Recent reviews by The Shogun of Sorrow, Aku

- It's a confusingly inferior adaptation of the actual card game. I struggle to see the necessity of outright changing all the cards, removing combos, etc for the sake of this game. The obvious market for this game are fans of the LCG, so why change it at all? And the changes they do make are pretty awful. And even given that they appeared to be trying to rip off Hearthstone's general look, it's a worse version of that game.

- Really needed more development time. The slow rollout of cards, even after all this time (more than 2 years) makes it thin and unfun. The UI could use a little work too.

- Changing the mechanics of the game, really makes it feel unbalanced at times, with "Sauron" doing way more ridiculous things than happens in the LCG.

- At the end of the day, it's not even that terribly fun compared to other games in related genres. I play the LCG twice a month with some friends and it just doesn't compare. In terms of card gards, there's plenty of better ones out there. In terms of Hearthstone-y games, there are way better ones out there. Don't waste your money, just go play any of those again instead. Or go play the LCG one, you'll end up spending more money, but you actually get something for it.

It's a generally amusing game but you really have to buy it at the right price. 12 hours is enough to 100% the whole thing, so keep that in mind when you consider what price you want to buy it. This might last you a chill weekend or a week at most. I really wouldn't consider buying this until it's under 15 bucks, and absolutely don't buy it until it's on sale at minimum.

It's an RPG, but a bare bones one. You have 3 builds (chosen via armor sets) basically and a couple options for powers like echolocation or damage resistance, etc. You have to eat creatures for resources (there's 4 max) and just doing the side content is enough to get you most of what you need for the entire game.

The story is goofy, which is to be expected, and the mock "Deadliest Catch" style keeps it entertaining.

Few minor criticisms - the random dialogue is fairly repetitive, and this includes the narrator. t's noticeable but not terribly annoying. The jumping mechanic is really janky, which becomes annoying the handful of times you're asked to use them. It frequently doesn't do what you want, either leading to a really shallow jump, or a back flip. Coupled with a camera flip when this happens, and you might be able to land where you want, but then accidentally jump back in the water because of the camera lock.

Buy it for cheap, play it over a couple days, then go back to playing something more substantial.

The obvious statement to make here is that if you find Slay the Spire fun, then there is a good chance you'll enjoy Monster Train. At it's most basic you could describe it as Slay the Spire meets Magic the Gathering.

However, MT has put in a lot of effort into innovating and changing up the mechanics and various processes to make it feel solidly unique. Even a lot of the common features are tweaked in some way to present a different kind of challenge. Difficulty wise, I find it slightly easier than Slay the Spire, but that's because I think MT is balanced in such a way that you have an easier time creating a viable deck without having to rely on RNG for a certain rare card or item to define the deck like Slay the Spire. It's less about "letting the game decide what build your going to work towards" and more on incorporating the various choices into your run. That said, there are a couple "build defining" items that do end up changing things like StS.

I bought the game blind after hearing that it was pretty similar to Slay the Spire, and I feel like it was well worth the price for the amount of entertainment I've already gotten out of it. If I had to have a complaint, it's that it could use a bit more of an expansion in terms of maybe more train track options, events for the various stops, etc. Regardless, the base game is 100% solid, it's a complete game right now. I don't think anyone who is interested in these types of games is going to regret even a full cost purchase, which on steam is a pretty strong compliment in my book.

At it's basic level, Bannerlord is a playable "game" that's reasonably enjoyable if you were entertained by Warband and just wanted basically an updated version of that with one or two quality of life mods.

However, I feel this release is pretty clearly an attempt to recoup the numerous years of development that it has taken to get the game even this far. This is not a feature complete early access title like Darkest Dungeon or Slay the Spire, Minecraft, etc that's looking for money to expand on an already largely complete game. This is clearly a company trying to raise funding by asking people to purchase a ticket to alpha test the game. Your saves are going to frequently be broken by even the smallest of patches, there are rather trivial issues [imgur.com] that doesn't really speak to 8 years of development with Q&A testing.

For that reason, I cannot recommend it. The game is, as I said, reasonably entertaining, but I cannot in good conscious sanction this kind of absurd abuse of early access. Hold off until the game is on sale once it leaves early access. Otherwise you're going to be playing this like people "play" Star Citizen. You're going to play it for a couple days, until a minor patch forces you to restart for the 8th time, forget about the game for 6 months, and then check back in to see how things are going before repeating the cycle. This is not a reasonable use of the early access label. A company with 100 employees and more than half a decade of development should be able to Q&A, alpha, and beta test the game themselves.

