Recent reviews by Narandia

Extremely addictive mix of unexpected genres.
With roguelite/like elements not even being something I tend to enjoy a lot, and despite the incentive for comparatively shorter games instead of the long-term projects found in regular ecosims.
But at the same time, the random factors add variety even as you start up from the beginning again and again, with a long-term progression system and difficulty levels gradually adding more options and challenges.

As an Early Access title, its impressively feature-complete and updates are coming at a steady pace while clearly taking player feedback in mind, with a beta branch to test out early versions of bigger changes, even though such playtesting could be argued to be the entire point of the Early Access version to begin with.

As it is now approaching a full release, my appreciation has only grown as many things have been expanded or fine-tuned, while keeping to the same premise.

An interesting new approach for a classic series, but unfortunately it falls short in many aspects at this stage, and also presents some new issues. Despite the official launch months ago, it still feels unfinished and just recieved massive balance changes alongside a basic difficulty selection feature. Its also fairly short and doesn't have much replay value.

Units appear as troops with individual animations, which is a nice change in theory but also caps every unit type at a max of 10, making basic troops useless later on, but the game also frequently struggles with individual units disconnecting from the unit tile or updating with significant delays. Battle progress in general seems to stall for several seconds after some actions.

General level progression has been reworked fairly significantly and quests frequently offer a few different routes to solving objectives, with the choices affecting the morality system or ideals. Although there are 4 ideals, its only ever a choice in the same grouping, with one often being easier than the other with no drawbacks or consequences to the game overall besides earning points for the chosen path, which in turn determines which higher skill tiers the hero can access.

3 of these Ideals map closely to the 3 types of skill trees found in the older games and are assigned as the prefered path for one of the 3 playable Heroes in practically the same way. Anarchy is the odd one out, providing a mix of economic advantages and combat benefits. Unlike older games, Heroes don't have exclusive skills, but are locked into a certain set of base skills and have different stat priorities while leveling.

Since skill or talent points are only obtained through levelups and the level cap of 30 is fairly easily reached, and the more powerful skills also still have skill requisites on top of being more expensive themselves, the system doesn't actually provide much room for choice if the goal is to obtain one of the 4 top abilities. A lot of skills are also fairly situational and some are practically useless after a while.

These ideals also form the basis for troop factions, rather than the races found in previous games, though in practical terms its a rather similar setup. Order troops are the usual Human type units, Power comprises Dwarves, Ogres and most animals, Finesse troops are magical beings such as golems and elementals, Anarchy is home to Bandits, Assassins and the Undead.

Which leaves out a ton of creatures from the older games. Demons, Elves, Orcs, Lizardmen and the like are completely absent. There is a sort of 5th faction, though it mostly uses corrupted versions of existing units and its inaccessible to the player.

Similarly, there are now 4 schools of magic rather than 3, each comprising of two sub-schools (though that doesn't really matter much in practical terms outside of elemental damage attributes. Learning and upgrading spells works roughly the same as before, except for the addition of Arcane Knowledge requirements and for some reason, crystals have been removed in favor of mana as a general resource (while the amount of total mana available per fight is determined largely by the Arcane Knowledge stat). These stat requirements are as such that only the mage hero can even learn all the spells, nevermind being able to actually upgrade spells fully.

One of the perhaps more unique advantages the new engine has is the ability to explore the world from a more direct perspective and interact more directly with various puzzle elements, which the game features a lot of. Often as quest objectives, but some puzzles are just sitting in the world to find and solve to obtain a treasure chest. That being said, they almost always boil down to activating torches or buttons in the right order based on simple text clues or symbols, or just brute-forcing with no penalty for wrong guesses other than wasted time.

One somewhat worthwhile exception are a series of combat trials with a fixed setup, attempting a sort of chess puzzle challenge. Unfortunately, random factors and AI behaviour can still make these frustrating, and changes made to the game have thrown off the balance of these tests as well.

