Recent reviews by Xafi

The 1.0 release feels more like a 0.8 at best. There are a lot of bugs, performance issues, unique items missing skins, boring endgame, class imbalance. Could be a decent in game in one year.

Pros:
+ skill trees
+ boss fights
+ character progression feels good until you reach endgame
+ loot filter
+ endless stash space
+ half the price of D4

Cons:
- terrible story, which is not even finished
- rng crafting system
- boring, repetitive combat
- bloated itemization with useless stats
- lack of unique items
- so many loading screens, especially when doing monoliths
- no big cohesive world, broken into smaller instances instead
- endless grind due to legendary potential and crafting rng
- boring, repetitive endgame
- no transmog in offline mode
- zero character customization (in terms of looks)

Best ARPG. Huge build variety, supported by a ton of items that can completely alter your skills. Vast handcrafted world (no randomly generated maps). Regarding complexity, it's a nice middle ground between Diablo3 and PoE.

It needs some updates to fix the optimization, but otherwise a fun game.

A perfect game if you want to feel sad.

The game has a solid foundation and could be a great game with time, but currently it has some serious issues, and until those are resolved I cannot recommend it.
- First of all, the AI is terrible. Both on the adventure map and in combat. It kills the creeps but leaves the resources that were guarded, does not even cap the mines most of the time. It does not care about the player hero, loves to end its turn next to your main hero even if its hero only have a single unit...what could go wrong? If you threaten to claim their castle it does not even try to defend it, just wanders around the map. In combat it rushes forward with its melee units without any tactics, even if the rest of his team are ranged, it sends its single melee unit to certain death.
- AI takes forever to play their turn. If you play a 6 player map with 5 AI you will spend minutes waiting for them to play their turn, and it will take longer as the game progresses.
- The game is poorly optimized. Even my gaming PC lags when the AI is playing their turn, and it is a pain to watch. On big maps I get lag spikes even on my turns when I have visibility on a large part of the map.

If the above gets fixed I'll update this review.

UPDATE (game version 0.82.6):
The AI has improved a lot both in battles and on the adventure map, but on the adventure map front there is still a long way to go. Big maps with lots of AI are still unplayable, too much downtime.

The first two episodes were great, it was interesting to see the relationship between Chloe and Rachel build up, and it was good to feel that my decions matter in that. The Tempest part is one my favourite Life is Strange scenes. After that I was really looking forward to the 3rd Episode, but it was a HUGE disappointment to me. I was expecting to be crying at the end of it, or just feel something at least...but this was not the case this time.

The story felt out of place. We built up our relationship with Rachel on the first 2 episodes, only to turn this whole episode to an investigation, with little meaningful interaction between the two characters. I felt like I don't have any influence on what happens next, so I did not feel connected to the characters that much. I think this whole Rose is not your real mother thing was relly weird an took the story in the wrong direction. I play LiS for the feels, but I could not find them here.

TL DR version:

Loot boxes are absolutely not necessary to achieve a 100% completition in the game

+ The game is well optimized
+ Nemesis System
+ Combat System
+ Items/sets
+ Difficulty

- Story
- Lots of grinding at the endgame

Long version:

This game is awesome. If you liked Shadow of Mordor you will definitely love this. I recommend to play it in the hardest difficulty (Nemesis), then it will give you quite a challange. You will quickly learn who to avoid, and which fights to pick. The combat is basically the same as in the prequel with some tweaks here and there. The nemesis system is just awesome. Each ork that you kill/shame/whatever will have an influence on the future. For example, I have killed an ork by cutting him in half...later he ambushed me on a mission, and explained that his mates collected his parts and sew him back together. Then there is an orc that I killed with Fire damage. He keeps returning and he is mortally vulnerable to Fire damage (I killed him like 5 times already). He says that there is no point in killing him because he will return...maybe it is time for me to shame him. Then there are the sieges...the coolest part of the game. Recruit some badass orcs, choose your sige weapons and siege the enemy fortress. It really feels like I am on a real battlefield, which can get chaotic pretty fast when I am facing 4-5 captains at the same time. Defending and attacking are both entertaining and engaging. Another improvement to the previous game is that we can now equip items in 6 slots, and there are also legendary set pieces which offer different styles of play.
Lootboxes are not necessary to complete the game, but they definitely give you an edge if you want to participate in online sieges. The hardest part is to find good legendary followers to defend your fortresses. It can take hours to spawn a legendary orc in the world by playing the game, but you can easily get them from lootboxes. But if you don't care about reaching the top of the leaderboards you can do just fine by playing the game. It is fun hunting for these orcs, and you can still buy lootboxes with ingame currency.
Now the bad part. The story does not feel very interesting, sometimes it does not even make much sense. The charachters are not well developed, they feel one-sided and bland.
As I mentioned above, after you reach the endgame it becomes very grindy, and it can get too repetitive after a while. Hunt worms - get intel - shame captain - recruit - etc...ah yeah, your maximum level is 60, while Orcs can spawn up to 65 which means that you have to shame them to reduce their level to 60 or below, in order to be able to recruit them. But then there is a higher chance that he will betray you because you shamed him.