Apparently someone thought it's a great idea to make the difficulty have a variance of 2 stars, so a 3 star job can be a 1, can be a difficulty 5. In general, I've experienced two possible outcomes - you either breeze through the mission with no issues at all, or you get mauled by 2 lances + some support units. There is no tactics in this at that point - you're trying to lure the enemy and split them - not gonna hapen. Trying to pick one enemy off? Nope, he'll soak up the damage, loose limbs, fall down and STILL survive - while his friends maul you. Finally the campaign. From the mechanics point of view, it's a complete failure. You need to progress into campaign to make the game playable - except this will make ALL the missions harder with no option to pick easier ones. Your mech suffered heavy damage? No problem, we'll just need a month or more to repair it. Simple rearming can take weeks. This game is a festival of wasted potential.
I'm running ubuntu 18.04 and this game is a nightmare to run. Trying to run it in lower details, different resolution, windowed mode. It either refuses to start (most of the time!) or freezes somewhere in a mission. To make it more frustrating, this game *DOESN'T LET YOU SAVE ANYWHERE* so when it crashes/freezes, you're back to last save. Could be due to intel integrated graphics, but the graphics of this game does not justify any need for anything more than the i5 built in graphics - text is blury, characters 2d hand drawn(quite pretty!) - it really looks like many of the old flash based browser games.
DISCLAIMER: This review is only based on graphics issue I'm having. I'd love to give this game a chance, but at the current state of events I simply can't due to vision impairment. This game is made in very low resolution. Period. There's no scaling option built in making the playfield take small section in the middle of the scren and being a massive strain to my eyes. Running multiple screen setup I will not let any game change my primary screen resolution forcing me to skip this one, which I'm extremely sad about.
The game is great on a first playthrough but after that I noticed a number of critical flaws in this game. The number of NPCs is very limited (I still want game that would be close to Baldur's gate 1) and they are very predictable. Something I hope will never happen again in gaming development - about 10% of areas are locked based on your choices during the initial game phase where you just use text to specify some choices. Basically you have to replay the game few times to access those few exclusive areas and heaven forbids you make wrong choices - if you chose to go to some area during "initialisation" and go to the other one during the game you will have a limited access to it and... you'll still get locked out of the other part. Really bad design. [SPOILER, though I'll try to be vague:] Finally, the game ends with a cliffhanger as some say, but for me it's a perfect stalemate. You hit the capital with 'supreme magic', same used by the overlord (the almighty being ruling the continent) thus indicating you have gained similar power and now you can nuke each other with said power if one goes too far.
After finishing the first shard you get Access Violation and that's it. The workaround (which is ridiculous by the way) doesn't work.
Like most games that tried to replicate Gothic, this one has a horrible, non responsive combat system. Either make it rely solely on player clicks OR character skill. Not both. My disapointment in this system might come from a bad control design that can be summed up as "Hey! I see you're trying to dodge that huge guy trying to impale you on his spear, here, let me kick in the air instead!" because auto targetting system I have yet to find a way of disabling decides to target another oponent who's 5 meters away, at full health and off the screen. Simply unacceptable. Another thing that got ruined is magic, or rather lack of it. If you go with muskets, you'll kill anything that gets in your way before it even gets close. Magic is more of a funny gimmick than a character build.
When this came out, the graphics was astounding, but playing it from the perspective of Morrowind fan, it was greatly disappointing. Many elements of the game mechanics that made Morrowind incredible experience were removed. Levitation - gone. Individual parts of the armor? Gone. Throwing weapons? Gone. Teleportation spells (mark&recall, intervention spells) gone. WORST: story full of mystery and intrigue? Gone. From "old cult, strange dreams, superhuman powers" went down to another "New cult wants to bring in deamons to the world, save the realm oh mighty hero!". I could never find the motivation to bother with stopping the Daedra invasion at any point. World levels with you - "oh, you're lvl xx? Here, let's bring some random thugs all wearing SUPER RARE vulcanic glass, armor that costs more than a small county makes in a year. Freedom and open world? Sure, until you don't try to kill this shop keeper who's important for a minor quest. Or another annoying npc. In Morrowind, if you killed someone important for the main plot you got a message you messed up and live with it or reload. The combat system - it's a matter of preference, but I disliked how blocking started to soak up some damage instead of being all or nothing. There was a mod of course to repair it, but side effect was your 2h weapon/shield was wearing out rapidly. Mana regeneration changed magic users dramatically, more importantly, many awesome spell effects have been removed and spells limited to your skill. You can no longer make a gamble spell from Morrowind that would have 30% chance to succeed, but obliterate your enemy in one blast. Story - major weak point. I found it simply uninteresting, cliche and poorly written. Save the kingdom, I've seen good in you... (dude, I'm in prison for *you don't know what*). Mage guild quest line was a nonsense. Fighters guild not much better. The only two reasonably interesting ones were the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild. And I prefer to RP spell-swords.
