Well, i played this game for 81h, and i'm fed up (i did not even try a single mission for the "Darkest Dungeon").
I totally agree with Andre_geo review. he game is very fun and interesting until you reach level 6 missions. Before reaching level 6, the game is great. Of course, some of your teamates will die, but it's ok, that's part of the game. You can still progress and do missions.
But after reaching level 6, the game becomes too much frustrating. Not because the game is much harder, just because all the fights are only luck based : dodge is useless (some of your teamates with 60 dodge will take hits everytime, but never reach an enemy with 20 in dodge... and they have good PRE, trinkets are useless too. Most of the times, it's like rolling thimbles ...
This game is ok and funny for 40 hours, not more. Buy it only during sales ...
So I bought this title on sale after Crimson Court DLC was released. I found it quite enjoyable til I got to the Darkest Dungeons whereupon I was smoked at every attempt. I read a bit about it and people were saying the game was rebalanced for the DLC. I hesitated to buy it but finally did since I had been enjoying the game a good deal up til this point.
I am very displeased with the new content. The curse will become a problem almost immediately once you head to the courtyard and pretty soon half your roster will be infected. Then all the infected characters will be stunning your allies in the middle of combat and/or driving them insane with their ravings. My progress has effectively been halted. I even restarted a campaign and waited until I had a good pool of trinkets before starting the courtyard but still was overcome by it.
I'm sure my strategy could use some tweaking but the game has become a drawn-out masochistic experience and not worth the effort for me. There are other games out in the world to play and only so much time in the day.
This game has a mandatory ironman mode - you cannot save manually or go back to a previous save. That would be fine, if the game worked correctly all the time. But sometimes it does not: Your save file is corrupted and the backup useless. Then, all progress is lost and you can start over.
So like the title the atmosphere and the mix of arthurian/ cthulu elements is neat, but most of the challenge comes from poor item descriptions and 3/4 of the madness conditions just being your loot being stolen by your party. The loot you get from dungeons is insufficient to heal the plethora of bad statuses you accrue, the little magic items are so far mostly worthless and damage your initiative/speed values. Classes other than crusader, bandit, plague doc, and priest seem lack luster. They promise a bunch of nifty skills that seem excellent at getting you killed. Also there seem to be inconsistent rules for you vs your enemies. An enemy can hit my backline with a dagger and yet my long sword fighter can hit the front line only? The kiss of death is that the items you buy for missions DISSAPEAR AFTER THE MISSION ENDS. This is a really fking stupid design idea and combined with the irritation that 99% of the random "curios/events" are negative, and you don't get the loot from trapped chests when they blow up, I just started ignoring them all, especially since your "thief" character only has 50% trap resistance. Which I THINK translates to 50% chance to disarm but idk.
I have read quite a few reviews complaining mostly about the game's unfair difficulty. Having spent plenty of time with Darkest Dungeon - enough to draw conclusions which I can call objective - I can say that these complaints probably come from people who have not even tried to explore what the game offers to deal with this difficulty. And it offers just enough to reduce it to very reasonable level if you actually think in advance and plan every expedition. Each location has its set of enemies which are highly resistant to certain types of attacks but vulnerable to others. Each character can be built in numerous ways. If you send a random party of heroes with "whatever" skills on a mission, you will have casualties, probably will have to retreat or get your entire team slaughtered. And that will just get worse as the game progresses. If, however, you prepare Bounty Hunter X or Plague Doctor Y from their very initiation to be good specifically at task X or Y, you will be surprised how much more efficient they become. Build your parties having in mind what threats they can face on each mission and suddenly they start crushing the monstrous hordes which could lead you to despair just a few missions earlier when you just picked 4 martyrs, believing that most of them will never return.
That said, the game is far fairer than some people will lead you to believe, provided that you actually spend some time thinking and exploring. That doesn't make it perfect though. The end game, the assault on the Darkest Dungeon itself, could turn into a very long grind because you need a well-equipped, max-leveled party to have a chance against the monsters which wait for you there. Every failed attack on the Darkest Dungeon costs you at least one hero, typically 2 or more and these veterans won't come back, you have to "produce" new ones. And that takes a while. Quite a while.
Finally - the game is worth it. If anything, for the fact that you don't see many like it around these days.
