To me the new content is alright but doesn't particularly feel worth the price or effort at this point unless you really enjoy the game. It seems that most of the substance here is in the new free Kingdoms mode released alongside it; which is mainly just a more excruciating and grindy version of the main game.
The Abomination is relatively ordinary, with the explicit gimmick of lacking ability customization in exchange for having two combat forms. Like other characters in this game the Abomination's specializations are a mixed bag of some that are very influential and effortless to get value out of, while others give the impression of requiring work to even make them tangibly useful. The character is just very ordinary by the standard of the games quality.
The new area is also ordinary. It's a new environment with some new enemies and some new loot, but it's relegated to only appearing at certain points in a run. It's presence only adds some overarching variety to the experience, otherwise the game remains mostly the same aside from this very specific part. There is nothing particularly impressive or unimpressive about it, it's just more of the same type of content as usual.
Once again the only significant new goals that the player gets out of this content are achievement collecting, and once again the main daunting achievement is win streaking the full game with the new character and not having them die at any point. It's a decent excuse to replay the game; until the new character gets killed by literally anything at some point several hours in and now the whole process needs to be restarted. All for a Steam Achievement with zero ingame rewards.
The experience of getting a new character and grinding for their achievements was more novel the first time around with the Blinding Blade DLC, but the novelty has faded now; especially considering the price of this. The player can generally extract all of the substance out of this content in an hour or less, the only lasting goal is the tedious achievements.
Meanwhile, the new Kingdoms mode is mostly just a more inconvenient version of the main game; with many identical mechanics that have been strung out to be less accessible. The player's goal is more vague, all progression completely resets after every run and various new mechanics have also been added to mainly inconvenience the player.
The player cannot customize the abilities or specializations of their party during creation, all of these things must be manually unlocked and purchased at inns. But only inns that have been upgraded to do so, and only if the player physically travels to one. The player can also swap characters in and out of their team, but only if they physically travel to where the new recruit is in the world. The player is actively pressured to do this as party members will lose their maximum health the longer they stay in the group. The only way to recover is by physically dropping the character off at a location for awhile, or using one of various random methods that are completely unreliable. This also means that the player has to physically travel around taking on and upgrading fresh new recruits if they want to create a network of strong characters while avoiding the health penalties. It also means that if the player is trying to get any of the numerous character specific achievements in the game this mode explicitly punishes them for it by debilitating longterm party members.
Because character upgrades and other basic services are locked behind inn upgrades the player also has to manually upgrade every inn across the world to develop a network of decent hubs. Which also require upgrades to gain the necessary defenses for surviving an enemy siege. This makes it harder for the player to actually manage the relationships and statuses of their party as they are constantly haemorrhaging resources on progressing everything else.
The gameplay is heavily driven by the player physically travelling around to defend inns from sieges. However it's not always possible or ideal to reach every siege in time, forcing the player to leave some inns to defend themselves. Inns only have a feasible chance of surviving this if the player has explicitly upgraded it with defenses by travelling there already. Any besieged inn that has not been upgraded in that way is doomed unless the player manually intervenes; but even with those defense upgrades an inn can still lose the siege. There's no specific guideline on what level of defense upgrading is needed for an inn to survive at different stages of the game, so it's basically just mandatory trial and error to learn. Also if the player loses too many inns the run ends, and the inns are completely scattered across the world; and they all require these upgrades to survive an unreachable siege which could hit any of them.
The other gameplay element that drives the Kingdoms mode is the overarching quest string, which has the player follow simple clues to perform specific tasks that advance the adventuring narrative. At first the quest locations are hinted with very obvious key words, but I eventually reached a point where the key words became more vague and my main guess was apparently wrong. Nothing else in the game especially matched up with the key words otherwise. At this point, if the player does not know what to do next in the quest they literally just have to run around trying random things in hopes of stumbling across the answer. Also the whole game mode is on a timer, if the player takes too long for any reason the run ends.
I played for quite a few hours and only got about a quarter of the way through the timer on average difficulty, and in that time I was barely able to get around to giving most of the inns basic upgrades. By then those upgrades seemed to become obsolete, causing a siege that I couldn't reach to be doomed because the upgrades I set up hours ago when I was over there weren't enough anymore. Even while constantly fighting battles I was gaining resources at about the rate I was spending them, with character relationships constantly deteriorating by way of just choosing any option in a fight.
It seems that a full run can take upward of ten to twenty hours depending on how long the main quest takes when the player doesn't have to play guessing games with its text descriptions; and how many resources the party needs to defeat whatever final boss there is. Which means the player can lose up to twenty hours of progress if too many inns are destroyed or the timer runs out. Or maybe even sooner if their party wipes beyond all hope of recovery.
Thus in my experience the new game mode is mostly defined by inconvenience, with significantly more drawn out and fractured mechanics than in the base game; and no progression elements that can be locked in to avoid future chores. It clearly has a tangible amount of mechanical nuance that players can learn and manage to make the experience unique and granular, but only if they slog through the whole learning process all the while being punished for their lack of knowledge.
Beyond fighting the new exclusive faction and grinding PNG achievements it doesn't feel like there's much of a draw to play the new mode compared to the much more convenient and straightforward main game. This combined with the ordinary yet fleeting new DLC makes this batch of content overall quite lacklustre to me.
If you're interested in finding some content that I do positively recommend it can be found on my curator page here .
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