Recent reviews by Draco100000

Goat DLC.

You need a decent PC to run it so be mindful of that.

This game is similar to Total War franchise. The campaing is set in a smaller scale map, where the Han Empire has launched a Expeditionary force to establish a Protectorate in the western Regions of China. Han has to destroy the Steppe kingdom Xiongnu in the north.
Alongside the Han empire there are other civilized factions that have some interesting units/bonuses that are "natives" of the area, or some sort of mix between Han and locals. the setting is quite interesting and the ambience the game gives is good.

Regarding the campaing mechanics, this game has some interesting takes:

-Campaing Camera is very slow, also the campaing map is absurdly high demand ( Im getting 50 fps on a 3060ti and 11600k). Considering there are not mindblowing graphics, the game seems quite unoptimized.

-There is a population system based aroun population points. Each pop point allows you to increase resource output of buildings ( up to 4 pop per building), using 1 pop also allow you to expand unused slots. Finally you require 1 pop point to recruit 1 unit, this is the core of the economical/military management of the game, You have to deploy troops to defend/attack, but also keep some pop back at home to maintain your production.

-All Armies can reinforce over significan distances, this means as long as you share the regin with other armies they will try to reinforce each other, inclusing nearby cities garrisons and bandits. Bandits are a very chaotic third wheel for most battles, where they will attack both contingents, its funny defeating most of your enemy army and then seeing them running into the bandits and getting killed.

-Diplomacy is a bit barebones, and the only relevant diplomatic deal you can do with anyone is free trade, which usually involves you gifting them ♥♥♥♥, then they declariong war either way. Interestingly having common enemies is the only reliable source of good relations that unlocks other treaties like NoP or map info sharing.
Higher difficulties everyone declares war to you, everyone befriends everyone trying to get rid of you. This happens in a very early point in gameplay.

-AI in campaing is a bit dumb, lower difficulties they are clearly overwhelmed by the game systems, recruiting more units that what they can maintain and goingbankrupt in many cases, ending up with a massive chaff army. Higher difficulty they will pump out elites out of thin air you can kind of farm to get high level equipment.

-Equipment is the second most interesting mechanic in this game, as pop is very scarce resource and you cant recruit indefenetely, this means you gotta use your already recruited units to the fullest, you can change their weapons, armor and shoes to transform them into other units, you can forge equipment using resources or you can steal equipment from enemies by looting the battlefield for 1 turn after a battle.

Now lets talk about battles:

-Gameplay is a bit arcade/strange, ranged units are significantly stronger, even against heavyly armored and shielded infantry. There is a clear archer metagame, specially for higher difficulties.

-Troop movement is unresponsive at times, combined with the clunky camera controls and clunky unit selection, the combat has a floaty feeling with a very bad pathfinding for units. Its quite bad, and it reminds me of constant reforming archers in Three Kingdoms Total War, for example to disengage you need to doubleclick a location, if you simply try to reform, the unit will try to finish the combat and then follow orders, its very strange. You can eventually master the controls and end up having quite a good control over the battlefield.

-Siege battles are quite crap, the defender has a lot of advantage, that is good, but the map is very simple with a single wall. Sometimes there is a massive mountain that towers over the wall, which makes the castle very dumb, as you can set up ranged units in this massive mountain and take a city with ease. AI wont allow you to shoot it down with range and will sally out to fight you if they feel you have ranged superiority. this tends to end up in attacker acting as defender.

AI is also atrociously bad at sieging themselves, and will send all troops all in without much though, usually you can cause massive slaughter as long as you have enough anged troops.

My evaluation of the game as is currently is 7/10, it has some issues but it will give you a new start position to play around and enjoy. The campaings are short, specially if you are a tw veteran, as you can take lots of land quickly if you play your cards right. The highest points of the game is the pop system and the equipment system.

Im skeptical regarding future updates, but if the game gets better over time it will be a great thing.

To me the most impressive thing is that most campaing mechanics would work nicely with a total war expirience, in fact this game goes back to some of the wonderful systems of Rome 1 and medieval 2, reason I give this game such a high score.

If future updates significantly improve the game I will defenetly increase the score.

