Shouldn't have preordered after all! The game beautiful and times flies while playing it, but inevitable at some point you notice it is riddled with bugs that lock your progress with no hope to fix it other than waiting for a patch. Devs unresponsive. Wait some time for the patches to come out before you buy!
This game didn't really get it's devilish hooks in me. The Cute/Demonic mashup of the game style is fun and well done, but I became bored of the gameplay. It mixes a light village management sim in-between bouts of top-down brawler. Eventually I got bored as the sim part was mostly checking boxes and chores, and the brawler part felt like the biggest chore to keep your cult village going.
Cult of the Lamb combines fighting and management gameplay in a nice, complementary manner. Take care of your cult and go on crusades to provide followers and resources. Although the world’s lore is clearly not the game’s main focus, it completes the experience. The player has control over how fast they wish to progress, never pushed forward and rarely held back.
The fighting system feels very well thought through. It introduces a variety of weapons and methods, giving the player a multitude of concepts to grasp and master. Certain items and actions allow the player to adapt their style, which satisfies both those who seek challenge and those who need a rest.
The cult management is less complex, but regularly demanding. Take care of your followers as you would of children, who cannot do anything by themselves. It’s a pleasant and important part of gameplay, but poses little challenge overall, especially with rituals which are usually enough to sort out all emergencies.
Save for the aforementioned fighting system, the game misses diversity. The surroundings and enemies get repetitive over time There are few areas to explore and they get repurposed later in the game. Base decoration is limited in area and variety (DLC providing negligible extras). The followers only differ on the outside, their traits being so minuscule as to not matter.
The game’s fantastic graphics make it look like it’s very well Polished (pun intended; see quality assurance in credits). This however is far from true. I feel like I’ve made a bug report every hour on average, the bugs ranging from mildly annoying to game breaking. In fact, before the 1.2 update, the game was literally unprogressable before the tutorial stage was even over, due to a bug. A quick search revealed that before it got fixed, it’s been a problem for about 8 months.
TL;DR: Fights are great, cult leading good enough, otherwise too repetitive and a buggy mess.
This released as one of my favorite games, and I do mean of all time. But they just had to keep updating it to make it "better" and more "balanced". Please, anyone, tell me why a single player completely offline game needs to be balanced? This used to be a great game where you had a town management element and a randomized questing element. But they've neglected to fix any of the bugs in the town management and have "balanced" the questing to be an intollerable mess. It went from a unique and fun game to just another piece of poorly assembled roguelike trash. Add it to the pile.