TLDR: If you're looking for a gateway into RTS games, this might be it. Otherwise, it's a little rough early on. Story Pro: - Great artwork, sound design, and good enough voice acting to keep your interest for first-time cutscene viewings. Story Con: - Borderline Misogynistic plot, I'm 2/5 bosses in already and have yet to hear a single line of dialogue from the women being enslaved, even a flashback to the Protagonist's time with his wife would've made it relatable. As it stands, it's just a handful of angry men yelling at each other about how women should be treated. Not great. Gameplay Pros: - Runes/Unit Upgrades provide good variety to playstyles, encouraging fine-tuning one "death-ball" composition over each map. - Promotes good use of the RTS mindset of keeping your army-production base at the front and remodeling any older bases into resource-production sites. Frequent (but not endless) enemy raids keep you on your toes. Gameplay Cons: - Gameplay difficulty is SURPRISINGLY tough early on, and I started on Easy difficulty. Basic enemies ramp up their health very quickly and often snipe your health in combat due to jerky/slow flow between attacking and blocking for your character. This is a Tough Game Early On. - Gameplay relies too heavily on backtracking to refill your health/stamina potions and checkup on construction progress, breaking the flow of combat as you flee the battlefield quite a lot to the safety of an outpost. - Heavy Attack ("Double Attack") doesn't start off better than just spamming Light Attacks, requiring a lo of investment/luck in getting good Runes to buff its damage output. Especially given the slow flow between Attacking and Blocking, Heavy Attack is often more of a liability than an asset overall, unless you always intend to fight behind your soldier's shields. - Enemy archers shoot waaaaay too far from their towers, more than off-screen. Either reduced range or slower arrows would be easier to block.
The best parts of this game art by far its aesthetic presentation and the solid soundtrack playing in the background. With the good parts out of the way, let's address the average/infuriating sections: (Av) Combat is explained in a pretty rudimentary manner, half the fighters feel awful to use in combat (let alone getting low-levels mid-late in the game with little chance to level them effectively), and combat consists less of carefully planning who'll go where and do what, and more "who do I need to throw the entire party at first so I can kill it the fastest and slog onto the next?" So if you don't get it on your first few tries you'll basically just be better off restarting the campaign early as opposed to resting, due to... (Nf) ...Resources dwindling like truffles to swine - worse yet, resting (resources expend per-day) is the only way to keep your core fighters in tip-top shape, and defeat in battle provides plenty of "#-days'-rest-required" casualties unless you plan on knocking things down to Easy. (Av) Dialogue is serviceable, what with 1/3 of the characters being murderers and another 1/3 being naive - about half of the event-interaction choices allow you to spend incredibly valuable amounts of time amounting to absolutely zero payoff (at least give me a penny for wasting my time, don't leave me a pauper). (Nf) The game has a penchant for murdering characters off-screen or through text-events; "Egil" was near-invincible on the battlefield, yet has no less than FOUR "chances" to randomly die in events without so much as an "excuse you" for his troubles (somehow he always loses his skull or throat, too, despite his skill and MASSIVE shield...). I've given up on a story that wants to top the amount and stupidity of deaths in the Game Of Thrones and Friday 13th franchises combined. Okay game in total, but I'll wait to see if the sequels are less ludicrous in design.
