I picked this up hoping for a decent Commandos-like experience and it much, much better than I expected. The writing and characters kept me engaged, gameplay and UI were very smooth and visually the game is a pleasure to look at. Desperados 3 is not just a great tactics game, but does its part in moving the genre forward.
A nice little addition in every single way - new skills, new opponents, a new tileset and some new lore. Not a must-have, but pretty good.
The atmosphere of the game is fantastic - the writing, the graphics, the music and the voice overs. Truly amazing job on this front. The gameplay itself is very well done and quite difficult in the early stages of the game, before you figure out what the best build is. Opponents don't really scale, so towards the end your tech-priests are true monsters, dispatching previously-difficult Necrons with ease. That's not a bad thing in my book, since you can obviously see just how far you've progressed. My only dislike is the global timer mechanic - I would have spent a lot longer doing all of the missions and unlocking every single upgrade, but I felt rushed, especially in the early game. It's well done, since you need to balance your desire to explore the tombs fully with the fact that exploring generates more awakening, so it's a balancing act. Still, maybe the game would have been better without it. Overall, definitely worth playing if you're a fan of WH40k.
There are a lot of things that the game does right - inventory management, loot variety (once you reach Act 2) and the combat system is... fine. Overall, an okay CRPG, at least mechanically. However, the things that PoE does wrong almost prevented me from finishing the game if not for PoE 2. I want to play the sequel and I wanted to continue from my save file. I found the world and lore VERY difficult to get into. There are a lot of info dumps way before I figured out what anything means. This barely improves as the game went on - lore dumps just keep on coming as you advance the main quest. But my main criticism is that the game felt... bland. I'm not sure why, it tackles quite a few interesting concepts but I found myself bored more than once. I'm glad I'm done and I don't think I'll pick up the sequel soon. Tyranny (also made by Obsidian) was much more enjoyable. To be fair, Tyranny was launched after PoE, so perhaps the devs applied what they learned in Pillars. Perhaps I should have played PoE before Tyranny but, alas, too late.
Companion quests are a mixed bag (Barik's was fine, Lantry's was kind of boring) but the new area you can access is so, so very buggy. Ignoring the fact that I felt shoehorned into actions I didn't want to take (which is basically the opposite of what the base game offers), there were simply so many bugs, some of them completely blocking my progress. Had I known how bad the new area is, I would have just skipped Barik's questline and not bought this DLC.
The game is definitely not perfect and reviews on YouTube describe in great detail what's wrong with Tyranny, but it's still *really* good if you're into deep CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's Gate. This might be the first RPG in a while that I'll replay in order to experience (one of) the different paths.
Yes, the game is completely linear and I felt absolutely zero need to replay chapters for the few collectibles I've missed. That's not what the game is about. I immensely enjoyed a break from the repetitive grind and fetch quests of "open world" games with "endless replay-ability" and endless little things to collect. This is the first game I've actually finished in a while and the first one in even longer that I've taken screenshots of for my friends. Absolutely stunning visuals, a great story, great characters, great voice acting. Excellent stuff, can't wait for the sequel.
