On paper, this game can seem like a dream come true especially for many of the colony sim/hybrid genre crowd who were disappointed by the offerings in the 2010s. This game appears to be an RPG, a sandbox, and a colony sim all rolled into one. Wowzers. The problem is the game gives you very few tools to actually manage what you need to do. The first "serious" quest can seem daunting: the NPC delivers his welcome spiel then goes "so craft an axe, oh and btw build a whole ass house as well" and you're like dude what. Turns out buildings are prefabs in this game, which can be disappointing. Still, I got over that, but there was more to come. After that the storyline seems to devolve into a bunch of fetchquests, which is my main issue. Nowhere does it advise you what to build next. Worse, you realize you need to take care of food and water for YOURSELF, but what about for your settlement? If you just randomly recruit people like new players will likely do ("cool, I can recruit!") they'll run face first into the realization that a bunch of randos does not a healthy settlement make. You have to worry about EVERY SINGLE facet of it, from resource gathering, crafting, cooking, farming, etc. The game mentions NONE of this. Sure, it tells you what a structure IS. JFC,,, an idiot could figure that out. What players need to know is HOW said structure fits into a settlement. Oh and did I mention a lot of this stuff is tech-level gated? If you treat it like an RTS to fail repeatedly before finding success, sure go ahead. The problem is many may come into this thinking it's an RPG. Having to figure out what can be unlocked first combined with what you need to get a viable settlement running is VERY different from exploring Skyrim. So MAKE SURE YOU KNOW what kind of game this is before you buy it. It's mainly about getting your settlement running. If you're looking for an RPG or sandbox, no, this isn't for you. And look up guides unless you enjoy restarting repeatedly.
For a studio of apparently only 9 people, the visuals are good - like what you'd expect of the elusive middle AA-tier between indie and triple-A. Unfortunately that's pretty much it. I'll give the lackluster story and questionable writing a pass - they're serviceable, hold your nose and get through. The characters are okay though I would've liked to see more lore. The problem is the gameplay loop. For a strategy RPG, you run around with just 2 characters for a large part of the game. This throws positioning out the window as enemies will almost always outnumber you. The main meta is the elemental rock-paper-scissors. Element A attacks hit hard against defenses of type element B, weak against element C, neutral towards the rest. DoT effects are useless; they only target one enemy and since you can nuke most enemies in 3-4 hits anyway there's no point wasting time trying to inflict DoTs. Same if it happens to you, don't bother curing, just kill the enemy and end combat. The interface is sorely lacking in many QoL features. Item sorting seems random, crafting recipes don't show how many of an item you already have (nor how many of each ingredient), same goes for buying in shops. WHY. It feels infuriatingly underdeveloped. Gear crafting recipes are dribbled to you at the same linear pace as the game, they might as well throw the tree out. You will never get recipe B before recipe A, so why put them on a tree? Each weapon has its own slot tree so you could optimize elementals for an area, but you can usually slot enough for most elements so this is rarely an issue. I spent over 30 hours, this isn't merely a bad first impression. The game may look decent but it needs a TON of work under the hood. For $30 this is a travesty. This is more of a tech demo or a beta - yet they have the audacity to sequel bait...
One thing I'll say about this studio is their releases are pretty dang stable. Never crashed a single time, even playing the alpha and beta releases. Kudos. Unfortunately for this Colony Sim, it's biggest issue is that it doesn't have an identity. It plays like an RTS except on a smaller scale, you have to micro the workers. That's pretty much it. See, colonists can have personality traits. That's cool, right? The problem is, the traits are baked in such a manner that they act like permanent bonus/debuffs. For example an "optimist" trait gets that colonist a permanent +7 bonus mood, whereas the negative "pessimist" slaps them with a -7. PERMANENTLY. Sure, you can try making them happy by fulfilling their random wants, but that doesn't touch this stone around their neck. Ideally, moods should be like in The Sims games: something bad might happen, so you do things to mitigate it until it goes away. That's why YOU are playing the game instead of it running autonomously: because YOU can help your colonists. But with permanent traits you can't really help much, because a colonist with the pessimist trait will always be one bad event away from going into a funk (which means they'll be un-commandable for an ENTIRE DAY while they relax). You send someone to chop wood, oops they got hurt, bam bad mood, done, you're screwed. This extremely flawed trait system forces players to metagame by only accepting new colonists who have good traits and reloading when you get ones with bad traits. There's a skill system but it's so shallow everyone ends up learning everything they can. Pointless. Oh, and they learn more by reading rather than actually performing related tasks. There's a decent game engine here but it's let down by poor game design. This might entertain you for a couple hours but when you've played one game you've seen all it has to offer. Not recommended.
