The story is good, the characters are likable, it looks good, the customization is enjoyable, and the stealth and combat are really good. But between random performance issues, dodgy hit detection (I got *really* sick of seeing tracers and throwing knives phase through enemy heads and torsos), and most of all the insane (and apparently common) game-breaking glitch in the Caspian chapter that can only be fixed by restarting the entire gods-damned chapter and has been in the game since launch *5 fucking years ago* that remains unfixed -- I'm uninstalling this and probably never combing back. If I could demand my money back, I would, and I highly discourage anyone from getting this game unless they are *very* willing to risk redoing hours of gameplay. If you still want to try the game, try to get to the lighthouse mission as quickly as possible and don't spend time exploring in case you have to re-do the chapter.
I feel like most of the reviews are wearing thick nostalgia goggles. As someone with no nostalgic memories of this game, I feel pretty confident in saying that after about 8 hours it is *awful.* The visuals are nice enough, the voice acting is fun, and the idea is a good one, but it's executed horrendously. When it isn't mostly just kind of dull, you're dealing with missions that have one acceptable and extremely limited strategy that can often depend completely on RNG. Take for example, the mission Quest for the Crown. Essentially you have to survive a massive wave of minotaurs but your heroes aren't going to live long enough to do any real damage, so you have to cast spells, which cost gold just like building and hiring heroes. Except sometimes the game tells you in no uncertain terms to piss off. Sometimes, the game straight up doesn't register clicks. Sometimes the game will decide that spell damage will be essentially 0. Sometimes the game will decide that you *didn't* cast a spell on what you were targeting for no reason. Sometimes the dumb AI decides that your few precious heroes are going to run directly up to the nearest big monster and refuse to run away, dying instantly. Sometimes heroes with minions will decide that they don't need them and will wander away from them and immediately die. Flags, your one means of directing heroes, only seems to work some of the time, and it feels completely random when heroes will bother with them at all. Constant issues like this will waste precious resources until you run out and die, then you reload and hope that maybe, *just maybe* it will be less crap this time. And sometimes you'll be right. But it's bad design. These things will mean that *sometimes* you might succeed because the game has allowed it, and many times you will fail because one too many spells just didn't work or one to many heroes decided life wasn't worth living. It is indicative of the basic problems with the entire game.
The game is gorgeous and the presentation is great all around, but I *hate* this gameplay, because even just a couple of hours in it *really* enjoys causing the player suffering. The game has a fondness for cheap, obnoxious enemies placed in such a way that you will struggle to be able to hit them at all as they tag team you, plus very clunky combat, in addition to the player taking damage on contact (a mechanic that I am not sure has *ever* been anything other than trash and bad design) often means that you will have to die and re-tread the same few screens over, and over, and over again. The parry doesn't feel good or very consistent -- it often felt almost *too* generous with some attacks, but with some others it felt like I was doing everything correctly and still getting hit. The dodge only *sometimes* seems to give you immunity frames, which means when you need to use it to get to the other side of an enemy you will randomly take damage from contact and go nowhere instead. But the biggest thing that I absolutely *despise* is the platforming. This game doesn't feel very precise at all, and yet you *have* to platform precisely. Whoever designed the Grave of the Peaks should never be allowed to design a level ever again and owes me the money I spent on this game. Randomly shifting wind that pushes you back and forth, with enemies that can attack you from any angle with a dash that starts too far away from you to hit them (assuming they're not doing it from below you, where you can do *nothing* about it) while you have to move between narrow platforms, including crumbling platforms that you can't clamber onto and will *literally* fall through if you don't land *exactly* in the center -- that area is a travesty of horrible and deliberately cruel design that was so not fun I wanted to hurl my controller through the wall and is the biggest reason I uninstalled the game and will never touch it again.
This game is a fantastic example of what not to do with design. It tried to force you to play a certain way with each character, and it will *not* tolerate any deviation. It has mandatory stealth sections that will instantly get you a game over, but enemy detection is all over the place. You'll have sequences where you're supposed to have pistol-only gunfights with enemies 20-30 yards away where you will very rarely hit anything because there's no way to improve accuracy. Hell, I got to chapter 7 and the game has included little useless nothing mechanics like riding a horse for 30 seconds and using Billy Candle's whip to swing over gaps and climb -- and by the way, the game *doesn't tell you* how to climb at all, even in the controls. It's a game that wants to be an arcadey action shooter but also a stealth game, and both sides are undercooked. This is a game that has no idea what it *actually* wants to be and just throws a bunch of different ideas at the wall and hopes something sticks.