Another fresh approach to the world is that most battles take place on the overworld, rather than the same basic battlefield based on the terrain where the battle was initiated in the older games. The downside to this however is that fights can only happen in often very obviously designed parts of the world map and can't be bypassed. These areas also tend to be very empty in terms of exploration for hidden goodies or other interactions. Sometimes they will at least be populated with some NPCs after the battle but few have anything to say or offer. Some of these areas are also reused for another fight later, sometimes in relation to the same quest, but some repeats are also purely optional. Any combat arena with enemies is also shown with a clear yellow outline at the border, though some fights are more like hidden ambushes... but even then the game not only autosaves right before it, you can always back out from the battle preview screen.
Portals also often lead to seperate maps with their own combat arena, where the game's approach is a bit inconsistent between just leading straight into the fight and moving back to the regular map or giving players the option to actually explore the arena after the fight (for no actual purpose other than just picking up a quest item).

Compared to the many different areas in the older series, KB II only really has one main map with a pretty standard layout of a few towns, villages, farms etc with some mines, ruins and caves. The tutorial starts in a seperate map with snow, but its a lot smaller and can be fully completed the first time. It is far less open for exploration too, with broken bridges, barricades and other obstacles which only go away when the main story says they should. In one case, a broken bridge was suddenly fixed when I finally found my way to it from the other side very late in the game.

Navigation in general feels quite a lot more cumbersome from this setup. There is a horse to ride around for faster movement, but it handles rather awkwardly for turns. Fortunately, Fast Travel is also available from many locations, though this always dismounts the player and the monuments that define fast travel points are always located outside of towns and other areas of interest. Movement is also somewhat awkwardly stilted compared to other games with this kind of perspective. The player character can't jump, can get stuck on some terrain, the horse can get in the way and some interactable objects can only be approached from certain directions. The map isn't always very readable in terms of elevation either and can sometimes even lack some important information (one quest I put off for later didn't have any map indicators showing up as the objective was behind a portal). Merchants and Recruiters are labelled only by their name on the icon, which isn't helpful.

One last comparison worth mentioning is the overal quality of the game compared to older ones. Though I ran into a very odd problem with the game's installation bugging out on the Direct X package, this game has so far avoided the various quality issues the older games had. No crashes, no inconsistent translations, bugged quests or mechanics of note. Even with the addition of voice acting for every piece of dialogue, I've not noticed any significant mistakes. Its not particularly great voiceacting, but not terrible either.

Overall, I think this new approach definitely has some potential. Many of my gripes in terms of what is missing from the older games might not even detract from the game from a newcomers perspective either. But its also a very short game for the full price and needs a lot more work.

Interesting spin of the strong reboot in 2016's Doom, if a bit frustrating sometimes with an obsession on platforming segments with few checkpoints and an enemy type that ends up contradicting the fast and furious gameplay.

Now ruined by an insanely invasive anti-cheat system that seems ripe for security loopholes.

Charming JRPG with an unique town-building aspect, albeit with a few flaws in execution. Not much is pushing players into actively make use of the town buildings and many of them become obsolete once everything is researched, while some research tasks require citizens with unique skills, so you need to figure out where that specific one person can be found, sometimes with very little hint where (and when) you can recruit them.

On the RPG battle side, there are a lot of strong enemies that can easily kill most party members with one mistake, so I often found myself having to dodge like crazy and hoping that the AI members were smart enough to dodge everything as well. Fortunately, they mostly are, but there are some exceptions. The main story bosses are usually designed a lot better, though their levels ramp up a lot compared to regular enemies and may require some grinding.

There is also a sort-of RTS battle mechanic, but its very simple and rarely proved to be any kind of challenge except for some missions having very tight time limits or suicidal escort targets. Most of them are however optional and few really offer some useful rewards.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this game, though I can still see a lot of potential for improvement.

Probably the best game of the series, though like all of them there's sadly some bugs and shoddy translation going on.

Charming game about being a shopkeeper in an RPG world.
Haggling is the name of the game.
You can even go dungeoncrawling yourself though that part is rather basic.

Great successor to Endless Space, playing more like a Fantasy-style Civilisation and improves many of the flaws of said game while still feeling very similar despite the different setting.

Great 4X Strategy game set in space. Bit buggy and not very intuitive, especially not in diplomacy terms and research. But if you liked Galactic Civilisations this won't disappoint. The newer Endless Legends might be a better starting point since it adresses these problems and plays more like Civilisation.