Recent reviews by Minamimoto Sho

Good VS style game, good music, nice artwork, interesting builds, good price.

Disliked due to trying to do the challenge in hard, chapter 9. Why would you think it's a good idea to give an extra mission to protect paper-thin 'help' that just charges willy nilly into enemies that rip them to shreds? It's dumb, and frustrating. This is bad game design and entirely soured the experience.

Edit 1: Got VERY frustrated with the challenge in chapter 10 as well; that looks to be more due to me not knowing / understanding unit pathing. After giving up on the challenge and just moving more forces down the middle, the horses diverted up and bought enough time.

Edit 2: For those that asked, I'm also doing a challenge run that if any unit dies, it's a restart. HEAVY use of save scumming but not allowing *anyone* to die is very challenging and quite often relies on rolling a brutal RNG gauntlet to get past. Revised to like because the game is at an appropriate difficulty otherwise.

Edit 3: Still just those problematic chapter 8-10 challenges that had the highest difficulty spikes. Rest of the no loss 100% challenge wasn't easy, but definitely required far greater resets. Also bugged achievements, didn't get the reward for completing the game on Warlord.

Plays better than it looks. Very addicting.

Tortanic no more, it's respectable and fun.

Great, fun platforming.

Too far a departure from the series and just not very fun for me.

The strategy gameplay is worse than the various previous installments, the metaprogression like talents are worse, no achievements and a weaker use of currency. There's clearly a ton of effort put in, but it feels like I bought a strategy game and someone tried to give me Skyrim instead. If I wanted to play Skyrim, I'd go play Skyrim.

TOTSUGEKI

So! 417 hours is an awful long time to play a game and give it a thumbs down. Why?

TL;DR, the endgame is INSANELY buggy and completely killed my impossible, no loss completionist run.

The good:
The gameplay is classic KB gameplay. I've put a ton of time into the series so far, and it never gets old.
Exploration was fun.
The new viking units were neat to play with.
The callbacks to previous KB games were fun.
Many interesting characters to interact with.
The valkyries are pretty neat, and a nice twist from the previous companion systems.

The bad:
There's a lot of reused maps, but if it helps pad out the game it's not so bad.
A bit grindier than other KB games. Way more bosses that spam armageddon / geyseys, but not a huge deal.

The ugly:
Very, very many lategame crashes. Check the forums, and you see lots of people running into the same issues.
Can't upgrade / suppress items very late into the game, 100% crash.
Can't quicksave too frequently, or it'll crash.
Can't press buttons after quickly saving and loading, or the game will free requiring a restart.
The game sometimes randomly crashes on any save, resulting in a loss of progress for the previous battle.
Lots of broken side quests. It's very easy to get some sidequests in a non-workable state, or they just don't work at all.

I am excluding a good number of bugs that can be fixed via simple .lua fixes, and there are a TON. You can find them on 1C's official forums, as well as info on the other bugs.

If I had to summarize my experience, it was like having a gourmet meal that was absolutely delicious at the start, and eventually turned completely rotten. A good chunk of my 'gameplay' time was padded due to having to work around crashes / bugs, and despite me having a good time with a good portion of the game I gotta give it a thumbs down.

Lords of Waterdeep is my favorite board game, and this is a great port of it.

Really fun deckbuilder.