Been playing RPG games since the 90s and this one just feels like everything clicks. Setting, story, characters and combat are all 5/5. Decent complexity but no overly complicated or unnecessary systems.
Skip to the bottom if you want to see how to (probably) fix crashes. At least it worked for me. But first here's the actual review. This game is basically a 4x turn-based fantasy-RPG where if you want to, you can win almost entirely with heroes. Similar in some respects to Endless Legend but this has bigger (optional) focus on heroes, powerful loot drops, spells, and leveling up, and greatly reduced city micromanagement. To me, less micromanagement in a 4x game is generally a good thing. Individual cities are each specialized either towards science, population/economy, or elite military unit production, but build choices aside, the management is simple and fast. To me this is a big advantage since I normally like small scales with low numbers of cities. On this game city number doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of micromanagement. Combat is generally good but some aspects are unpolished. The reason I would give 4 rather than 5 stars is because the combat system could be better. Also auto-resolve does not like squishy and/or ranged units so that can be tedious depending on army composition. On that note, units and unit designs/traits/equipment can also be customized so you can create exactly the units and armies you want. --- CRASHES (and how to fix) --- If you get an unlucky roll on the hardware dice, the game may be almost unplayable by default. I'm on Windows 11 with a nearly brand new computer and on a very large monitor. By default, something was causing the game was to crash every 5 minutes or so. To fix 99% of these crashes, here's what worked for me. Right click the exe or shortcut and go to the Compatibility tab: 1. Run the program in Compatibility mode for Windows 8 2. "Disable fullscreen optimizations" You may also test disabling some extra graphics settings in game. For me, the above 2 steps went from crashing every 3-5 minutes to once every 8 hours maybe. It may not be a universal fix but this is what fixed it on my machine.
This game is a turn-based tactic game and team-based rogue-lite where you get progressively stronger with unlocks. The general style of combat is "never get hit" (you will get hit, but think Xcom 2 style of combat, except more melee and fantasy setting). I love the dark fantasy asthetics and atmosphere but the game mechanics are less than great. The tactical combat is 'good enough' and the timeline system is fun and fairly unique (there are no conventional "turns," every unit takes their turn based on a dynamic timeline). My main problem is with the "resource" system for healing characters. This feels fundamentally wrong and unnecessarily grindy. Specifically, you must sacrifice a character of equal level to heal another character, which makes HP a non-renewable resource except by grinding new characters to sacrifice. If this sounds strange, it feels strange too... To make matters worse, many character skills require sacrificing HP in order to use the skill. So the fundamental goal to optimize combat is to 'spend' as little health as possible. To be clear, difficulty is not the issue (you are expected to lose and get stronger in subsequent runs). The problem is that the system feels tedious and playing correctly still feels 'wrong' as you spend HP. Additionally, there is very little stat customization and almost no variety in character builds. So you won't get much from replaying the game. As others noted, the UI is also clunky and lacks a lot of information that should be common sense. For instance on the character selection screen before starting a mission, you can't see anything about the characters and instead have to cancel that and go back to a different menu to make sure you're remembering what skills/stats/etc... are on the characters you are planning to pick. 3/5. Definitely not a bad game, difficulty is on-point, but the fundamental mechanics feel flawed and unfun.
