izigame.me

I understand that this is the black sheep of the Expeditions series, but I ended up liking it more than I thought I would given its less than stellar reputation and the fact that I've never found the Viking Age to be particularly interesting.
I'll start off with the bad:
- I did have issues with crashes. I understand on release that this was a much bigger problem than I experienced, but even though it's a lot better than it once was I still encountered some crashes. Most of these were in the later part of the game (after you arrive to Britain.) Mostly it was just a minor annoyance thanks to frequent autosaves, but I experienced a crash immediately after a particularly difficult battle (last autosave was right before the battle) that made me rage quit the game for about a week.
- I wasn't really a fan of the time limit. It wasn't particularly unforgiving or anything. The time limit is a little tight during the Denmark part of the game, but it's fairly generous after you make it to Britain. I was able to experience most of the side content with some time to spare. Admittedly this was with using a guide to help with some of the more obscure side quests and I could see it actually being a problem if you were blindly exploring on your own. I don't know, I don't really think a time limit adds anything to the game and disincentivizes exploration to a degree, which is not something you want in a game about exploration.
Now for the good:
- I liked the character customization in this game. Conquistadors did have some limited customization in the form of promotion, but it's a lot more fleshed out in this game. For starters, the PC is actually a combatant this time around so how you build your character actually matters in combat in addition to out of combat. You're able to recruit a set number of named characters whose stats are predetermined, though you can play around with their gear and abilities, as well as recruit a couple mercenaries that are fully customizable and if minmaxed properly will be better than any of the named story characters.
- I actually found the characters to be pretty likable. Having good characters is always crucial to any RPG and I felt like the ones in this game had a lot more personality to them than in Conquistadors. I ended up liking the main cast so much that I primarily used them even if my customized mercs were better in combat because I liked their interactions so much. The berserker in particular was the real stand out.
Mixed Feelings:
- I feel like the difficulty was a little better balanced this time around. Conquistadors was pretty front heavy in it's difficulty but by the end you were steam rolling everything if you knew what you were doing. This game manages to keep a bit of a challenge throughout though that's mostly because of how broken ranged units are. In Conquistadors, ranged units were pretty worthless, so it feels like they overcorrected in this game because they are incredibly over-powered. I can't tell you how many times I lost a character or two in the first round of fighting because of bullshit enemy archers pulled. The good news is you can do the same with your own archers.
- Camp management and over-world random events. I feel like camp management is easier and overall less important than it was in Conquistador. Not really sure if that's good or bad. The bullshit random events from the previous game return so I recommend saving often in case you get fucked by RNG and get a bullshit random encounter or event (looking at you wolf ambush). These can often times be more difficult than anything in the main storyline.
All in all I liked it well enough I suppose. It definitely wasn't as bad as I was led to believe.