Recent reviews by daveyd

A truly unique indie game. A masterpiece, though not without flaws.

Pros:
+ The story and overall atmosphere is excellent
+ It's fun to develop your necromancy and see NPCs react to it
+ Choices with consequences (or at the very least well done illusion of choice)... I'm unsure of how different choices would've played out, but curious enough that I'll definitely play it again eventually.
+ Excellent soundtrack that fits the tone perfectly.
+ Cool setting (18th century Europe in a a fictional nation)

Cons:
- Combat is somewhat lackluster. Not terrible by any means, but pretty basic and you have limited tactical options. While it is fun to create an army of the undead, some battles with large numbers of enemies get a bit tedious... Combat is relatively infrequent for most of the game, so this is not a major con.
- Moving around outside of town can be frustrating. While in town there's a map and even fast travel, but out in the wilderness there are invisible barriers in places and only way to figure out if you can go somewhere is to try hovering the cursor over it.
- Graphics. They're not the greatest. But I found them "good enough" to immerse myself in the world.

Neutral:
The character building system is a bit odd and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. You make choices in the prologue that determine your character's stats. Then each chapter you get a fixed amount of skill points that you can spend to help you pass skill checks when your character's stat is not high enough. You gain power by learning new spells but there's no leveling up.

TLDR: Overall it is great game, well worth the money, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes a narrative driven RPG. Check out the demo first as it should give a pretty good idea if you'll like the game.

I had bought it a year ago played for 10ish hours and stopped playing for whatever reason. But I recently decided to start it up again and I am very glad I did. The game is fantastic; Challenging turn-based tactical combat with lots of abilities and spells to acquire, great exploration with lots of secrets to uncover, and a decent story / lore. Some of the sidequests are a bit uninspired (e.g., "bring me 5 monster tails") but since the game focuses on combat so much I suppose that is to be expected.

Dialogue is fairly minimal (it uses a keyword system) but enjoyable. The focus of the game is on the combat, progressing with your character, and acquiring new equipment.

I highly recommend the game to everyone. It is a hidden gem and a steal at only $10. I'm shocked there's only 326 reviews on Steam... clearly a lot of people don't know about this game. My only real complaint is that it left me wanting more. Here's hoping for a DLC or sequel.

The Adventurers is a tactical RPG / mercenary simulator where you acquire quests from towns which usually involve going to a location and slaying monsters or bandits. Sometimes they are simple delivery / escort quests where you just have to go from one town to another. Currently there's only 3 classes (warrior, archer, and thief) but there are plans to add more.

The world map is randomly generated. As you travel you will also find random encounters which are usually a choice between potential combat or avoiding / fleeing. When your party is fatigued you have to make camp. Every party member chooses a task to perform: guarding, repairing equipment (which degrades in combat), hunting, cooking, or socializing (there's a party relationship system that affects adjacency bonuses in battle)

Combat is turn-based on a hex grid. Mechanics seem to be inspired by D&D. There's attacks of opportunity when characters move past enemies. Every turn your character get movement, an action (attack, defend or flee), and a bonus action (drink potions and certain special skills). It's fun and fairly challenging.

I'd cautiously recommend the game now to anyone who enjoys turn-based RPGs if you don't mind some bugs (It's Early Access after all). The demo is worth trying out; it will give you a good sense of whether you'll enjoy the game.

This game is seriously addictive.

It is a life / farming sim in the vein of Stardew Valley but with a darker tone, medieval setting, and more RPG elements. But If farming is not your thing, you could completely ignore that aspect and just forage and hunt for food and focus on doing the quests.

I find the music and graphics quite charming. I haven't advanced far into the main quest yet so I cannot comment on the story.

My only complaint thusfar is that the combat tends to be too easy. Also, if you "die" you lose a small amount of gold and respawn nearby with some of your health restored. I'd like to see some sort of hard difficulty mode implemented. But in spite of this the game is quite fun.

Mechanics: The character creation system is pretty deep and seems to be inspired by D&D. It was hard to choose a class as I kind of wanted to play them all. I eventually settled on Armsmaster.

Visuals: While some love the retro look, I know the low res / pixelated graphics will turn some people off. For me it's not exactly a plus, but I can tolerate it as long as I can tell what's going on, which I usually can. Initially it's a bit difficult to distinguish between characters in combat, but I got used to it after awhile. I've seen some complain about having a hard time reading the pixelated text but with the customization options I didn't find it to be a problem.

Audio: The music is really cool. SFX are great as well. No complaints there.

Story: Excellent! Better than average writing for sure. It's a fairly dark fantasy game with cosmic horror (i.e., Lovecraftian) elements.

Cons: I found the game to be a bit too easy even though I played on hard difficulty. In particular I would love to see the final battle tweaked to be much harder.

Probably my only other complaint with the game is a design decision: when one of your party members is downed during combat they won't get XP for that encounter, meaning squishy characters can lag behind your warriors in terms of leveling up. It makes players want to reload every time someone is knocked out. Very annoying IMO.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one who dislikes this and the developer implied that he'll probably make this an optional setting in an upcoming patch.

I love this game and it left me wanting more. Here's hoping for DLC / sequel of some sort.

Update: Unfortunately the game is being canceled so I no longer would recommend it.

