I'm a sucker for party based tactical combat turned based crpgs, so this is my cup of tea. I'm only about an hour in but so far so good. There are a lot of classes to choose from and each has the ability to deal with a different map element (like breaking down barriers or removing cursed ground) as well a some kind of party buff/heal like removing a negative status effect during camping. The movement and interactionns with the map are quick, as are the combat actions which is nice so you're not spending a lot of time just watching your party walk around. Single key-press to loot all items near you is a nice QoL touch too. A couple of annoyances so far include some muddy UI choices and an awkward formation system. UI example, your available attribute points to distribute are shown in the far top-right of the screen while the attributes and buttons to distribute them are on the opposite side, so you don't immediately see these two "linked" pieces of information in same place. Why not show the available points immediately above the attribute list itself? As for the formations, your main character is always dead center and cannot be moved. This not only limits the design of your formation, but overall it is VERY confineds space-wise. You also cannot select any other character but your main to move about with, with your companions following at a slight delay to run to their designated position. This means if you're playing a squishy like a Mage, it's very annoying and sometimes impossible to protect them by keeping them safely behind your tanky warriors. Not only MUST your mage be in front while moving, but the farthest forward position you can place a character from them is actually still in the very generous melee range of your main. So even if you stop moving as soon as you aggro an enemy to give your tank a chance to move in front, you're still so close than many enemies can still run right up to your main and hit them before you can act. Will update
I am super confused about the great reviews this game has received. The atmosphere, art design, characters, all good stuff. It's well written. Should have been a movie or something instead. There's almost zero "game play" here. You can't even figure out what to do based on clues, because there aren't any. You quite literally just have to click around on every corner of every painted scene to move your character into every nook and cranny waiting for an icon to pop up on the screen letting you know that you need to click on it. It's not even clear where you can and cannot traverse, so you have no choice but to randomly click on every inch real estate to see if your character will auto-path there and whether or not an interactive bubble will pop up when you get there. New conversation options with NPCs or interactive bubbles on objects will appear based on whether you have "unlocked" them by finding the previous clickable bubble in the chain. Click on every inch of every screen to hunt for the interactive bubbles, then revisit all the previous screens to see if that bubble unlocked a new bubble elsewhere. That's it. That's the game. It's so tedious I can't bring myself to finish even though it's relatively short. Just watch a Youtube video of it or something if you respect your own time.
Enjoying the game a lot. Nice to have a turn based "conquest" style game that doesn't take hours and hours to complete a map. There is a bit of a learning curve and I'm still not great at it (I have not won a map yet while taking any of the more difficult starting positions), but the quick pace of play makes it easy to try again with different strategies. One thing to keep in mind in general is that it's a race to reach assorted goals to win, not a "conquer every tile" thing, so a slow grind to domination does not work here. You must figure out a way to earn victory points quickl, make sure you review what the various conditions are before you start the map. However, the game appears to have been immediately abandoned on GOG which is super disappointing. Steam version is receiving content updates that have no mention here. It's really frustrating when devs launch games on GOG without disclosing that they have no intention of actually supporting it on the platform.
I'm not going to get in to the merits of the re-master here, this is just a warning for those that may be looking into it for the first time. Do not mistake this for a Witcher/Gothic/Elder Scrolls, etc. style story driven 3rd person action rgp. It was supposed to be an MMO, they ran out of money along the way, and quickly re-coded a few bits to dump it to market as a single player game. I cannot understand the love this game got from anybody in the first place. It's blatantly obvious from the moment you drop in to the starter area that this was designed as an MMO. Everything about the areas, quest hubs, quest design, dialog, etc. is like an original WoW v1.0 clone, only there are no other players. I dumped about 40 hours into the original hoping to find something more eventually, but there's nothing here. It's MMO mob grinding without the chat window. Looks decent and the action plays out OK, but there's simply no game here. Empty, static world holding mindless path looping mobs with aggro circles that you grind for "boar tusk/wolf hide/bandit amulet" drops to complete quest hub missions. That's it...many hours of that.
