Fun to play but very little content. I hope the devs get the resources necessary to build on this.
The game was made by 3 people so I wasn't gonna be too harsh about bad pacing, typos, bad writing, bad to mediocre game design choices or foreground elements constantly obscuring the game, all issues that come up in the first 15 minutes of playing. But if a game is of that quality and it won't launch the second time I try to play it I won't spend the time to troubleshoot, I'll take the refund and spend the money on something else.
Incredibly badly balanced. Barely out of the tutorial missions in campaign 1 on medium difficulty, defeated enemies keep respawning every 2 turns with full strength, the enemy I'm supposed to beat sits in a corner of the map and with a level 20 hero and several stacks of the best unit I can make, fully upgraded, and a bunch of support I can't even touch it. Units generally lack basic abilities like delaying their turn or defending, the battlefield is often crowded to the point where it's hard to see which unit is where. The battlefields are extremely similar to each other, there's a unit with wings that's animated as flying that can't actually fly and the list goes on. The story so far is: you're a ruthless feudal lord crushing a rebellion of vassals backed by some undead mystery enemy. There are 200 fantasy names thrown at you per conversation of which there are two types: "I'm with the enemy, let's fight" or "I stand with you, here's some troops". So far resource management has been pretty much unnecessary, you get so much stuff you can just do anything. Graphics are neat, controls are okay, the town management is mostly enjoyable (aside from how you can't sell more than one building in the same turn for some reason), rally points are a very nice quality of life feature. I don't recommend this game. It's been built competently but the design itself is weak, probably didn't see much playtesting.
Dear alien race who made this game, You looked at what elements made a 4X game, put them in there and called it a day without ever really sinking your teeth into what makes a human game engaging or fun. Sincerely yours, DefaultPlayerName
Checkpoints instead of proper saves and starting a new game for some mysterious reason doesn't do it under a new profile, it obliterates the progress made on the previous one. It's like the low level game design stuff was done by competent people and the high level design of game features was determined by complete morons.
This game felt like somebody had a good concept, gathered 20% of money and manpower necessary and then used that to execute a fraction of the original idea in the most shallow way possible. Game mechanics (1/5): You have 3 moves in combat: move, shoot or heal. This is further exacerbated by how there are only two types of enemies: the one that shoots damage from afar and the one that runs up and hits you up close. The social system is, honestly, the strong point in terms of game mechanics, because a simple barebones system can work better for this than something gimmicky. The stealth gamestyle offers the most boring, waiting based game play you can imagine. No lockpicking or computer hacking minigame. Items are small icons with identical stat blocks save for the values. By the time I got to the Groundbreaker I was not looking at what I was collecting at all. The games does not reward exploration at all. The most you usually get out of it is a box with generic who gives a rat's ass level loot. Art (4/5): The game is pretty, sounds good and the voice acting is decent. Writing (3/5): There are a number of good ideas and effective deliveries in there, but overall it feels disjointed and unplanned. Content (2/5): What we have up to Byzantium is good. That's where I expected to get to the deep end so to speak. The first two areas felt like a good intro, Monarch was a good chapter 1 and then I moved on to Byzantium expecting a sprawling central city chock full of questlines, factions, secrets to discover etc. Instead that's when the game ends the open world concept and just forces you down the remaining few main questline missions. Companions: (2/5): They each have a mostly well written personality, a boring, short companion questline and an identical combat impact. They speak, but don't really impact the game in any other way. I just didn't feel particularly connected with any of them and didn't feel like they were much of a benefit to have around either.
Pros: - Very pretty - Good concept - Mostly delivers on the initial promise of weird - Some of the boss fights were enjoyable Cons: - Pointless CP system, just let me save normally - Punishes players for dying - Multiple actions mapped on the same key by default - The use action requires a second long key holding for no reason - Combat is completely imbalanced, launch is way OP - Which is further compounded by undisableable auto aim when using it - Combat is bland and flows the same regardless of what I'm fighting and where I'm fighting - Full of unnecessary, tedious random encounters, compounded by the previous point - Lots of boring "go to a place, press a button" types of side quests, the worst of which are the cleaning missions in Investigations where you literally just have to wander around areas to spot specific, hidden things - Boring writing, bland, uninteresting player character and NPC-s and at one point there was narration that had zilch to do with what was going on in the game - In some puzzles there's somebody nagging you every 30 seconds, essentially saying "hey, have you solved the puzzle yet?" Had to turn down dialogue volume to 0 to cope. In one instance the NPC actually started backseat gaming and telling me where to go. - Completely uninspired crafting/resource system of random drops of resources that basically differ in their names - Compounded by the fact that you get 2 weapon slots so after you have 2 guns you like you are no longer motivated to spend time and resources on building the rest - Enemy spawning is sometimes completely unfair, you open a door while routinely moving from A to B, and boom, 70% of your health is gone because an enemy appears in your face Overall: After the initial concept was set the game design team just layed back and thought it'd carry the game so they can be lazy. It shows. I do not recommend spending money on this game.
Between obvious bugs, like expensive magic items or feats straight up not working, intentional design choices like long resting only being possible in pre-established sites (I must have missed the 5e rule that says: "To take a long rest a campfire is necessary. Campfires can't be built by mortal beings, such advanced fires were only created by the gods at the dawn of time and must be found.") and the phoned in, lazy voice acting, this game becomes a frustrating experience. I do not recommend it.
At the very beginning of the game its strengths are displayed: a faithful adaptation of the pen and paper system and great artwork. But as you delve into the game its crippling weaknesses become apparent: an extremely limited amount of enemies reused for ad nauseam repeated encounters under the same tactical circumstances (seriously, what's the fun in dealing with the 17th wolf pack in your way, just exploring the map?), the dumb AI, a large, explorable map with most locations being mostly empty save for a filler combat encounter and some basic loot, a lack of sidequests and guidance for the player to important events, mediocre writing/storytelling, etc... And the kingdom building feature... I was so excited about this when I first started playing. I was looking forward to making all sorts of important moral, diplomatic, economic and military decisions and see what kind of a baron I would turn out to be, how all that would influence the outcome. Instead it's a weak little resource management game about increasing stats and managing die rolls where even the occasional RPG style decision making only results in stats moving one way or the other. I would recommend avoiding this title. The overall experience is tedious and frustrating.
