Really enjoyed this game -- here's some background. The game starts in Denmark with you taking leadership of your Viking clan and village. Your rule is immediately threatened by a boorish neighbor who covets your land. So you do some preliminaries, recruit (or create as party members) 9 fellow travelers (your "hird") and then set sail across the North Sea to the British Isles seeking additional resources. Once in Britain, you can pursue an alliance or are free to roam, loot and pillage like a good Viking. Then you return to Denmark and defend your clan. The game uses the Unity engine and operates on three levels: 1. The campaign map where you move to different areas. 2. The area map where you bring five of your hird, explore and interact. 3. The village upgrade where you use the resources you've gained to improve your village. This is all pretty standard, but the game excels in a bunch of ways. First, you have a nice choice of strategy. Pursue an alliance? With whom? Loot & pillage? Where? Second, your hird will have around 12 members so there's great variety. And you can customize your characters and their portraits & names. Don't want to listen to NPC's pitter patter? Create your own fully customizable hird. Third, the game feels alive. A lot of thought has gone into managing your hird. Equipment gets damaged and needs repaired. Characters get injured and you'll need to rest and treat their wounds with medicine. There's no magical doo-dahs lying about -- just resources that you'll need to acquire to strengthen your hird and your rule. If you have Expeditions: Rome this is similar but being able to fully customize your hird makes Vikings WAY better IMHO (hopefully THQ brings back the customization option in the next installment). Figure 30 hours or so for a main campaign. And then figure you'll probably want to play again a few times and explore different strategies - you're free to channel your inner Hagar the Horrible.
Fantastic game that I keep coming back to. Think of it as a steampunk Master of Orion with better playability and game balance. It's an indie developer and I'm a bit in awe of how well thought out the game is. The gfx -- not surprisingly -- are 90s style, but a lot of work and care has been put into developing an extremely fun, entertaining game. You can design and pit your steampunk ships against one another in combat mode or launch a basic 2-4 hour "conquest" game against computer opponents. Lots of modding opportunities and replayability. And it's great fun to tinker with ship designs, trying to get just the right design for your intended purpose. The "conquest" games where you get some elements of 4X (again, think of it as a steampunk MOO) is fairly basic, but has enough twists and depth to keep it engaging with repeated plays. This is a game that I keep coming back to time and time again -- great fun!
I really enjoyed -- nice pacing and story development. You can form your own party of up to four characters and there's a fair amount of variability on classes, abilities, looks, etc. The story was totally fine -- nothing off the charts creative, but that's hard to do these days with the number of CRPG games bouncing around. And the political element is a nice inclusion. UI is terrific -- very intuitive and easy to grasp, can't praise it enough. Also loved how closely the game hewed to the D&D world which really made learning and playing the game a lot of fun and easy to learn. And the final battle added a great twist, imho. There aren't any major flaws. Allowing character editing -- if possible -- would be a big plus, Ditto with editing armor and weapons. Voice packs and character head choices are a bit limited, but Solasta is not a big budget production so no complaints. Finally, I love how upfront and honest the developers are regarding their product (check Reddit). It was great to see a post where a developer wrote (about Lost Valley) basically "we realize where our game did not turn out where we wanted it to, but we needed to operate within some financial and time constraints." Be sure to add the Unfinished Business mod to the game and give Tac Ad kudos. Between the very solid Solasta framework and their commitment to their product, they should be doing some great work going forward!
First the good -- the gfx are pretty well done. And there are some nice design touches (e.g., separate system for the ships). Now the bad, and there is a lot of it. First, the scale of the game is way off. For the Coral Sea scenario, each hex is about 35 miles across and only one ship can occupy a hex. So the game quickly turns into a jumbled mess of ships and airplanes all bumping into each other. The result basically looks like a 6 YO's bathtub when they bring all their toy boats into the tub to play. Nothing at all like Pacific naval combat. Second, the AI is weak. Basically, it just throws everything at you en masse without any regard to tactics. Third, scenario design is horrible. Let's take the Midway scenario. On turn 2, the Japanese transports show up at Midway (well ahead of the supporting fleet!). So you move your capital ships into range of the transports and blow them apart. Not very realistic, but kind of fun. But even though you've crushed the invading force, the scenario requires you to sink the four Japanese carriers which are still 50 hexes to the west. So now you've got to move your fleet to the west to attack the Kido Butai even though you've already crushed the invading fleet. Simultaneously, the Japanese main battle fleet arrives at Midway (way ahead of the carriers) and is shelling Midway for reasons unknown. Lacking any air cover, the battle fleet should be sitting ducks, right? Nope, issue number four -- and it's a biggie -- is that airstrikes are woefully ineffective. You tend to lose planes faster than you damage the ships you're attacking. So you're left to take on the Jap carriers with submarines and whatever surface firepower you can muster. Your air power is basically useless. What you end up with is two fleets mindlessly bashing the heck out of each other any way they can and whichever fleet has a few remaining ships or planes after 15 turns wins. Just totally unlike Pacific naval combat. Avoid!
This is really a fantastic game. It's a treasure hunt/puzzle solving game that is well designed with an engaging story. The sexual parts are well done and more importantly, well integrated into the game. Plus the female characters actually have some depth (as opposed to the typical bring character X this item and she falls madly in love with you). That said, there's no reason to focus on the sexual aspect of the game. The game, NPCs, story and puzzles are so well designed that by mid-game the sexual stuff was really totally unnecessary. Definitely recommend!
