Ambitious classic that failed to really do everything it wanted but still pretty good, better than Fallout in terms of quests, worse in terms of interface. Tech vs. Magick is like, do you want Tech summoning (automata) or Magic summon (necro), do you want Tech healing (herbology) or potions etc. - but it's also the thematic question that made FFVI so good and it does interesting character arcs here with Bates and the classic Gnomish conspiracy. You can play it like a weak Diablo I with a sword fighter or as a gunslinger, which could be balanced to pack some more punch for the effor in upkeep, or as a mage, thieving can be tucked in to any of these with some unlock spells or a few skill ranks. A kitchen sink game which nonetheless whips up a mean sugar cookie batter, with the right utensiles.
What a funny game, had my sides splitting.
I really like the toy flow but maybe this is my taste, I feel a need to see combinations, utility buildings, and little sim people walking around. I like the idea of cities built in the sky, sort of like how we live now, but on weird Dr. Seuss stilt houses that hang in odd angles. It feels like the loose physics implies a potential sim world where the people are similarly loose in their behavior, a magical realism city sim, I think that'd be a fun direction to take it in.
My wife hates this game. She resents me playing it. I love it. It made me cry. Not because of a character being killed or anything, but rather, because of my time being killed. The #1 complaint people have about this game, is how punishing it is. Have you ever put months into a Dwarf Fortress game, delved too deep, and lost it all to an unexpected demonic invasion? This game condenses that experience into the first 3-8 retries of the first 30 minutes of most late-stage maps on high difficulty, and one baseline difficulty for those who have not mastered the basics of building cheap walls early and often. I told myself, this is the most fun I've had playing a game since Minecraft. And I've played all the best (by my tastes) games released on Gog and on PSN over the last 5 years. But this is really fresh. It's not afraid to be Nintendo Hard, it has a great quintile structure in its tech tree and base-economy development, and unit access. The units all feel like a distinct gameplay and punching up to the next unit changes the game dynamic. Great acceleration flows with Battels + Exploration missions rewarding tech points and helping you unlock more of that power-up feeling. Tactics change dramatically based on units unlocked. Late-game unit mix on both sides is interesting. Most RTS involve like-sized/mixed matrices of units. This goes another way, it's about stark asymmetries. Can't recommend enough, but only for those who can budget 3-5 hour sessions and will accept defeat gracefully. Screaming in agony in your home is not recommended. I wrote a long-form Reverse Game Design treatment for this gem, including RTS history/comparative analysis. Trying to get it published on The Game Design Forum. Students of the genre must play this. Include it in the game design academic curriculum.
