Recent reviews by TheAsh

Great game that pushes the genre forward.

This game should be taught in game design schools

Great game

Cool concept that might take the genre to new places

Great Game

is good

TL;DR:
Wait 7 years to buy it on humble bundle with all expansions for 15$.

As a player who mainly enjoys the characters and the emergent stories of this franchise, CK3 on launch is just making me want to play CK2 (I bought it with all major expansions for 15$ on humble bundle).

Don't get me wrong, CK3 has an amazing foundation, a lot of cool mechanics, a ton of QOL features (Multiplayer is amazingly easy to just drop in and out of) and amazing potential, but it just lacks content and needs some time to add some QOL to it's new features (Just like every paradox game). Right now the game feels generic and bland, the characters don't feel personal like in CK2, and at a lot of points it just feels like nothing is happening while you wait for the grand strategy stuff to progress.

If you have CK2 + expansions you probably better off with that, and if you're extremely patient you can just wait to buy it, 7 years from now, after they release all the expansions in an affordable bundle before CK4 comes out.

Very unique and interesting mechanic, summoning creatures is very fun, the later stages can get very challenging.

Great voice acting and music, really nice atmosphere.

Main differences from other auto battlers:
-Your account has a rune page, similar to LOL, where you equip buffs for your game that you buy with in-game currency, examples are: Giving your units 10 mana regen, 10%+ for certain rarity tier/alliance drops, spawning mines, placing walls, 10% stat bonuses etc.
-You can choose up to 5 heroes to have on your bench at game start, you unlock these like the runes, if you don't use it you start with more gold.
-Complete Item shop: each hero can equip 3 items (they are not bound to them), you have a shop where you can buy every single item in the game, you can combine regular items with special items.
-4v4 Mode: a game mode that is really poorly executed, sharing units with your team is extremely limited and confusing, you are given almost 0 information and agency over what is going on.

I personally think the rune system is way to powerful, feels extremely grind-to-win and will probably be pay-to-win, the player with the most runes will have a huge advantage over the others.
Edit: just played a game where there was one guy with 3 runes against 7 others with 0 runes, the guys won with 100 hp.

About the current state of the game:
UI is very annoying and clunky, you can't drag and drop items in a lot of situations you'd expect to, Positioning units is slow.

This game might have potential but right now it doesn't look great

I currently have 130 hours in the online mode, out of them 120 hours are staring at "game disconnected" screen, infinite loading screens and fighting the game to let you play it properly and use it's features.