If you like Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin you will feel like at home. You might like it if you like souls games, but be prepared to use all tools the game offers in order to clear areas. Specially the Lamp, which is very powerfull tool to deal with isolated strong opponents.

EDIT:

The game was nerfed to absurdity, enemies are brain dead, specially ranged. The devs have not offered back the level of crazy fun the release version of the game had.

They have appeased the casual masses by making enemies dumb.

Insane. Its surprising how its imposible for me now to play the game I loved.

This game now is shameful example of devs losing the trust on themselves and doing what dumb people tell them to.

I dont recommend yet, wait 2 years when CA have decided wether this game should stop getting support or not.
If the game died because of their greed and bad decisions investing money in flop projects like HYENAS or TW: PHARAOH, and they decided to stop making updates, good news mods will be up to date most likely and you will be able to have massive up to date campaings.
If the game didnt die you will still be able to play modded, but vanilla wont be in such a deplorable state and multiplayer battles should be thriving if you like that.
Either way I would advise against suporting upcoming dlc unless it goes down to its proper price, or recieves enough content to justify 25 euros.

Is it a good game? well it should be better, thats the issue. Fans shouldnt cover more bugs more rapidly than CA in a consistent way. They shouldnt be doing compromises like reused audio and quite terrible modeling with clipping everywhere.... I will keep playing it because of mods, and any decently priced dlc in the future.

Buy wh2 and play it before even considering this one if you are new to the franchise.

EDIT: Recently some CA devs helped Nagash mod team to find a very complicated issue. Because of this selfless act of support I will change my review to positive but the original sentiment stays.

This game is a perfect simulation of Wuxia, Jianghu and Murim novels and comics. It does make justice to the texts it is based on. The different fighting styles, the sect system, the cultivation levels... The npc system with friendship and hatred relations and the continously evolving world make it a very dynamic game. It has everything you would expect it too have if you come from reading this novels.

For players that know nothing of Jianghu, it shouldnt be too hard to grasp the concept of the game, although the amount of content might be a bit overwhelming. If you like bullet hell games and roleplaying games it can be a very interesting story.

Repairs are too expensive.

They fixed the servers, now its the time.

Its my favourite game but FROM SOFTWARE is showing total abandoning of its best franchise on PC. This behaviour is unnacceptable, we need the servers back. I cannot recommend this game without its best feature.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wake up From, I wont buy a Bandai Namco game ever again if this ♥♥♥♥ doesnt get fixed.

EDIT: ONLINE IS BACK BABY! THE HUNT BEGINS!

Pros:
BEST GAME OF HISTORY.
The online works incredibly well, its like amazing.
Bosses with great challenge difficulty, build variety to kill them, tough enough to make them fun to coop.
Improved melee expirience in comparison to DS games.
Cons:
If you are a casul you might need several dozens of hours to get the mechanics.
Pcs with lower than recommended settings and close to it should beware of running the game in lower resolutions and low settings to get acceptable framerates.
There are some minor things that are getting fixed.

Conclusion:
BUY IT NOW

Important EDIT: I cant recommend this game until FROM SOFT returns servers to Dark Souls Trilogy, such a scumbag move cannot be supported, I regret buying this game and I hate Bandai Namco and From Soft for abandoning the franchise that put them here. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disgrace what a piece of ♥♥♥♥ company.

EDIT 2: DS2 and 3 have online servers Im complete again and my life makes sense now.

Very usefull for Total War games on my 1440p screen. I have a 3060 Ti and it makes a noticeable difference smoothing the image a lot and allowing for consistent +60 fps expiriences in ultra with working visible g-sync.

The only issue is the fact that the screen border limiter is a bit wonky and its not really good for camera controls in strategy games, which basically forces me to use keys and mouse buttons to control the camera.

I get more use for this program in my 1060 laptop.

Overall very good software for the price, totally recommended to improve visual fidelity with lower gpu consumption and also for pixel art games.

Edit: I recently used it with games that didnt have native sharpening options for many textures and models when even at 4k there was noticeable jagged areas and lower texture detail but with nvidia sscaling option in this program I could enjoy a great sharpening effect that moved textures from this games to the next level. Its great that it got updated with new options and it works better than before. Gladly surpriised by this program that i was bit unsure whether it would be a good buy back then.