Recent reviews by DocNasty

Definitely needs some polish. TLDR; Worth the demo, currently at a pre-alpha with content, smooth gameplay and AI is less dumb (but not smarter) than a lot of similar games, worth $20 to $30 at the moment.

Long version I will update if I play any more, the balance of dwarves is still a bit crazy, and the AI does not seem to like to sit on tasks for a long time so things like food production go up and down really fast, it is hard to tell how many people I overall need. Seems like in the long run it incentivises you to slowly add permanent workers to certain places just to feel more consistent. Only 1 enemy in the demo, really wish it would let you play past that point and just summon 2x enemy each wave just so we can see stress-test of how much it can handle. I only got to 120 dwarves and it seems to keep going smooth, I may test it again without triggering the finale and see how many dwarves you can make before things break.

This is definitely a thumbs up game, your not going to find realistic strategy from the enemy here, they kind of clump and push straight forward. But it gives you enough Total War vibes to feel strategic, Rogue-like enough to feel powerful, and TBS enough to laugh at pixel death. I found myself auto-resolving a lot of the early fights but playing every time I got a new type of unit. Not gonna do a pro-con for this one yet, I haven't found enough glaring con's beyond balancing or improvement suggestions.

A lot of good concepts, I am sure a lot of people will comment Palworld but I think the flying mechanic as well as the airships really stand out, I am holding my breathe that they make major improvements because at the moment you are locked to a time-limit that leaves little time to make it to the airship stage to even test it out... I can't stand timed demo's when it comes to building, they should just lock levels or content instead.

I am recommending the demo for a play, but if this game ends up being more than 49.99 or doesnt get some serious polish it will liekly be a no on the full game.

TLDR; Worth downloading and trying the Demo, may not be worth more than $30 and may not get very far based on current Kickstarter model and goals. I think if the modding is good and they extend the skills quite a bit then it might be a good buy for something different.

So to start off, the game is not amazing... however it is pretty good and it has so many different mechanics than we are used to in this genre that I think it deserves at least a +1 for not copy-pasting.

Pros =
-Procedural Gen: I love procedural gen in these kind of games, we will still have to see how good it is.
-Destructive maps: New for this genre and I think it works, it sometimes feels weird deforming the ground under you when using a big ability, but then it also feels good when you use an exploding teleport that gouges the earth beneath you.

Cons =
-Just going to say its not balanced, skills are unpolished for a demo, difficulty creep is non-existent as a lvl 3 dies in 4 hits hile a lvl4 dies in like 23 hits.
-Overzelous on hiding things, found a few hidden dungeons underground that I only happened to find when using abilities that break the ground.

Ill update more as I test some new maps.

TLDR; I give it a 5/10, unfortunately most of those points are just because the game is playable, does not crash, little to no bugs, and plays smoothly. Loses all of its points on gameplay and design, It is worth the download and try for yourself as it is a small game.

Pros:
- It runs (which unfortunately is a pro for games launching)
- Movement is smooth, missing some elements like crouch-sliding keeping momentum.
- Hits feel impactful
- Good spread of common weapon varieties
- Destructive mechanics for walls felt solid
- Base and Siege engine design, actually feels wonderful the first time you see them

Cons:
- Audio is completely whack, someone walking 20 feet away behind a building sounds like they are walking on your face.
- 1 base feels good, the other 3 felt way too big for 3v3 (Ill change if they add 5v5)
- Respawn mechanic favor's sweaty camping
- Sliding feels boring
- The character models are weirdly low-res in many areas and changing settings just makes it worse.
- Harvesting is boring, felt forced to make it seem 'different'
- Siege Engine felt like a gimmick, it doesnt really give attackers an advantage and is only useful against 1 of the bases that no one should pick.

Neutral:
The dev's missed a lot of opportunities, the big siege engine was actually quite impressive but you don't respawn on it, why not? The bases are built for attackers instead of defenders, some of the bases should never be picked no matter what because the defense points can be accessed by a single wall and completely exposed to make attackers jobs easy with only 2-3 walls destroyed, other bases require multiple walls destroyed to get to them. The mirrored map supports a 'competitive fairness' but it makes the game feel copy/pasta.

