Eador: Masters of the Broken World Review (dragut)
The game has a special beauty, calling you to play but has a very boring and grindy side too, so I have mixed feelings against the game. As this Masters of the Broken World (MotB) is better than all other Eador titles, I rate this positive. But I will mention negative parts mainly here.
And I will tell you the most important part here at the beginning.
If you buy the game you will notice that, very small fraction of the players finished the game (6% like that), and only 13.3% of players finished the First Shard in Campaign (Shard: map, episode, mission, campaign turn, whatever you call it). You can find the same data by simply checking Steam Achievements of the game, which "The Wise Old Man" achievement (by having a dialogue with first rival faction mage: Oinor) appears just after beating the first shard (after tutorial) and it is the beginning of the game!
So between 6-13.3% of players played Eador campaign properly!
This is terrible news. it means most of the players didn't make progress in Campaign at all, but they stopped playing in early episodes (after all the grindy, boring progress).
On the other hand, this is definitely best in Eador series over Eador Imperium and Eador Genesis. Eador MotB doesn't have slow turn paces like Imperium (Eador series are already very slow paced games) and obviously has better graphics than Genesis and has other improvements over it.
Also Imperium looks almost similar like MotB already and MotB is better and more fun to play for that reason.
However all Eador games suffer same slow economy and slow progression which eat MANY hours to progress in a single Tiny or Small map. Sorry, you can't rush to conquer enemy, when all hexes between you and enemy are full of monsters in challenging difficulties too, so in order to beat them, you need to progress and it will take HOURS with grindy battles.
And the need to repeat all those battles in EVERY SINGLE shard is simply boring (has reasons). Especially, when most of the battles have same patterns with same limited battle-map size does not give you a liking to battles much (you can't flank enemy with horse archers or flank enemy ranged units with your cavalry, because map is too narrow to maneuver. You are either supposed to defend or charge at the enemy directly which your only tactical options are terrain features and different abilities of the characters).
Further, you cannot transfer your progress to next shard easily too, you have to pay very expensive amount of energy and you will find yourself dismissing the hero completely at the end of the shard/mission or only transferring the hero and had to remove all items and soldiers from your army which is a very tedious task.
As a result, you have to train a new hero in many of the shards you play and develop him up to 15-20 levels everytime with grindy battles in order to have power to beat the enemy in the shard. There are wrong gameplay designs sadly.
Bugs: I encountered bugs in early Campaign which persuades you to not progress further, however after the first shard (the shard after tutorial), the game becomes playable. Thanksfully you don't encounter same bugs at same points, by repeating a game "load" you have an opportunity to pass the bug. The bugs are generally errors happening in the background (inner workings of the game) and it makes the game unplayable by freezing or requiring you to crash the game manually. Sometimes there is no problem at all and sometimes you are in a loop of bugs. Bugs happened especially in Tutorial and next Campaign episode, now on 2nd and 3rd shards I didn't encounter any bugs.