The game mechanics and story (what I saw of them) are fairly solid, but I've not seen a game this inexcusably buggy since Daggerfall. This is even worse, though, because while Daggerfall fell afoul of pressing too hard on the bleeding edge of the technology of the time, this is failing at something that was being done pretty consistently reliably 20 years ago, and with the limited resources of 20-years-older hardware. Full application crashes happened several times, and the game falling non-responsive, forcing me to kill the process from the system monitor, was a constant occurance, having done so literally dozens of times in a game that, according to the savefile timestamps, I had only been at for 3.3 hours when I gave up on it.
The top reviews for this game way over-hype it. Game-design-wise, it's fairly good, but hardly impressive, and has several glaring problems, mostly in the area of its interface: lots of information that is really important to keep an eye on is needlessly extremely tedious to track down. For example, when an enemy attacks one of your towns at the start of the game, when you have 3, you can usually guess which one, but when you've got 30 in the endgame, and they all look pretty similar, if you fight of an attack, but lose troops in the process, the only way to tell which town to send reinforcements to is to tediously check every town one by one til you find the one with depleted troops. Not once in the entire "getting attacked" process does it display the name of the town where the attack is happening! Even worse are the technical issues. The number and frequency of bugs aren't too bad, but there seems to be literally zero error-catching, so every bug is an unrecoverable application freeze. While crashing the game is bad enough, the Linux port also uses Dos Box to do the port, and the people who applied the port were stupid enough to make it intercept ALL keypresses, even ones that should never be intercepted without exceptionally good reason, and that the game doesn't use at all. For example, the game makes no use whatsoever of alt, control, or tab, and uses delete only in one place where it's redundant with backspace. Capturing these keypresses anyway turns every application freeze into an unrecoverable system freeze, forcing hard reboots. This goes beyond "bad game" territory, and skirts dangerously close to "malware" territory!
