Recent reviews by Namrok

This is essentially the Battletech game I've always wanted.

The Mechwarrior games have their place. The Mech Commander games aren't bad either. But I love Battletech for the fiction and the tabletop experience. And previous efforts always felt orthogonal at best to my love of Battletech.

So it's finally here! No, it's not the tabletop game ported to PC. It's better than that! It recontextualizes the feeling of the tabletop game to the PC. And it's steeped in all the lore and tropes I've come to love in Battletech.

Hell, Battletech aside, it's a damned good game in it's own right. And I'm looking very forward to what they do with this going forward.

So, after many breaks, I finally finished this game.

I suppose up front I should say I don't have nearly enough time for games as I used to. So being able to actually finish an RPG in around 10 hours was a very enjoyable experience. Not every RPG needs to be epic, you know? I don't remember what I paid for this, I think I got it in a Humble Bundle, but $15 seems about right for this.

Now I'm not familiar with Shadowrun at all. But this game did a good job of easing me in. The world building was relatively minimal, and didn't hold things up too horribly. In fact, I think the world building was appropriately spread out and well integrated into the game. No audio logs you listen to while doing other things in this game. Or worse, audio logs you listen to unable to do anything else. I'm looking at you Mass Effect.

I perhaps could have used a bit more of a combat tutorial. I didn't realize until halfway through the game that I could overwatch, or that I could command my guys in any order I wanted. But perhaps I should have Read The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Manual instead. On second glance, there doesn't appear to BE a manual...

Combat did start to get a bit repetitive towards the end. Equipment wasn't too glamorous either. But I think my biggest complaint is that I never got attached to any of the hirelings you can get. Well, except for Coyote. But for the most part, your team will just consist of a rotating cast of randos, with maybe a story required NPC. It really hurt my engagement in the somewhat stale combat. I had my guy, who I cared about, and then 3 bags of meat.

That being said, at the end of the day I really enjoyed this game. It took me a few months to stop being distracted by other games and actually finish this one. The reptitive combat may have contributed to that. But the story was interesting enough to keep me coming back. And the story really does wind and twist through some interesting nooks and crannies. Probably the strongest aspect of this game, aside from the generally creative setting.

Probably not the strongest recommendation, but it's still a recommendation all the same.

Ultimately I recommend this game, but not without mixed feelings.

First and foremost, I adored Titan Quest. And if you loved Titan Quest, you'll love Grim Dawn, full stop. It takes the formula, and it just adds so much more. I especially appreciate the devotion system, which is a sort of parallel leveling system that comes from exploration and discovering shrines.

That being said, it suffers from some of Titan Quest's problems as well. It's a grindy game. It's a slow game at times. It's the sort of game you mindlessly click through while you have a podcast on in the background.

That aside, I love it. Seems like the developers went through quite the struggle to make this happen, but I'm glad they did.

This game starts off really strong, and shows a lot of promise. It gets you going with a very simple premise, get money, recruit villagers, upgrade your town. Buy hammers to turn villagers into builders, buy bows to turn them into hunters. Then they introduce farmers, catapults, and lastly knights. And this all takes place in the format of a side scroller. It's really unique.

And you get to build up your town, which is fun at first. You unlock a new building every other day or so. It's exciting when your towers and walls get higher and higher.

The challenge of the enemies which assault your town ramps up as well, with a massive wave every 5 days. At first it's a ton of fun trying to build up enough to meet the challenge.

But very quickly you realize it's rather shallow. In fact, it's repetitive and shallow. After a certain point all you do anymore is build walls and towers, and try to replenish your archers from the scant recruits you need to venture deeper and deeper into the forest to find. After day 10 there is only one more thing to see. After day 20 there is nothing.

And the challenge quickly escalates to something that feels unfair. You need lots of archers to defend your walls. But then the quantity and toughness of enemies increases, and you need catapults. Then the floating demons show up which fly over your walls and just pluck people up and eat them. But that's still manageable, if you have a large enough mass of archers behind your walls. Then the trolls show up, and they destroy walls and throw your catapult rocks back at you, decimating your archers beyond recovery. But they are slow, so you need to build towers a ways out to weaken them as they approach your town. Except any archers you put in your towers just get eaten by the floating demons. It's a game of rock, paper, scissors where at the end of the day, you aren't allowed to throw rock.

But to make matters even worse, the gameplay is rather passive as well. When the action gets started, you mostly just get to watch. Really you don't even need to be there. Except there is nowhere else to be, since to leave the safety of your town results in disaster anyways. So you sit and do nothing while your archers fend off the enemy, and you wait for the sun to come up. Another aspect of this game which is novel at first, but gets old fast.

Who knows, maybe they'll flesh this game out a bit more. Right now it feels like a proof of concept from a gamejam without the depth or scope of content a full game requires. For a game which has achievements going out to surviving 100 days, the amount of content is surprisingly sparse.

If they flesh out the content more I'd change my opinion. The game needs a longer path of escalation. Give the player more tools to mitigate the limits of the early game, but then throw bigger challenges at them which force them to rush further up a tech tree to mitigate those. Add something to ward off the flying demons, but then add another enemy which counters that. Upgrade the players horse to run farther and faster since you have to cover a lot more ground in the late game. Give the player something to do at night except just watch the action. These are the challenges the Kingdom dev team needs to overcome before I consider this anything more than a tech demo or a proof of concept.

Fantastic game. Has a real zen quality to it since the pacing is so much different from other tower defense games. The level design is fantastic, and consistently challenging in new ways. Also the story is like something out of a Stephen Baxter novel. I only wish there were more levels.