For info I playing it with 4 small mods. Played on: Normal (first game) Context and History: this game is heavily grounded into real history and this way isn't contended to PC/SJW Culture. The admirable part is the Codex that gives context and small History lessons about the medieval society and geopolitics of the area the game is. In the game itself, the transposition of a believable/real settings certainly heps to immerse even more into history. I passed a few time to observe castles and dwellings, a bit like a virtually living museum. The work put in this is pretty admirable. Of course there are (very) few gamey stuff like some healing potions, but the gameplay is unforgivable if you play silly (like jumping from an height) and indeed it is pretty far from the fantasy of Skyrim or Oblivion. Combat: at first I had a hard time to grasp the combat and played it as ... in Skyrim. A dreadful error even if I managed to kill enemies. But, the in-game combat tutorial when you are at Rattay was like a "Oh Yeah!" / "That was it!" moment, cuddos to the work done in this department. It is like you, as a player, evolving in same time as your character. Of course it is better that you don't act like a braindead when it is time to engage someone or a group, such system really requires some tactics, heroism doesn't brings you a long life... Other Gameplay: it was the same experience for Lockpicking. Excepted that the in-game tutorial wasn't clear to me, I had to find a youtube video to finally understand it. The system is simple but painful when you are at level 0 and until you meet the miller that will train you in this way. The rest is pretty nice and immersive, haggling is always fun and stay optional. Bugs: OK I playing the last version of the moment; 1.7.1. Frankly during the whole run I haven't encountered any crash, nor strange physics bugs or textures. The only very few glitches (2 or 3 after 15hrs) I seen are for shadows by certain angle and in a very few places.
TL;DR: In the end a good experience that need some polish and expansion (the reason of my -1 star) Summary: since the early 80' I playing video games I never experienced such dark and tense, from start to finish, strategy/management game. Even if not open-ended, the pace was OK, and there are other scenarios that you can unlock after the first one (with some evident hint for future updates). Personnally I haven't felt connected with the population, because in strategy games I always try to employ the best method to reach the goals, regardless of discontent and whinning. And in my first game the population survived (337 people) so in the end it wasn't bad. Ideology and "morale" should be more objective, because in reality there isn't ONE good way, righteous than tho, like the two ideologies, presented in the game, which are the same in the end, It's one cons to me. I haven't used child labor / emergency shift / bad food and so on, but the city survived in the end. Pros: - tense and dark, put pretty well the player into - good pace of gaming; there are many events and problems, no boring/flat time like for some other strategy games - the end event of the first scenario is pretty interesting - 3D / Sound / Music Cons: - The lack of choices, out of a binary of extreme ideologies - I found certain Adaptation items irrelevant and finished the first scenario without even using them - Sometime certains events repeat themselves a bit too much, which is annoying when you trying to make the city survive (like the woman event if you take the faith side) - a few problem with the responsiveness of the keyboard sometime
