Seemed like a deal at $10, US, but about thirty seconds into the campaign tutorial, the game is broken in such a way that makes it literally impossible to play. The tutorial demands you expand the inn, but will not allow you to do so. This problem has existed since the game's release, and hasn't been fixed.
Do not buy this game.
So, these sort of sims appeal to me but I wait to see the reviews before I purchase when a game is new so I waited for some. When they came, they weren't very reassuring and I held off some more as they did at least seem to promise fixes on the horizon. Then eventually I got notification that the Anniversary Edition was on special and some of the reviews had indicated those aforementioned fixes and I took the gamble... it was not a break me sort of investment; It was quite cheap actually.
I have had very little issues with the game. There has been no crashes though customers will walk about exploring and get stuck in a corner and just stack if you don't realise or forget they there, but that's why the introduced the hand of god button (but it shouldn't be a thing that's needed in the first place.
No manual I can find (I may have missed it) to let me know the answers to many questions.
No explanation on why adventurers, bards, seers, and vedetas will not do a quest for days and the quest will just vanish uncompleted? Is there a limit on how many quests? A time span between finishing one and starting another?
You can have a metaphorical 'million' staff but customers will still complain about slow service even if there are ample goods.
Cannot be totally self sufficient with most of the more expensive items needing to be purchased. With what you can I wouldn't even try as you can't seem to have enough staff to do everything and some things (the bakery for me and brewery) just never produced any bread and ale/mead/etc.
Can't seem to chop wood from a forest (I think a load screen tells you not to do so in the Lords forest, so...?)
Other than that, I have been enjoying the sandbox mode even with my 'heroes' only doing assigned quests randomly. Managing fun otherwise.
Entertaining game with a lot of potential.
As of patch 2.6, the GoG Galaxy version is crashing a lot for me. Had experienced a few crashes in 2.4 and 2.3, but not to this degree.
Campaign Mode:
The A.I. is still getting stuck and doing nothing despite giving a wide birth of space for them to move. The Staff moves to talk to people on breaks, completely breaking them and causing them to stay in the same place indefinitely. Haven't built Staff rooms to see if this fixes their need to chat with people randomly, though it looks like the people they do talk to lose the ability to move (though I have on some occasions seen them still ask for service, even though they're stuck... and they never get served). At first this was only happening in the rest rooms, but just now it happened in the tutorial of the campaign, with two patrons stuck on the stairs after an employee spoke with them. Now my employees are just flocking to them whenever they need to speak.
Developers:
The Developers seem to be nice and updating frequently. Some quick responses on a few forums, and an apology for the initial launch problems.
However, they made a post about people not updating their games or not understanding things, and that the game is mostly bug free and the campaign can be played through.
Speaking for myself, I always check versions before booting up to see updates. The game still has plenty of bugs, and if people are, in large, confused by various things, then that is either a problem of not explaning things, or a design flaw.
It is the developers first game, according to their initial apology, so many of these things can be understood. Though players always find and break games in unexpected ways (or go about things oddly), so to claim any version is mostly bug free is a little unrealistic.
Nov. 15th review:
Wait until more patches. Will update as soon as I finish the campaign without seeing annoying bugs and change the stars / personal recommendations.
This game is fun enough to play, the Sims meets X-com is the best i can come up with.
The only real issue is it runs like a boat without a motor on a gravel driveway.
It takes a solid 2 minutes of black screen to decide if it's going to run, and if anything pops up on a new window while it's running, there's a full sulk and it black screens again.
I can alt-tab to anything that my heart desires, and all I get is a constant black screen, can't get to task manager even after opening it, and it refuses to behave for alt-F4.
In essence, i need to just stop the game every hour or so to ensure my save file syncs, because the alternative is i have to reset my laptop, and that makes me a little emotional.
In summary, a good game, but make sure you've got a computer from 2030 at least.
On paper this seems like it would be a great game, but unfortunately it is fully of glitches, bugs, clunky controls, and completely idiotic broken AI. It is so full of issues that it feels like you are playing an Alpha copy certainly not even a Beta or Full Release. At this point the game is pretty unplayable. Maybe they will get things fixed upcoming but for now I would stay away.