Disclaimer: I haven't completed the game yet (I've thoroughly played the beta, and has started playing the full game). Still, I think that it might be worth to share my impressions. I really like the writing so far, and the characters seem interesting. Mechanically I really like this game, as e.g. Pillars of Eternity games feel too overbalanced for my taste, while Pathfinder: Kingmaker allows for more wacky stuff. For those who don't know, Pathfinder is basically a tweaked version of D&D 3.5 (think NWN2), and Pathfinder: Kingmaker follows the rules quite faithfully. Can't really say much about the kingdom rulership mechanic yet. Visually, P:K looks great; in my opinion, better than Divinity: Original Sin 2. I enjoy the art style a lot. Also the UI is very nice. I had some graphical glitches and slowdowns, but nothing too drastic so far. All in all, if you liked e.g. NWN2 (and expansions) back in the day, definitely check this game out.
This game was clearly inspired by The Banner Saga. However, in my opinion, it's not a bad thing in the slightest, since I, for one, would love to see more games in this vein. Thus, I'll compare it to The Banner Saga. Ash of Gods has a bit weaker writing (as in how the dialogues and descriptions are written), but the story itself is equally great, and the characters are very interesting and well thought-out. Ash of Gods' art is equally great to The Banner Saga's one. All the screens and characters are awesomely drawn. While I loved The Banner Saga's music, I loved Ash of Gods' one even more. It was made by some of the people behind the music in the Witcher games, which speaks for itself, and in this game they did an equally great job. Now the combat. At the moment it's Ash of Gods' weakest spot, since for now the game doesn't have a Medium difficulty setting, it's either way too hard (on Classic mode) or way too easy (on Story mode). The combat follows the same principles as in The Banner Saga, with a few twists of its own. What I don't like is the round robin system where after your character's turn there is always a turn of an enemy character, no matter how many character are left in your on your side, and how many are left on the enemy side. This makes single characters overpowered. I hope that the devs will introduce a new difficulty setting in a future patch, which will be harder than the current Story mode but not as mercilessly and unfairly punishing as the current Classic mode. For now, I recommend everyone to play on Story mode. To conclude, despite the shortcomings of the combat balance and woeful current situation with difficulty settings, I still had a lot of fun with this game, thanks to great story and characters and fantastic art and music. For me it took ~20 hours to complete this game (which is quite a bit longer than The Banner Saga 1 or 2). I give Ash of Gods 5/5 despite my complaints above since I enjoyed my time with this game quite a lot.
First, let's set the main things straight. This game is for those people who enjoy the "story" and "talking" parts of RPGs most. If for you the main aspect of a game is "combat", be it realtime action, or thoughful strategic turn-based combat, this game is not for you, don't buy it. If you're of the former sort (like I am), then I highly recommend buying this game. Now, for the specifics. I've completed this game in ~38 hours, in a fairly completionist playthrough. Note that you'll spend the majority of time playing this game reading through dialogue and exposition and figuring which options to choose in response. So basically this is an enhanced "choose your own adventure" book, but one which is very well made and has a good story and interesting charactes. Original Planescape: Torment probably had a better story, but this one is still quite great, and the reactivity of the dialogues is very impressive. The writing itself is very nice. To summarize, if you like good fantasy/sci-fi books and you like the "story" and "talking" parts in RPGs, definitely buy this game.