Edit:

Now that i've had more time to play, I feel that the above issue complicates my views of future development in general for this game. They're going to spend so much time and effort micropatching the game every day that the largely one-note no-alternatives gameplay is going to be an issue. I fully do not expect to see any real expansion of gameplay for at least 1.5 years. As of right now, there is little direction to do after the game throws you to the wolves in the tutorial, which is an issue that the previous game had. I do not ever expect the developers to fix this issue. You have other issues like sieges being boring, and rushed, with the AI stealing all of your food because quite honestly it's too stupid. You'll never be granted a fief. I watched the AI horde 7 fiefs to a non-faction leading lord, and I who had the 2nd largest number of companions had zero. Non-sieging play can be valuable, but it is not respected by the mechanics for purposes of obtaining a fief. This severely limits the usefulness of various troops, as well as completely pulls the rug out of various playstyles, a design concept that is completely antithetical to the sandbox gameplay.

The more I play, the more I feel this game will never be good. It has completely peaked at this point and all it will ever be is an updated Warband. I feel sorry for the community who got tricked into paying additional money for what basically amounts to a graphics mod.

Ultimately if you love CRPGs specifically, I assume that this is pretty much right up your alley. If you're looking for just about anything else, this is a real creative mess. I've played through one game until I got a game over due to the game not actually telling me I had a timer, then trying to enjoy myself and catch up on kingdom building. But no, I guess having fun isn't allowed, so the game forcibly eliminated my game. I'm currently replaying it through the Enhanced Edition content, but none of that will really impact my review:

The combat has to have been just about the worst development choice. I cannot fathom what lead people to believe that any alternative to a turn based game with initiative deciding the turn order was a good idea. You get these long stupid breaks in combat because it's just people wasting real time until they can attack again on their turn, but since it's real time, the whole thing is just a weird abstraction of what pathfinder looks like in real life. Final Fantasy Tactics is like 20+ years old. How could they not have figured this out? Slowing down the game to a square based, turn by turn game would solve just about all of the awkwardness, especially moments where your bard is doing a performance but because again the game is weirdly abstracted, you have people running all over the place completely outside of the performance. Go ahead and play bard in normal pathfinder and tell me how often that happens. It has to be one of the least satisfying mechanics I've ever experienced in video games. Every combat is just an interruption to more interesting content and I just wish it would just be over every time.

It's really like playing a game with the world's lamest DM. They're super strict about everything and cannot intelligently change things on the fly. Too many worthless items? Not enough items for certain characters? Too bad. Not to mention, this is the DM that basically just added a few characters, and then never bothered to adapt any of the really interesting ideas that people who played the campaign did before them. No real creative steps were taken above and beyond the written adventure path which is a real shame because Kingmaker is fundamentally a toolbox. You're meant to just go wild with it. The characters the game did add are quite honestly too weird and boring to be functional. They're very one dimensional and few of them feel like decent fits in the campaign. What would have been way more interesting is allowing the player to pick from a couple of choices as to who to bring with you as your party. Instead of a tower shield fighter, maybe a paladin of Erastil. You can get a cleric, but choose from a handful of options as to what kind of cleric. You can buy some in that vein, but they have no real quests for themselves and it's stupidly cost prohibitive for no reason. There isn't a lot of personal content in this game, it wouldn't have been much more effort to make some quests for them. Again, it's like a DM who didn't go out of their way to try and improve upon what was already on the page. Not to mention they're a stickler for just about every stupid rule that most people ignore. Like alignment shifting, few DMs will bother tracking whether the lawful good character makes too many neutral good choices. They'll probably just track evil ones in case the character goes overboard. weight is another good example.

All in all, this is a real step back for RPGs. Consider it when it's under 20 bucks, but even then you should probably hang on until it's under 12.

Pros:

- Game generally looks good depending on your rig
- The game isn't being made by some random schmuck in his mother's basement, so there are regular updates and not months in between
- The game has enough content to keep you busy

Cons:

- The entire problem is that this game is entirely based around one of two groups: Solo players who have 40+ hours to dump into the game, and online players who can join up with an already established tribe. The Engram system is an incredibly slow grind and you'll still have to play multiple double digit hours in order to hit the decent areas. Taming is also a slow grind, you need to grind in order to make kibble which tames fastest, and then you need to grind out the kibble, which takes more work.

It's just fundamentally not a fun game until you have an established base with all the basics. It's somewhat fun with friends, but they'll all quit unless the developers take a break from releasing useless dinosaurs like Kangaroos, and play the game solo for a month to get the experience. The beginning bits need to be redone, and the most recent patch killed dino survivability. I'll change this if the devs ever bother to go back and make the beginning fun.

- This contains the Missing Link DLC, as well as some major changes to boss battles so you can hack or stealth your way out. The price is discounted if you already purchased DE:HR and/or TML.