Vibrant, varied, customizable and endlessly replayable.
So atmospheric. I keep coming back to this game to just immerse myself in the world, the characters and the stories.
Absolutely brilliant DLC with a great story and characters exploring weighty and relevant themes. Just as important for me, one of the new endings feels like the right and true bittersweet ending that the game deserves. Thanks, CD Red.
As an old player of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (HOMM3), I was really excited about this game, but after playing part of the first campaign, I have to set it aside until it's out of early access to see if has matured enough to capture the magic. The innovation that you only start getting mana at the start of a battle (combined with the limits on the number of units in stacks) makes the battles more interesting. The fact that there are no longer spells on the strategic map also helps. Now your position on the map and the defensibility of your cities actually matters. But that leads to the bad stuff: The towns don't have a unified screen for buildings and upgrades, and not one for troops either, unless you have a visiting hero. The build sites are interesting in principle, but I can't even see what I've already built when considering what to build, and I can't see which small buildings are prerequisites for larger buildings until I want to build the larger building, in a separate menu for a medium or large building site. The game really needs a unified town menu with clearly marked upgrade paths. I still have no idea how to build walls around my town. The pixelated art is fun enough, but it's so heavily pixelated that I have trouble telling units apart, especially base units and their upgrades. On the strategy map, the goodies are hard to tell apart, and it's not clear which ones you've already visited. If the graphics resolution were doubled, that should take care of the problem, but for now I need to spend an unnecessary amount of time squinting at units. In general, the UI just needs a lot more work. In battle, you get a list of the statuses affecting a unit when you click on it, but you can't get the details of what that effect does anywhere that I can find. In summary, I'm putting the game away for now and hoping that it will in time become as good as it could be.
Just finished the game and loved it. I finally understand D&D 5th edition rules. :-) It's fun to try out all the ways you can use the different classes separately and together, and see how they can progress. The studio's heritage from Amplitude shines through clearly in the interface, and that's a good thing. All menus are crisp and understandable, and previews of your moves and actions are clearly shown. All in all, the game mechanics are communicated very well via the interface, and all your possible actions are easy to browse. The story and immersion is so-so, but the combat is spot-on. Like another review, it reminds me of the tenseness of XCOM. There are a few small UI quibbles though: - It's very hard to see via a move preview if I'm entering an area effect like stinking cloud. The interface should warn about this like it does with triggering attacks of opportunity. - When browsing scrolls in the inventory, it would be nice to easily see which scrolls can be cast by the character who has them. - Crafting recipes that are already known should also be easily identified.
This game still has me hooked after almost 100 hours. Solid gameplay, interesting story and mostly-okay UI. The different units are good and weak at the things you would expect from their descriptions and stats, and it's a fun puzzle to figure out how to best break a cluster of enemies with the right sequence of attacks. The upgrade trees are also fun to explore, and it's good that you can spend surplus resources on training existing troops to give them new buffs. Oh yeah, and scouting really matters. My niggles: - The map should really be able to zoom out more and not lag so much. The graphics are so relatively simple that it really shouldn't be be an issue on a modern PC. - You can't set units as done for the round, so it becomes a hassle to find the units that still have moves when moving a large army. - It's bloody annoying finding and assigning items to units. - On the minimap, it's impossible to tell used from fresh units, and the same for explored and unexplored locations.
I haven't been this immersed in a cRPG since Skyrim. Fair notice: I play on a high-end PC and have only experience mildly immersion-breaking bugs but never had a crash, so my focus is on the game running as intended. The best thing about this game compared to others is the the other characters and their stories. You get to know them through many encounters and the relationships grow organically. The characters are fleshed-out and believable with interesting storylines that take you surprising places narratively. It's most definitely not just fetch quests but deep and meaningful interactions. Apart from that, the world is detailed, interesting and gorgeous. You have Asian neon, run-down gang hotbeds and the badlands of Mad Max all in and around one city, with interesting in-between places. There's just so much to explore, and I just want to see everything. Character progression, equipment and combat are great. You can sneak, hack, fight or any combination in between. Combat quickhacks are so much fun, and most playstyles seem to have their place. All in all, I'll be spending far more time with this game than is probably healthy, but I'm locked up in the real-world dystopia of Pandemic-world, so who cares?
