I would strongly recommend grabbing this while it's on sale. Many of the reviews of this game are very negative, and I understand why, but I'm going to try to temper those reviews a bit. It's very true that this game was extremely mediocre on release, but since then, the dev team have done an excellent job at updating and improving the game. They have shown the appropriate amount of boldness in doing away entirely with things that didn't work well, and an appropriate amount of subtleness in making small changes when needed. The updates have substantially changed and improved the game, and the roadmap for further developments is very promising. The DLC available so far, 1/2 of which is free (and the other half is pretty reasonably priced) adds a great deal of replayability, flavor, and interesting content to the game. I still have issues with this game, of course (the economy is kind of backwards in many ways from what classical antiquity really looked like) but these devs have gained my confidence in their ability to improve the game over time, the huge majority of which have been through free updates. I am a paradox veteran, I have 500+ hours on EUIII, EUIV, and Stellaris, but this is probably my favorite paradox game yet made, especially if the updates continue at their current pace and quality. I know paradox's DLC practices seem extreme, and for EUIV I think they genuinely are extreme. But games are expensive to make, and something has to fund the continuting development and update of niche GSG games after they're already sold, and paradox's DLC does that. Most of the content updates are free, and mostly the DLC which is available genuinely adds to the game and is usually reasonably priced. I offer Stellaris as my example of a DLC model that works well (while admittadly EUIV is one that works poorly.) Most of the negative reviews for this game are over 1 year old. It was essentially a completely different game at that time. I recommend you give it a chance
The combat is great and I had a lot of fun with this game. The visuals and music are quite good. The story and dialogue is pretty good although some of the jokes fall flat. The only real downside to this game are 1. It's not long enough! 2. no online co-op. If they added like 30% more content and gave online co-op this would be among the best beat em ups I've ever played.
