Recent reviews by Mista Cow

I have been hoping for a game with this exact premise for years. The only other game that really fills this niche is "My Life as a King" for the Nintendo wii shop. Needless to say I was excited to try it out, but it's incredibly disappointing...

The game fails just on the level of very basic competence. There are two resolution options, the highest of which is 1080p. The in game tutorials explain almost nothing, as do the tool tips or lack thereof. The UI is incredibly tedious as well. It took me a good 15 minutes to figure out how to even save the game. It was buried in the quest list menu for some reason.

From the perspective of actual gameplay, it fails as well. The battle aspect is rather uninteresting and not very deep, the adventurers have almost no autonomy inside battles, but you also require a limited resource to give them any actions. I think it could be serviceable, if the rest of the game was fine.

That brings me to the town gameplay, which is extremely tedious and flat. All the facilities just provide global buffs to all your adventurers, regardless of class. These buffs are not permanent either, you have to run around to each facility to refresh the buffs when they are running out. There was some kind of option to automate this, but again, there's no explanation of how it works, and you cannot automate the resource gathering aspects of the guild. This could have been a very interesting part of the game if there was some kind of simulation element behind this. Like you upgrade the facilities and adventures will go use their money to upgrade their own equipment, maybe with the facilities needing some upkeep. Instead it's the most dull and tedious system possible.

Fishing specifically is also incredibly pointless, like 0 thought put behind it, it's just there to be there. Probably so they could put the fishing screenshot in the marketing material. There's no minigame, you just click fish and get the fish, and you can do it an infinite amount of times. I figured I should mention it since people like fishing in games.

A very disappointing game. I just hope this doesn't set the precedent that the premise is flawed. I requested a refund.

It's really solid, I appreciate the ARPG style weapon affixes a lot. The difficulty scaling is also perfect and the game is consistently challenging.

I see people comparing it to Risk of Rain 2, but I honestly enjoy this game more.

TL;DR: If you love the part of RTS games about where you're trying to constantly counter the opponents units you'll love this too. It's highly addictive and you get into games very quickly.

I don't care much for autobattlers. They are usually very RNG heavy, and rotating between different opponents means you have to focus on building a well rounded comp rather than playing specific counters. This is a completely different experience.

Ironically, even though Autochess was a originally a Warcraft arcade mode, this spin on autobattlers has much more appeal to a RTS lover like me. That's because this game focuses on units rather than heroes. It sort of remind me of Nexus wars from SC arcade if anyone remembers that as fondly as I do.

Being a game about units rather then heroes with crazy abilities, it's very visually clear and easy to tell where your comps are failing. There is a constant back and forth of trying to pick the hard counters to the opponents unit comp, but also trying to preemptively guess how they'll build to counter your eventual counter and so on and so on. It's really fun in the same way that trying to have build an army composition that counters your opponents' in an RTS is, but without the hell of having to maintain your APM. The dopamine levels when you pre-guess what your opponent is going to place and you already have the counter down is insane.

It's quite polished for an EA game. I have yet to run into bugs and I get into matches within seconds. Probably my only complaint is that there's only one repetitive song for each gameplay phase, so I muted music almost immediately.

I think anyone can have a great time with this game if they love strategising and having that feeling of hard reading your opponent. It's fun and addicting in a extremely basic level and I can't recommend it enough.

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✔ Terrible graphics
✔ Spreadsheet simulator
✔ 400 page manual
✔ Higher priced then you would expect
✔ Looks like the target demographic is civil engineers in their 50s

Yep it's a great game.

It's good, just needs more polish and variety of end game content.

Character build depth and itemization, the core of the game, feels really good. There are tons of different possible meta builds for every character class without the systems being overwhelming.

The MTX is unfortunate, but I can understand why they would need the extra cash.

My favorite Rougelike. A true classic. I still play in ASCII mode sometimes but they did a really good job with the payed release.

The temporary item system is still stupid but at least you don't have to spend real money on it now.

Game is a lot of fun, there's some jankyness with the abilities but honestly it makes it better. Basically PUBG with better gun play, class abilities, and a bit more polish IMO.

Rogue legacy but the movement is cracked

Probably the deepest strategy game I've ever played, and that's saying a lot. I love games that look a little grimy but have an overwhelming amount of information, and that's dominions to a tea 1000%.
There's so much faction, spell, and magic item variety that people have be constantly experimenting with things for years and the meta still eludes the community. In fact, there's 3 entirely different metas to figure out depending on what age you play in.

Shockingly, despite sheer breadth of factions and options, everything feels well balanced. Every faction is viable (well. underwater nations may be a little iffy depending on the game setup). Even if a faction is considered a little weak by the community there's a feeling that if someone just dedicated their time to really figuring it out, they could be really strong.

While there is just so much to the game, it is actually quite intuitive once you get the feel for it. There are plenty of deep calculations going on under the hood, but the end results are about what you would expect.
E.g. long spears are good against cavalry and big units, maces are good against armors, axes are good against shields, units take penalties for being surrounded, if you have lots of spammable weak units you should research magic that gives AoE buffs, and etc. The difficulty comes from optimizing and learning specific spells, magic items, and pretender builds that are really good for your faction.

No other 4x games are very focused on competitive mp gameplay. Most focus on the single player experience because of the existence of in-game diplomacy options. It's very unique in being truly meant to be played with other people.

Anyways, in summary there's nothing quite like it, and I can't recommend it enough.