I've only played for a couple of hours but I feel confident that I can recommend this game. It has a strong tabletop RPG feel. The rules and character building seem heavily inspired by 5e D&D from what I can tell. It has decent turn-based tactical combat and the ability to recruit virtually any NPC is a novel feature. It's the kind of game I want to stay up all night playing.

The only downside is it is an Early Access game with all the usual shortcomings, but it seems stable and polished enough to have fun with now.

In case anyone wants to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5O79gX0aqs

Like Stardew Valley and Pokemon had a baby. And it's a fun game. It's something relaxing to play in between sessions of more unforgiving, hardcore games. You can play Toby's Island at your own pace.

Pros
+Good art
+Good Soundtrack
+Lots of secrets to discover and puzzles to solve

Cons
-Slow start
-Can't save anywhere (there is an autosave at points but otherwise you must return home to save.

For the price I think it is a bargain. I've barely scratched the surface but it's something different.

At first, I wasn't too sure about the combat system. It seemed too simplistic (i.e., there weren't going to be enough tactical options). however, I ended up liking it a lot and found the beauty in it's simplicity. It's quite different from any other turn-based strategy game I ever played; sometimes your options are limited but that just has to be taken into account when planning your strategy (the worst thing is when you are forced to knowingly send one of your soldiers into a vicious counter-attack).

Unfortunately, you will sometimes have to endure walls of text. And let me be clear I have no problem reading text in my RPGs. When it's well-written, I like it just fine. But some of the many legends in Legend in Eisenwald (usually encountered as rumors in taverns) are… shall we say, needlessly verbose. They just go on and on and on. And while they are usually somewhat interesting and may even play an important part in the main story, I feel that many of them could be cut in half without losing anything substantial.

Some other things I wasn't crazy about:

*At the end of most chapters, you say goodbye to most, if not all of your soldiers and their gear.. That means all of the units that you worked to build into powerful army will be gone and you'll have to pretty much start over building your army in the next chapter.. leveling up peasants and buying basic equipment.

I understand that this probably done for game balance reasons (and in particular, to give you incentive to conquer enemy castles, which allows you to hire additional units)…. nevertheless, its very irritating to lose all your veteran soldiers and their gear, and the game usually gives very weak rationale for this (e.g., someone tells you that a large force will attract too much attention so you can only take two units… But then as soon as you get the next chapter, you'll likely recruit more troops ASAP). I would've preferred if the game was balanced to take more of my units with me… You spend a lot of time rebuilding your army in each chapter, and while that can be fun for awhile, it inevitably feels like busy work.

*Moving across some areas in the game can be pretty painful… I constantly experienced misclicking as it's seldom clear where you can and can't go on each area... Lots of twists and turns. It would have been nice if you could double click on a point on the map and have it plot a course to the destination… Instead, you have to actually see the place you want to go to, and since your field of view is so small, you will have to constantly rotate the camera to try to see whatever town or building you're trying to get to.

*There were a few instances where enemies respawned. I could understand if they were vampires or something, but no, there in one chapter I remember regular enemies coming back to life and retaking the castle.

*There were some instances in the game where my character makes some morally questionable choices that I would not have liked to do… There's perhaps a couple times in the game when you can make a choice, but for the most part your character is going to complete their quest by any means necessary. It's a bit frustrating in a role-playing game when things like this are decided for you… In the final chapter in particular, it seems my character acts based on a decision I made several chapters ago..

The final chapter dragged on a bit as you have to clear a bunch of castles, but I found the battles to all be rather easy (except the final battle which had an insanely powerful enemy).

Other than that, I really liked the game overall and would recommend giving it a shot if you want to try something different. The music is fantastic and the combat / character class progression system is simple, yet effective.

For my 1st playthrough I chose Isaac as my main character. Took me about 11 hours of play time.

Overall I liked the game and highly recommend it. It broke away from a lot of most tired JRPG cliches (e.g., you aren't a chosen one prophesized to save the world from an ancient evil, you're not a pre-teen, and no one has amnesia!). There are no random encounters and all of the enemies are avoidable (except for bosses and story related combat, of course). The game is fairly linear, but there are a a few points in the story where you get to make narrative choices, but the consequences won't become apparent until future installments (this game is the fist of a planned trilogy). The combat is also a lot more interesting than the typical JRPG because you have some character customization options, there is actually an incentive to use "defend" at times. Very little if any grinding is needed; the game isn't padded with lots of filler combat.

On the downside, cut scenes are not skippable (which becomes extremely annoying if you have to replay boss fights in a couple areas), new weapons are not be sold by merchants and must be found somewhere on the map (a few of them are rather easy to miss), there is currently no difficulty setting; although I found it close to my personal preference for the most part, combat was too easy in the beginning of the game. A few other minor design issues, but otherwise a very enjoyable game; it's like an JRPG for RPG fans who are usually disatisfied with the sub-genre.

Dragonfall DC improves upon Shadowrun Returns in every way.The battles are more challenging and tactical. The enemy AI is better and strategy matters. Melee oriented characters are now a lot more viable because of the changes to cover system. The new missions are really interesting and Blitz's personal mission is hilarious. There are choices to make which actually seem to have significant consequences and multiple endings. I consider this one of my favorite video games of all time. If you liked Shadowrun Returns, you'll love this. Even if you were disappointed with the linearity and brevity of "Dead Man's Switch" I would recommend this game.