Be warned this is a port of a 2009 PSP game, don't expect miracles. That said, I experienced no performance issues at all, not even a single crash. There was ONE bug I managed to trigger, by somehow dodging out of bounds and falling through the bottom of the screen - my character fell in darkness for about 5 seconds before an automatic game over kicked in. That was it in an otherwise flawless port. This is apparently the first Ys game to feature a party mechanic. Your party members don't rely on the SP meter though they seem to use skills rather sparingly. Too infrequently to rely on for leveling skills - you'll need to play each character you want to skill up. They rarely get hurt though, so switch up when your current played character seems like it'd get knocked out. Abuse the out-of-combat regen/warp autoheal mechanic when you can, consumables are mildly annoying to re-craft/buy. It's a 2009 PSP game: the cutscenes are fairly basic and dialog features the standard JRPG style of the character shown in a cutout above their dialog text. The storyline is linear, though you're allowed to roam most of the map you unlocked at most points. While there's some grinding for drops to craft gear, it's not as annoying as grinding to level up skills. I played with a Cheat Engine table cheat (look for exact matching version) to be able to spam skills with no SP cost and STILL barely maxed several skills. The music is great, typical of Ys. Sound effects are okay but get repetitive. No major nitpicks about the presentation. Most enemies are fairly easy even on Hard difficulty (can't change this setting btw). However, boss fights tend to ramp up, and the final boss is both a hp sponge and cheap af. Overall decent if you like Ys games. If you like ARPGs but aren't familiar with Ys, it's okay. If you dislike JRPGs, probably stay away - the ARPG component hasn't that much meat to it. While I'm glad I got it because "it's Ys", I'm glad it's over. TL;DR Good but dated.
I'd like to get some things out of the way. Yes, I've played Civs 5 & 6; they make some interesting changes - but it is my OPINION that the AI is poorly equipped to handle 1UPT (unit per tile). Any human player with a modicum of strategy skill can out-war the AI. It's no fun if you win every time. The other common complain, CIv4's "stacks of doom": have the complainers actually played? Siege units/anything with collateral damage will obliterate stacks no matter how large. The AI doesn't even cram that many units into a stack, this is solely a human player thing. This complaint just sounds like sore losers who couldn't handle other human players cheesing them. This isn't the game's fault. When played against the AI things work pretty well. And while you could cheese doomstacks yourself there are plenty of other victory conditions than simply conquering. If you ignore every other way to play the game that isn't the game's fault either. Civ4 is a culmination of the earlier 3 games and has aged fairly well. Assuming you aren't a warmongering psycho, the AI actually reacts diplomatically reasonably enough - it's possible to keep them at arms' length, unlike in the later games where it seems the player is always dragged into large wars. Nope, in Civ4 you can hunker down in your corner provided you have reasonable neighbours while aiming for a different win condition e.g. be the first to space. One of the game's strong points is the modding community: it is well active to this day. There are great mods that enhance and extend the Civ4 experience. Better AI, revamped tech tree, more and improved civics and civs, etc. Many are integrated in larger mods too. Don't forget the 4GB RAM tweak, it helps overcome the game's 2GB RAM limits imposed by its 32bit roots and improves stability as well as shortens AI turn times. You'll find all these searching the CivFanatics forums. Good luck! And, just one more turn... Oh, it's 3am already.
I don't own the GOG version, though by now the patching issues should be done. Despite the name, you aren't much of a builder - this plays a lot more like, say, Stardew Valley, or a Rune Factory game. You only craft items insomuch as they suit your purposes to fulfill requests, that's it. Alas, you don't do ANY actual building a la sandbox games; structures on your predefined plot are all bartered for through a 3rd party. That said, you'd probably notice there haven't been too many RF style games, making this a very welcome entry. The NPCs are charming enough and the storyline long enough to hold your attention for at least 1 playthrough. It plays pretty much like those games: as mentioned, you don't actually construct anything, you're more of a crafter than a builder, and you craft stuff mostly to fill requests or gift to NPCs in order to befriend/romance them. Taken on their own, each feature by itself feels shallow. The inconsistent (and random!) way you're awarded some designs while others are automatically attached to a request can be confusing and annoying. NPC chatter is limited. However the game has enough moving parts for you to flit from one to another to keep you occupied until you finally have enough. If you're looking for something to fill that Rune Factory shaped void, this should fit nicely. It's not a great example of the genre, but it has its highlights. It's lack of depth, balance issues, and other flaws drag it down from being a great game, but overall it does ok. Recommended if you're a genre fan.
Older players like myself may have fond memories of Syndicate; this looks like a good spiritual successor on paper, but unfortunately it isn't quite that. As others have mentioned, combat is often not in your favor. Your team isn't bankrolled by a large syndicate; you lead a group of hired guns, contracted to lead an audacious campaign which ends up dealing with the established powers-that-be. There's some flavor text in the game but I found it too divorced from the gameplay; basically you can ignore the "news articles" since they have little bearing on anything except giving you lore. The gameplay itself is where most players take issue. As mentioned, going in guns blazing is swiftly punished. While it seems designed to let you churn through clones, I find it's a lot better to conserve the great stats you get from rare individuals with high stats you manage to hijack, rather than repeatedly discard low quality clones. It's a lot safer to play stealth - and this pretty much negates the use of most weapons you ever research and buy. I got through the entire game using silenced pistols - see, pistols have unlimited ammo while other weapons don't. It then becomes obvious that, since going in loud will get you punished very quickly, going in quiet is the way to go. And this is probably where a lot of players expecting a Syndicate successor feel wronged. There's a decent variety of weapons, but actually using them is often a bad idea. There isn't much variety in augs and gear, and even this suffers from "X is clearly better than the rest" syndrome, though to be fair different playstyles will have different X. You unlock gear by having them awarded as mission rewards, though the Black Market tries to help by making random pieces available over time. This does lead to uneven playthroughs though - e.g. if you unlock good armor late, your early game will be frustrating. Not a bad game, but not quite what people were expecting.
