity. Your party walks into a burning fort and one character remarks, in total seriousness, "I have a bad feeling about this." It also doesn't help that the dialog comes out of the mouths of character models straight out of Oblivion, with even worse animation. The dialog sections might as well be skippable for all of the consequence they have and the lack of choice the player is given, but they unfortuantely aren't. The rest of the game is a ho-hum D&D turn-based combat system. It might have been tolerable if the developers had stuck to doing that and streamlined the rest of the experience, but any value this game might have had is ruined by it pretending that it has a story.
I'm an enormous sucker for isomentric, party-based RPGs, but this game just wasn't ready to be released. Too many of the quests are either out-and-out broken or can be accidentally broken with no way to fix or proceed in them. I'm writing this review after finding out that the reason I can't complete one of my quests is that the NPC isn't showing up where she should be. The game also makes the player sit through way too many loading screens, too many times where your party has to slowly walk from one end of a zone to the other, and other wastes of time. Managing your kingdom might require going through three loading screens just to check on something or spend two seconds ordering a building to be built. The overworld map and kingdom managing UI really have no excuse for not being kept in memory. The time that the game eats up transitiong between them bogs it down to an unacceptable degree. And then there's the horribly unbalanced combat and innapropriate placement of ecnounters. Early game you will be dying in stupid, frustrating battles where your characters are getting one-shotted. It's gotten better by the time I've played to, but the early game is a real slog, and almost made me quit it. Story-wise, there's noting special or interesting so far. It would be servicable if the rest of the game were functional, but it's not enough to justify playing through this thing.
