Whereas the previous instalments strengths carried it through the bad parts this time it's the opposite. The story and characters, while okay, are a clear step down from Kingmaker and the annoying aspects are back worse than ever. The crusader minigame is a horrible waste of time even more so than the city building one from Kingmaker. This time around traveling in the world has been made even more cumbersome with an added fatigue mechanic that requires you to slog back and forth from the base in the joyous world map experience all the while combating meaningless random encounters and having to rest about every 90 seconds. I feel like this game wants to waste my time instead of just offering an RPG adventure without redundant mechanics.
A promising story and premise ruined by infuriating mechanics and technical difficulties. The game starts out well and I was really into it but the further I got the more I this game drew my ire. To me, everything this game does right, there's something that brings it down. The lore and story are good but horrible pacing and too many threads make sure that it doesn't really flow well and make the game feel stretched out and and it should have ended already. Combat is okay and tactical but the ridiculous spell casting rules, resting and increasing ability damage/negative level etc shenanigans make it feel like a trudge. Kingdom management involves simcity-like town building and auto mode to skip it doesn't work. In my case auto mode resulted in a game breaking bug so I can't finish the game. The game is also very unforgiving to newcomers, its's easy to ruin your character by picking the wrong things, there's no option to reset and you probably need to roam the internet if you want to grasp the definitions of many D&D terms present in the game. My advise would be to wait until it's patched and not pay full price for this game.
