izigame.me

Great medieval mercenary-company survival sim with a ton of content.
You start off with 4 "companions" and a pony. The companions all come from one of several base classes, depending on which of five starting origins you pick, and after a bit of startup customizing and a short blurb you'll find yourself at the top of a small hill where you can begin your adventures. Two bandits will almost immediately attack you, giving you a chance to learn the combat system, which is turn based on an X-Com or Final Fantasy tactics style grid. So far so good.
The game has a a great deal of depth that slowly reveals itself over time. Your mercenary company, like any good mercenary company, runs on gold and food; your troops have to be fed daily, and paid every three days. You get the gold by fulfilling contracts, most of which will involve hunting down the various bandits that roam the county but you can also get contracts for delivering messages, locating ancient tombs (which you can then explore and plunder on your own time), bringing goods somewhere, that sort of thing. Mercenary companies naturally gravitate to trade, so of course you can do that as well on your own without any contracts, although this does require traveling to other counties which is quite dangerous until you get some levels. There is a plotline that you can follow, but there is no hurry.
As for the food - well, your companions all start the game with one profession, Tinkerer. But there are ten, and you have to uncover them as you go through the game by getting yourself into situations that require them (like touching a forge uncovers Blacksmithing, and touching a wood stump will uncover Woodcutting). The professions unwind slowly, like the rest of the game, and you can really make a tremendous amount of stuff with the crafting professions, if you can find the resources. You learn things with "knowledge", which you can acquire in various ways, like traveling the world, making new things, and having your Scholar uncover secrets. The Cook - because of course there needs to be a company cook - is a particularly important position, as good food gives bonuses to your troop, and they will complain if they don't get hot meals. Build a cooking pot as soon as you can, to discover the Cook profession and turn raw food items into real food, and cut down on their grumbling.
Combat-wise, your starting classes (of which there are seven - swordsman, warrior, brute, spearman, ranger, archer, and pugilist) further branch out at level 3 into three additional advanced classes for each of the starting ones, which determine the armor and weapons they can wield, and gives them different skills. With twenty-one different class choices the combat can get quite diverse and you can handle battles in a variety of ways. The most interesting part of the base mechanics to me is that the game lets you decide which of your characters to go during any given time - you take a turn with any person, then they take one with a specific enemy, etc. - which allows for a lot of flexibility in the combat puzzles. I also like that you have armor and hit points, and your armor is basically hit points but it has to be repaired after every battle (with raw materials on hand, or gold at the local smith) but your real HP recover instantly after the battle. Which is nice! (Although you will pick up injuries if your HP get too low during the fight.) The enemies start off rather straightforward in the starting county but as you branch out and go to different counties they will develop different tactics and buffs and attacks and you will fight different foes and let's just say there's a big difficulty spike, assuming you're playing region locked difficulties. (I would advise against the default difficulty where the enemies always scale to you, I have hated that mechanic ever since Oblivion introduced it to RPGs - it makes you feel like leveling up is bad, especially on higher difficulties, and that's a terrible way to play an RPG.)
The gameplay loop is great fun, and as mentioned there is a great deal of content - as of this writing I am about 40 hours into my extreme difficulty ironman playthrough and I am barely touching the second county (out of what looks like five or six). Speaking of difficulty the game is reasonably forgiving on lower difficulties, but on the highest mode it is really punishing, as not only is combat more difficult but your company requires a good deal more gold, and your characters will probably die now and again (as you skip the "dying" state at 0 hp and instead go straight to "dead"). But it's still great fun, and as you get higher and higher level you will have to do some hard thinking through the mechanics of the combat puzzles. At least there is a "run away" button you can press if things get too nasty, although it does a lot of damage to your company on the way out.
I am missing on describing some things - like your companion relations, and companion (and company) traits, and how you can capture animals and people and tame the animals to fight for you, and stealing things - but this review is quite long enough already by Steam standards and since I only got to the second county so far I am surely missing a bunch of stuff anyway. Suffice to say the game is very well developed and thought out, and is a high quality medieval mercenary-company sim. I loved Battle Brothers, and this seems to me to be an improvement on their formula in every way. Worth picking up.