izigame.me

I think 500 hours has taught me enough about the game that I can give a fair review. The game is fantastic and the gameplay loop is enough to get a lot of players entranced into the game. The skills are great, the stats and weapons are balanced and the dungeon crawling is fun and engaging even though its a turn based game. Ironman mode (highly suggest after a few playthroughs) is incredibly challenging but rewarding. IN MANNSHIRE AND OSBROOK.

The guards:
The base gameplay is great, but lets get to the issues. First off I am currently level 27 Jorgrim grinding out for the achievements i can still receive on this playthrough. There is no semblance or reason in which a normal Brynn guard can 1v1 me. I understand the developers didn't like people killing the guards in Brynn, but to make it so my nearly maxed character, lordly axe and relict sword, best artifact armor in the game can't 1v1 a spear boi in the capital city doesn't make sense. I have fought the troll and the manticore and one of these guards are harder.

(Tip to new players if you want to steal, have a full inventory then when the character asks you to hand the item over, left click on the monitor away from the dialogue and the item should drop you should "hand it over" and it'll still be on the ground for you to pick up).
Moving on, the the stealing mechanics. Oh the stealing mechanics. So if you steal from a settlement the goods will be stolen for a period of time according to the price. As the wiki says and is portrayed you can sell nails immediately but silk you steal will remain stolen for quite a while. So if you have stolen goods in your inventory the guards will check you way more often. I do not know what it is about the coding but you can walk around a town and they won't check you constantly, you have a single stolen item they do. The inconsistency between this and the power level of the guards make it feel like they are somewhat omnipotent in just about every playthrough.

Travel:
As many others have pointed out travel kinda sucks. Unless you are specifically running a ranged, survival based character it is pointless to explore without places of interest or a specific build in mind. Getting to dungeons isn't the problem as at most they are 5 tiles away and the least would be 3. As a medium armor character its not a problem, as a light armor character unless you have the most expensive set of clothes you should be fine. Heavy armor is punished directly by this. Due to you only having access to a carriage that takes you between towns you have already visited, it makes exploring a hassle, and far away locations and distant dungeons a slog to get to. The caravan update has been announced but still the current map is 38x35 with some of those tiles being mountain ranges you can't really access. Still leaving 1000 tiles of exploration with a lot of POI being randomly generated in a certain type of biome (I took about 30% of the map away as it is a gross overestimation on how many tiles are unexplorable and it's still left at 1000 tiles).

Be prepared this game is a walking simulator

The difficulty:
This game's difficulty in the beginning parts is great, in the mid-game it feels fantastic and in the end game it is downright horrible. Osbrook and Mannshire have very fair quests, the difficulty only spikes at level 5 and then again at level 10. The difficulty spike at around 12 to 15 is the one that seems downright unfair. If you go to Brynn below level 10, prepare your Gwynnels Potion, and your ass because you are going to be dying and rerunning that dungeon for a bit. Once you get to level 10 things seem to get better with the Brynn dungeons but I think the game should prioritize you into running Osbrook and Mannshire quests before going to Brynn. Someone in one of these comments talked about players not being suggested to continue grinding earlier dungeons rather than Brynn ones which I think should be prioritized as it would help better prepare new players on the dangers. And I know the argument of BuT tHe DaNgEr LeVeLs, which doesn't apply as in mid-game the brynn dungeons are categorized at the same level as mannshire which doesn't help explaining difficulty to newer players. Apart from that, game becomes a cakewalk after level 20.

The development
This game has been in beta since 2020. Me and my friends picked up this game with the troll update and have been playing since 2021. In that time, armor and weapons have been reworked, skill trees got their passives removed (still malding over that) and became more streamlined, some enchants and potions have been added, curses have been changed, pelts are locked behind survival (even more mad about that) and lots of more enemies and later game. Brynn was an entire city of gold update and beginning stealth mechanics (noise produced) were removed. A lot has been changed but there hasn't been much update nor communication. The road map isn't accurate as a lot of features weren't added or weren't promised and added. I'd just like a bit of common ground and communication between developers and player base. A scheduled date for an update, rather than a road map with generalized dates for all the updates. Me and a friend love this game we do speed-runs against each other in hardcore to see who can last the longest and get the highest level. But, it's so incredibly hard to come back to this game when there is nothing in the works. The caravan update has been teased for god knows how long now and I've been waiting for a 4th magic tree or even DISEASES for ages. Character creation was the lowest priority a while back and now its one of the highest, yet still nothing.

TLDR: Fantastic game, caveats being inconsistent guards, travel being a pain, difficulty in the later stages and the hell like development cycle. I absolutely love and adore this game, bought the supporter pack and will be putting thousands of hours to come, but I cannot recommend this game as it stands now due to the roadmap being an ever changing goalpost.