Three hours and I'm out of patience. Lots of great ideas -- though it's annoying that the game pretty much requires you build as many barracks as you possibly can to keep up with the attrition your armies will face -- but a *lot* of problems. Some of these issues are purely technical. The biggest and most consistent ones I've encountered have been the game's graphics suffering a breakdown if I alt-tab to another screen rendering the entire game virtually unreadable and requiring a reload, and said reloading suddenly making any and all unit and building markers disappear from the minimap so I can't see where even visible enemies are at a glance. These both happen literally every single time the situation comes up without exception. And some issues are design. Namely, screw artillery. Not because it's powerful, but because it is functionally indestructible at range. Artillery pieces (particularly cannon) have a *ludicrously* massive HP pool, to the point where I can literally order 10 other cannons to fire on 1 enemy cannon, and even when they manage to hit they do negligible damage -- think less than a hundred out of 9-12.5 *thousand.* Which makes absolutely no sense and removes even the concept of artillery dueling from the game. The only way around this is to attack and seize the cannon with infantry or cavalry, which *will* lead to high casualties even when the artillery is undefended. Except that infantry takes far to long to do so, so that leaves cavalry. Good of one of the first campaigns to decide then that you don't get to make any while fighting and AI that loves to spam cannon. Maybe the game gets better, but I'm not sticking around to find out when I could be playing something that doesn't piss me off with bad design and programming.
This game was one I played a lot of as a kid, and I'm happy to say it still holds up. It still has the bright and colorful world, the fun battle system, and a great OST that I have seared into my brain. It still has the problems, though. The balance is nonsense (never play Water) and endgame still suffers due to a steady decline in enemies to fight as nations are conquered and neutral forces across the world are destroyed, never to return. Unless you're playing Death, in which case you're the only one to get a spell that lets you re-populate neutral structures with enemies to fight. It's also not as feature-rich as a lot of more modern turn-based strategy/civilization games, but what's there is good and fun.
To be honest, it's been quite a while since I played, but it doesn't look to have changed much (which is probably already a mark against it), so take what I say with a grain of salt. The game's graphics are weak, but if you're like me that's not a problem. The problem is in the game itself. It starts of strong with a sea of many things to do and enemies to defeat -- you have a pretty robust crew system and lots of ships to choose from and to fight, not to mention exciting sea beasties. But after a few hours you'll quickly realize that the pirates are rapidly being wiped out by friendly navies and the vast majority of the beasts are megalodons, which once you've killed three or four stop being all that interesting or exciting like the first time. Soon you find yourself sailing the seas with nothing to do but trade goods back and forth and occasionally go out of your way to hunt a sea monster that's probably the same type you've spent most of the game killing. And that sailing involves little to no soundtrack and having to speed up time (though not enough in my opinion) in order to move on to the next bit of boring trading. There's a chaos campaign that I found far too busy and reliant on boarding and melee combat, which is a miserably sluggish affair, and ship skirmishes, which just never interested me at all All in all, a big disappointment.
I was honestly looking forward to finally playing this game. I'd heard about it's great humor and fun combat, and I was sorely disappointed. Maybe 4 hours in and I already regret the time and money I've spent. The humor is almost exclusively the lowest common denominator -- it's all cheap weak and I think I chuckled maybe twice, just a little. On top of that, the gameplay is basic and not very engaging, while the boss fights so far have been awful. First there's the profoundly annoying bugbear, then you get the trow/goblin boss in the park -- the one who you can't attack in melee, your ranged minion will never target, and who always summons help much faster than you can. After almost ten minutes of fighting him and barely making any headway, I realized that this game bites and uninstalled it. Save your time, you're probably better off getting Bard's Tale 4 -- it's look much better than this. Oh, and also the songs are mostly just annoying and you will get *sick to death* of killing hundreds of trow, especially in the aforementioned park.
I remember playing this game as a kid. I remember cheating at it a lot as a kid, because I was 5 and couldn't play halfway intelligently. The game has good visuals and atmosphere and is pretty ambitious -- trying to make 4 distinct factions and potentially dangerous wildlife with a variety of spells and upgrade less than a year after Warcraft 2 came out is *very* ambitious. It's also kind of terrible without nostalgia goggles. The programming is *extremely* janky and bad -- units can be dropped off of a boat and not be able to get back on it for some reason, units will decide that "attack" means "walk directly up to the enemy unit and stare at them," enemy AI will chase a single unit through a gauntlet of attacking enemies or a damaging fence even if it kills them, there's weird and random delays in unit response to orders, sometimes the enemy can just sense that you have units within their territory (even if they're invisible) and will chase them down, units only attacking enemies they're order to or who have attacked them directly, etc, etc. Then you get bad interface design. Casting spells and upgrading units are both *extremely* clunky and tedious, and magic gives the AI much more of an advantage in combat than you because they can do it much more easily than you can, even the total lack of anything like an "attack move" makes battle finicky and miserable. Add to that a lot of the mission design is *terrible.* A mission where you have to steal boxes from an enemy base where the enemies automatically detect where your units are at all times so you can't sneak in (unless the AI breaks), a mission where you can't build a base but have to slowly free an army of totally worthless units that can literally be wiped out in a couple of seconds if the AI remembers it has spells, the list goes on. It's a shame the game just doesn't have the basic programming and design chops to keep up with its ambitious scope and cool little world.