Vaguely like Heroes of Might and Magic, you start with a base, recruit heroes and form parties, and send them around the map uncovering the fog of war, defeat neutral mobs to get the loot they were protecting, capture resource generating tiles, defeat the parties of the other players, and ultimately capture their bases until you've wiped them all out. There are 3 modes: campaign, skirmish, and local co-op. Skirmish is merely a specific type of co-op where the other players are all AI. Combat plays out in grid-based environments, which are quite colourful and pleasing to look at, though each of the 4 classes only has palette-shifted models depending on which of the 4 factions you play. Skill trees are NOT shown in advance; upon leveling up a unit may choose from 3 randomly rolled skills - even cross-class ones. This helps makes each unit feel more unique, especially since they also come with random traits. Gameplay-wise this is one of the more flexible ones when it comes to physics; paladins and barbarians have an innate kick skill, which you can use to smash rocks into enemy units or even topple trees onto them. This means hiding behind cover can be a double-edged sword, because the AI will also occasionally do this to you too. The ranger and mage also have push/pull type skills to use on the environment. However... it is a very short game. There is only 1 map size, and you can likely blitz through a skirmish in one session. The campaign is basically 3 maps glued back-to-back (1 of each environment type), though to be fair the characters are entertaining and the pacing brisk. Base building is shallow, collect enough resources and build stuff that grants bonuses, same with the guild purchases. Not many choices, doesn't take long to max. Turning off permadeath means you can re-buy dead heroes, otherwise you buy level 1s. I would love to see this engine being used in a full-fledged tactics RPG. This feels more like a board game, it's great but get it on sale.
Bluntly, you need to enjoy the base game, because this delivers a whopping helping of more. It's not merely a couple of extra side missions or a handful of new maps either - it's a fairly dense, admittedly combat-heavy addition. Good news, if you liked the game lore and wanted more, this delivers in spades. A pacifist will have a hard time with this, though you gotta admit a pacifist wouldn't really have fun with the base game either. There ARE plenty of opportunities to sneak around if you go stealth (which I did), but if you want to fully explore the map there's no avoiding conflict. It is possible to attempt playing nice or at least make an effort to not go full murderhobo, but violence is a little more baked into this content than the base game, and considering how dominating that can already get, this is definitely no place to go in half-hearted or you'll find yourself getting zoned. Repeatedly. This also adds fast travel of a sort, after going through one rollercoaster of a side trip. It may not be to everyone's tastes, but I can say it was at least memorable, and -for me- a unique experience. The additional weapon types are okay. didn't feel pressured into changing to them. More feats is always nice. Overall this is a fairly solid release. Certainly can't complain content-wise, there's a lot of it. All that lore is also a great draw, if you liked the stuff in the base game (instead of merely skipping through it) then you'll definitely find something to hold your attention here. Two thumbs up, definitely recommended.
FFT (1998) casts a long shadow. Far too many later games of this genre especially the Nippon Ichi ones are way too reliant on stats, where you can simply overlevel the enemy and then have your mage facetank melee enemies and punch them to death. I hate when strategy gets thrown out simply because you have a bigger numerical dong. I'm glad to report this game manages to (mostly) avoid this. While you can still powergrind, the per-level gap is smaller so you'd have to grind a ton. It's way faster, more efficient, and FUN, to play intelligently. This game also avoids FFT's mistake of making debuffs be impossible to stick, whereas here the early classes can debuff at >70%, making them far more reliable. You'll still want to put down a dangerous caster quickly but at least you have a fair shot at shutting them up instead of eating fireballs the whole time. While FFT still takes the cake with variety, it's nothing to sneeze at here either. It's not as easy to break the game though, so while most builds are viable you won't duplicate FFT's crazy combinations like Calculating all enemies into frogs in turn 1. The game has a decidedly more grounded direction, you'll need to think for your victories and not rely on overpowered gimmicks. The story is decent but if you don't click with the characters it can get dull as it follows them closely. I want to learn more about the game world but sadly lore is sparse - though understandable as this isn't AAA and they didn't have the resources to flesh it out more. One major con (for ME) is there's no gear stealing (lol). I love stealing shit. You can't do that here :( This was confirmed to be a deliberate design choice. Ah well. There's secrets though, and many treasures can only be reached with the appropriate movement ability, giving you reason to revisit maps. There's also some crafting and it's handled well, not too much busywork. All in all worth the asking price, definitely recommended.
