Recent reviews by Pandarandrist

Simply put, I wish there were 12 more games exactly like this one. This game is fantastic.

This game has a lot to like, but also has what I see as some pretty serious flaws.

The biggest one is how damage is balanced. When your characters have 30 health enemies can routinely deal 20-25 damage with their hits, especially if they apply ailment damage. This means killing enemies or avoiding their attacks is critical. But there is an initiative roll! Players seem to have a significant advantage on initiative, but I had two runs in a row ended because I lost initiative and was one-shot before getting a chance to act in battle. This was on normal difficulty.

I generally don't like the way damage is balanced in the game, but add the ability to not go first on top of it, and it's just ludicrous. Not being able to take a turn before you die, from full health, is a pretty unforgivable flaw.

Great factory game in space

This game is simply fantastic. It's probably the absolute best example of experienced of adapting board game concepts into a video game. The game is compelling, well-balanced, and discovering and executing different strategies is interesting and satisfying.

People who are saying the game is all RNG are straight up smoking something. I mean, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of RNG elements, but I'm not a gaming expert, and I still haven't lost, just winning my first Utopian+ game.

Oh! Another HUGE plus of this game is that you can reasonably sit down and finish a game in a single sitting (2-3 hours, maybe?) I absolutely love that.

Simply stated, this is my favorite ARPG of all time, even in its current (unfinished) state. Here's why:

1. Extremely intuitive and engaging character growth through passive (talent) trees, skill choices, and skill talent trees. No need to follow a build guide, choices develop naturally and freely tested as you play. Every skill I specialize I fall in love with, and as a result I have 4 different characters with the same class/subclass (among others)

2. Excellent gearing through crafting. Intuitive and straight-forward crafting allows deterministic elements and RNG elements for crafting that let you make use of a wide variety of gear to enhance your crafting capabilities and to modify gear for your character

3. A commitment to finding your own gear. The game is designed with a drop-first mindset, meaning that the game is engaging and optimized for finding your own gear. You can target farm, and push odds in your favor in a wide variety of ways

4. Genius gearing systems. The crafting, exalted, and legendary potential systems are each brilliantly designed systems that make gear both accessible, widely usable (even low level uniques), and gives an unbelievably high gear ceiling

This game still has a lot of room to grow and improve more, and it will. But even for what it is right now, it's a really exquisite game.

Game is alright, but considering the experience I've had, I was surprised the reviews are so overwhelmingly positive. Some of my complaints are more quibbles, and others are more core.

* Difficulty
The game is just very, very easy. I'm playing on normal difficulty (captain?) which I do on pretty much every game, but this one is trivial. Your main squad, as well as any of the squads of named characters that join you during missions can easily take out 3-6 enemy squads *on their own*. You can just plop your squad down in the middle of a horde of enemies and they'll just kill themselves attacking you during their turn. Awesome. I pretty much feel invincible. Essentially, the normal difficult feels like baby mode.

* Gameplay
I just don't like the map play very much. I think the main issue is that there aren't really zones of control. You can't meaningfully defend archers, you can't stop enemies from running right past you, unless there are choke points one unit wide. While this is a complaint of mine, it definitely isn't a dealbreaker, it's a small thing. That said, because the game is so easy, each map is essentially you slowly walking through a bunch of enemy armies, sending your weak units out to capture undefended objectives, and slowly making your way across the map to capture an enemy base. Every single time.

* Rewards
You get mountains of gold but there really isn't much to spend it on. You can buy units, but your squads are generally full already and plenty strong to take on the missions, or you can buy a very limited set of items, which altogether amount for like 20-30% of your gold rewards. I have a huge amount of amassed gold that I'm not spending, and the game is still trivial. There should be more ways to spend money, more ways to make your characters powerful, and a challenge that actually motivates increasing your army's power

* Character Growth
Your weaker squads are garbage, your stronger squads are gods. For your weaker squads to get stronger, they need to gain levels, stats, and leadership, but the only real way to do that is to have them fight. But they can't. And they don't need to, because your top 4 squads can kill the enemy armies by themselves. I've found it very hard to have a strong squad outside of my top 4-5 squads, but there's nothing else to spend money on.

Also, the game talks about how you can roll whatever class you want, but...it's kind of a lie. The stats are wildly different character to character, and if your character has 15 strength and 40 magic, you're not going to make them a warrior. The stats are mostly dictated by the class the unit started as, but there's some random variation on top of that

Anyway, lots of complaints. I'll probably keep playing it, but certainly don't think the game deserves 90%+ positive reviews

Basically, I think this game is great for the asking price. It's a great little 2D Mount&Blade-like game that has some rough spots that, for me, didn't impact the experience of playing the game. All of the systems that I interacted with worked perfectly well, and the "get stronger - roam countryside - amass army - take over world" fantasy of M&B is 100% there. For the asking price, this game is an absolute steal.

I didn't get past character creation before the game lost my interest. My complaints aren't meant to apply to everyone else, but they are why I was not interested.

1) The general art design is interesting, but not something I particularly like. For example, women in stiletto heels in combat. That's just not a look I can enjoy.

2) In character creation you get to test out a character with many skills unlocked. You can spawn enemies and hack away at them. The abilities were almost all some flavor of "hit x times, deal x damage". They just simply weren't very different from each other, or very different from the basic attack. But they have a cooldown, so you have to rotate them.

This game is absolutely fantastic. I don't think I've been this excited about a game in a long time, and I knew nothing before I bought it. Early access issues exist, especially since they just pushed a big update. Despite that, this is the most worth it game I've bought in...I don't know how long. Ever?

There's a lot to like about this game, but ultimately, the gameplay just isn't it. The game is 60% cutscene. You spend most of your time walking from one cutscene to another. The actual combat zones are very sprawling with not much interesting content/combat. Overall, I really wanted to like this one, but it wasn't for me