Was not expecting this game to be that good but was very nicely surprised. Decent voice acting (although it's only during important cutscenes), a lot of RPG stuff to build and play around with. Quite enjoyable. There is one major drawback though. This game has probably the worst side quest design I have ever seen in any game. The vast majority of them expect you to walk between multiple random NPCs, none of which are marked on the map or even given the general area about where they are supposed to be located. The basic quest structure is "I have this problem, go talk to someone named X". Good luck figuring out who X is. It could have been an NPC you talked with 10 hours ago an had nothing important to say or an NPC you haven't even met yet. Then you find X and he sends you to talk to Y. And this can drag on for quite a while. To finish those quests without a guide would take hours of randomly wandering about the areas of the game, hoping you just happen to stumble upon the relevant NPC. And those are the good side quests.... For the bad ones, you have to rely on random, I repeat RANDOM encounters on the map that can trigger only in specific, non-descript regions of it. Some quests give you direction like "east of this city", which is however absolutely useless as the map doesn't even bother telling you where north is. To top it all off, as you progress through the main story, some side quests are missable and simply disappear from your quest log with no warning whatsoever. The NPC involved in 2 quests I had stuck in the quest log (surprisingly the one with random condition to complete as I later found out in a guide...) is simply gone after moving the main story forward, which I of course noticed only several hours later. Simply put, I keep playing, hoping there are as few side quests as possible, because it hugely detracts from the otherwise pretty well made main story. Could have been a 9/10, but have to drop it to 7.5 due to the atrocious side quests.
The main point of this DLC is an addition of one more puppet. It consists of one small area where you start a quest, then backtrack to previously visited locations to kill a couple of new quest monsters that drop a quest item, bring the items back to the DLC area, use them, fight a boss and add him to your (by that point) already overcrowded roster. That's pretty much it. The associated quest also has pretty much no context or story to it. Just a random small dungeon you get to enter like 2/3rds into the game.
The main point of this DLC is an addition of one more puppet. It consists of one small area where you start a quest, then backtrack to previously visited locations to kill a couple of new quest monsters that drop a quest item, bring the items back to the DLC area, use them, fight a boss and add him to your roster. It can also be a pretty massive difficulty spike if you do it too early. That's pretty much it. This DLC compared to the other at least has some story and context lore notes to it but still, an extremely small addition to an already over-crowded roster of playable characters, Definitely not necessary.
I'll list mostly what I disliked. The "improved" combat verges on being annoying. Enemies are ludicrously tanky and many of them require spamming gimmicky moves because they can't be touched normally, especially in the late game. Every time it was an option, I was just looking for instant death areas to throw enemies into because killing them normally would take forever. Couple that with non-existent health recovery except sparsely place fountains which also serve as save points and that led to me just starting to skip combat sequences later in the game because they are just too time consuming and repetitive (enemies respawn). The save points are also placed very widely apart and don't retain the state of the game, just the location and that is all. Meaning that if you kill a couple of enemies, go back to save, then die and load the save, the enemies will have respawned anyway. Then there are the endings. 2 of them to be exact and the canonical ending requires you to find 9 extremely well hidden health upgrade shrines. I've found only 5 and spent a lot of time looking around. That is most likely due to the confusing and maze-like layout, coupled with 2 timelines between which you swap constantly (meaning you backtrack nonstop in slightly changed areas). I didn't do a clean sweep mostly because areas become randomly locked off as you move through the game and the frankly eventually tedious combat with the ever-respawning enemies every time you revisit an area. Might do another playthrough with a guide because spending hours running around similar looking rooms just to find secrets for the correct ending would have me dying of boredom. And the music, was honestly just ear-grating for me. Much preferred the soundtrack in Sands of Time. Here, the music just blasts you in the face whenever some action is happening. The ambient soundtrack is fine but the main tracks? Always had to turn the volume down quickly the moment action started... I'd give this about 6.5/10.
A decent TD game when everything works. You have to manually man the towers, manage crew, mine resources etc. But with slow-motion available at any time, it's manageable. Unfortunately, the bugs are very numerous. 1) Probably the most important, the behavior of energy hubs is completely stupid. They can support 3 buildings and up to 5 when fully upgraded. But whenever you move a hub, it completely loses all logic of its connections. Just picking the hub up and placing it in the same spot will usually result in the towers still being powered, yet you can connect additional towers to the same hub and they will also be powered up. Upon moving a hub, the energy area also no longer has to cover the entire 3x3 area to power up a tower, but just touching a single point will power it up. You can extremely easily and unintentionally cheat yourself into having more powered buildings than intended. I had to resort resort to having to manually count the connections for every hub just to play the intended way. A core mechanic being this broken is simply inexcusable. And when it occasionally works how it's supposed to, you have no way of affecting which buildings are connected to which hub, making managing clusters of towers/buildings a truly painful experience. How this made it through playtesting, I have no idea. 2) Volume controls are completely out of whack. Anything from 0-70 for a given category is inaudible, then the volume spikes greatly for each point. Additionally, some sliders can't be bumped past the 86 mark for whatever reason. In-game audio is also a mess. It is way too affected by distance where you can barely hear anything when zoomed out and blowing out your eardrums when you zoom in. Music randomly spikes in volume or bugs out, some voices are extremely loud... The audio experience is simply horrible. 3) I've had enemies randomly teleport straight to my main building, damaging it, thus instantly ruining the 3 star score for the level and having to restart.
Interesting side story to the main game. But it's basically just a single level where you kill hundreds of enemies. Most of it takes form of a base defense, á la Starship Troopers, where you get flooded by swarms of low tier enemies. Got the DLC by buying the Limited Edition of the base game but just putting a short review here for people who only bought the base game and wanted to know what the DLC is.