Game is not in a working state, With 37k players during beta at peak it is completely crashed for the first 7 hours of launch (and it is still going on as of writing this) with only 21.5k players. Cannot recommend at all until the dev's fix these mistakes.

TLDR;

Would not recommend where it is now, CoOp is a lot of fun but it is so expensive to play as each commander costs like $5 minimum. Campaign is alright, amazing writing but just like coop its not worth $30 for about 3 hours of gameplay.

Long Version:

Pros:
- A lot of differences to other RTS's, does not feel copy-paste
- Gameplay is smooth and different factions are both diverse but still easy to pick up
- Factions feel like they specialize in one thing over another, which makes you really think about what to play

Cons:

- Some factions are too specialized, so they can feel bland and act like one-trick-ponies.
- The cost, it is ridiculous for a game that is still missing about 60% of the overall game with only 1 campaign and minimal maps.

General feel of the game: More in-depth than Diablo 4, less complicated than POE4, honestly takes the best of both games into 1 with very few faults.

Pro's
+ High number of legendary's and high drop chance, giving you access to fun tools to enjoy.
+ Early access to fun skills, not locked behind days of grinding to get to the fun builds
+ Smooth gameplay and easy to speed through the story after the first playthrough (most scripted events are skippable

CON -
- Mastery was not very well explained, although did not take long to figure out
- Game starts a little too easy at times, started my first character in Hardcore and even on bosses I rarely worry about dying, though it may be my broken build.


tldr: Scratches the itch of a the ARPG genre without being too easy or casual, easy to get my dumb friends as well as the sweaters to both enjoy and play.

Its OK, we will do Pro/Con first before my thoughts... If I mention GOT it is Ghost of Tsushima, I will limit my references but it is good to note as they are incredibly similar styles.

tl/dr: If you like older AC games, play with instant assassinations, if you like Samurai and the idea of Yasuke then play Ghost Of Tsushima, not a bad game but needs a lot of updates to fix the problems. 6/10

PRO
- Beautiful Scenery and towns,
- It runs well, I have had stuttering once or twice but it is not bad
- The initial problems with climbing and running on Naoe were mostly fixed in the last patch, so they are updating and making it more playable.
- fighting is relatively smooth, very much like origins but combat lasts a little long sometimes.
- I like the instant assassination option, feels less like an RPG and more like just an open world AC game.

CONS
- Game is built to follow roads.
- Mastery is terrible, Knowledge Points are terrible.
- Riposte/Counter attack feels awkward.
- Abilities are generally weaker then just parry.
- Some enemies with fans just call in airstrikes from no-where.
- They clearly want you to play Yasuke.
- You cannot sprint with Yasuke, he just charges randomly boxes and people.

NEITHER
- Kunai are busted

Do not let the hours played fool you, after the first 12 hours I started just AFK riding across the map to unlock fast-travel locations so there are quite a few hours of eating dinner, bathroom breaks, and watching movies.

You can climb the mountains but it feels like you are Skyrim horse-glitching up the rock faces most times, the game really wants you to just follow the road and makes off-road area excessively dense foliage to hide sub-par graphic areas as 'filler'. Knowledge activities are 5+ minute stops out of the way to a temple, gather some scrolls to not read, to get 1/10 for the next tier. Worst part is only 2 of the 20 temples I have been to were actually used for story, otherwise they are throw-away locations only for knowledge. All of the knowledge activities are awful. If you fight more than 2 people then every time you parry someone will instantly swing at you forcing you to parry them instead of counter-attacking making 'posture' attacks (charge attack) harder to perform, and enemies can hit you during the animations with no animation-cancelling. GOT made enemies stagger when abilities were used but here they just swing away at you. The fan enemies calling in random arrow barrages is very RPG-like when your in the middle of a forest in a one-on-one and they call in fire arrow barrage from the rice fields. Finally yasuke does 1,250 dmg to Naoe's 432 damage at my current level in combat which would make sense if you build Naoe as assassin, but if you build her for Combat she still does less than half his damage when he is built for literally anything else, and he can still assassinate people!

It is a nice little game, a little basic but it has charm. It has a looped gameplay at first when getting to the second area but once you unlock more things to play with it starts feeling a bit more open to how you want to play. Will update later in the game, only just getting to the 3rd zone.