MY original Steam review: "After finishing all Spiders RPGs up to Bound by Flame I must say, this is their best work I have played so far and they are all underrated in my opinion. The games do lack some polish and variety and are on the short side when compared to AAA hallmarks like Mass Effect or The Witcher but they have their own charm, great atmosphere and mature writing. Combat in Bound by Flame was brutal at the beginning. I played on normal (Hawk) and died during the tutorial and often and repeatedly during the first half of the game. But as your power grows and you figure out how to go about combat more cleverly things actually become a tad too easy towards the end. The penultimate boss in the game was even a real pushover who hardly even touched me. All in all a very satisfying experience that I would rate as a 7.5." Took me 18 hours to finish and I played as Thief with some Fire support, so it's not true, that you can only play one class (never ever listen to people just claiming things like that). As a Spider RPG it's actually surpassed by Technomancer in all aspects except for atmosphere. The village tune from the first act is still one of my favorite musical pieces in a game. I often lingered there much longer than I had to, to listen to the music.
Massive Assault has an interesting approach to combat, that differs from normal TBS games in several ways: - units always do a fixed amount of damage, even at low health - you cannot move into spaces of units destroyed in that round - first step into an enemry territory gives them money to raise guerillas at the start of their turn - territories free of enemies can build units at the end of your turn - freeing an enemy territory and capturing it's capital gives you a one time resource bonus to buy units All of this allows for some interesting tactics and strategies in both defense and offense and even though the game only has about a dozen units, it doesn't feel like it really needs more. Unfortunately, the AI seems to be broken. Campaign mode often came up with the message "This game appear to be broken. Please restore it." Which I did, and the message came again. Then I changed my tactics a bit, but to no avail. But when I did something stupid instead, the game went on without a problem. By this I surmise, that the AI crashes if you stray from the expected path. Therefore I cannot recommend this for the vs. AI gameplay, and for multiplayer I would recommend the superior Phantom Renaissance.
