This game needs to make up its mind. While it is a roguelite it also tries to be a metroidvania and speed runner at the same time, these are two diametrically opposed game styles. The later being a fast paced, jump and dodge, whoa close one style affair, while the former is a slower, look before you leap, block then counter experience. There are timed doors that force you to speed through each level to reach them and collect the rewards within, items you need to collect such as cells for unlocking new weapons/skills and scrolls that boots your stats and buff your max health. But if you do that you will miss out on all the loot hidden in the levels, such as secret room with unique weapons/skills, sweet easter eggs that are subject to rng, and better weapons to replace your under level garbage from the previous level. Stun locking is also a problem a single hit locks you into a flinch animation that leaves you open to further attacks, now combine that with enemies that hit you through walls, spawn mini mobs that swarm you, or just flat out stop you from escaping( Hello golem you op piece of ...) and you are gonna have a bad time. Further more the daily challenge is garbage, pick from two random weapons and hope they don't suck. Now hurry to the boss and skip all the loot and upgrades along the way because you don't want to run out of time do you? But you will anyway as the boss is a tougher version of the one in the base game. Skip this till they rebalance it, especially with the insane amount of grinding required to unlock anything.
I can't play this expansion, every time I try to access it I get this confusing error message. I've tried as many of the suggestion on the support page as I could, but nothing worked and now I can't access the base game either. The forums aren't any help, big surprise there (sarcasm).
Skip this game, seriously just turn around and walk away. Do you want a challenging but rewarding rogue lite bullet hell? This isn't it, you'll spawn, die, spawn again without making any progress to the point where you will consider self harm. Progress is depressingly slow, gun drops are rare and usually crap, health is easily lost but very hard to replenish, and game mechanics are never explained except for the basics in the tutorial. I spent 2 hours on the first level dying over and over to the first boss because I only had the shitty starter gun and sometimes one of the joke weapons. What's the point of variety if you never get to use any of it? Each of the characters shares the same problem of being complete garbage with out one of the "good guns" that will most likely never drop. I wish GOG had an actual return policy rather than this if it works you can't return bullcrap, hell I would settle for store credit.
Tried this game and found it to be boring, slow, and aggravating. Some of the gameplay designs are just stupid. Items despawn to quickly, fought a group of bandits that dropped five cash sacks and to hats (player lives) but by the time I finished them off everything was gone. Cash can be picked up by walking over it but hats have to be interacted with almost impossible during a intense firefight. And whoever came up with that buffalo herding minigame for rancher what's his face can eat a rusty railroad spike.
I loved AOW and Aow2. When I saw this game I ignored all of the warnings, and the DRM (shame on you GOG for lying about being DRM free) and bought it + DLC without a second thought. DO NOT REPEAT MY MISTAKE! Don't get me wrong the game is beautiful, smooth, and has an interesting story, but the AI and RNG will destroy you. I'm not a great tactician but when I have two full stacks of units(mix of infantry ,archers, cavalry, and two heroes) vs three sprites and a very likely victory on the descriptor I don't think there is any chance I can lose by pressing auto resolve, I was very, very wrong. Also never auto resolve a siege it doesn't matter how many troops you have or how great your defenses are you will lose. The enemy Ai also has a nasty habit of suddenly becoming psychic when you declare war on them, and will relentlessly zero in on your troops/cities with the exact number and types of troops to crush you every time. I played five games where the AI dispelled all of my max power global spells on the first try while my attempts on his low power spells failed at least four times in a row before succeeding. This publisher is now on my "Never buy from" list.
When I fist saw that this game was coming to GOG I was overjoyed, there have been plenty of games that I wanted to play but they will most likely never be sold here. After playin it however I can't help but feel disappointed. This game's AI needs to be reworked badly, instead of gradually evolving in the campaign mode the game "cheats" by stacking the deck against you. For example the game forces you to play aggressively but will punish you for not building bases by overrunning you with cheap enemy units. Trying to build defenses to halt the constant enemy zerging? Well all of your farms have gone fallow and you lose. Trying to zerg your enemy? Your opponent builds units and collects resources faster than you do. Game forces a resource cap for your mission? The AI doesn't have that handicap. A lack of player controls also screws you over. You can't pause unit construction, so your resources are constantly draining preventing you form building new unit spawning bunkers or resource fields. All of this added together results in a clunky irritating game.
First I'd like to say that I do like this game, but there are several glaring problems. 1. Heavy grind. You will laterally spend hours collecting echoes (the games currency) just to purchase a new spotlight. 2. Clunky combat. Fighting other ships is actually okay, but the sea monsters just bum rush you from behind outside of your fire arch. You'll have to retreat constantly to hopefully turn around and wait for your cannons to lock on and it will just rush out of shot and hit you. 3. Fast consumption. Fuel and food deplete faster than you can restock them. Turning in reports to the Admiral is your main source of income for cash and fuel, but you will use more than you receive so you always end with a net loss. 4. Super slow and weak ship. Your starter ship is total garbage, low health, weak forward facing cannon, no rear cannon, and a slow engine. 5. Epic yet empty map. Plenty of map to explore but not much to find in it. 6. Extremely expensive. From ships to cargo everything in this game is designed to bankrupt your captain. 7. A legacy of loss. All good rouge likes have some sort of death mechanic where your previous run gives you a small starter bonus for the next one, but this is locked behind a unnecessary home upgrade. All early deaths are costly and any bonus you receive is to small to really help your progress. 8. Useless crewmembers. From first mates to cooks every main crew member ads very little to your ship. Instead they serve as in house stat trainers, just another pointless step in the level grind. In summary it has potential but needs mods to shine. Still better than some of the worse rogue likes out there. Cough cough (Darkest Dungeon) cough cough.
