izigame.me

It's a good first attempt, but I wouldn't want to pay full price for this.
Expeditions: Viking is an RPG with tactical combat like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Wasteland or the newer Shadowrun Returns. The setting is historical fiction, as in these Danes could've lived around the era of the game, so it's nice change of pace from elves and dwarfs. The story is decent, the characters are interesting, and there's a number of different ways to build your party and tackle the challenges. It's definitely got some positives.
The negatives are where it gets me. The UI looks okay, but it's a pain to navigate. Clickable objects are rendered in 3D, but this also means they are often occluded by other objects, so you spend a few extra seconds each time you want to click on something to loot it just trying to get the angle right so you can actually click it. There are a lot of lootables, so this adds up. Sometimes your clicks on your party members just don't register. Figuring line-of-sight for archers can is problematic, especially when the AI doesn't have that issue. There is no option to change a decision you made because there's no option to confirm. As soon as you click, it's done. It can be really hard to know what status effects actually do because the affects of those effects are only shown in the tooltip for the action that causes them. It took me a while to figure that 'harried' does nothing on its own, only working as a setup for a combo. The game doesn't hide info from you, but it doesn't do a good job of making it easily accessible, either.
The difficulty is uneven. Sometimes you get first turn in a combat, and sometimes the enemy does. Even when you don't go first you always get a round to move before the bloodshed starts, which is nice because my ranged vikings always seem to be in front of my melee guys. There doesn't appear to be a way to control your formation, so this is frustrating, and doesn't have an easy solution. Getting the first attack obviously can be a huge advantage, but there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason as to who gets to make the first move.
It's hard. This can be mitigated somewhat by dropping the difficulty in the options, but it starts out hard, so you only look at turning the difficulty down after you've been abused heavily in a few combats. Maybe that doesn't leave the best early impression.
Finally, the only lose condition is running out of time. This makes it possible to lose a fight or two and still come back, but this can also trigger a failure cascade. If you lose and have some troops wounded it makes them less effective and more likely to suffer more losses. Burning your resources on trying to make up for your losses means you don't have those resources to spend elsewhere. The end result, the failure cascade, is that you fight a losing battle for however long it takes to lose the game. At which point you wonder why you didn't just save scum that important fight in the beginning, rather than losing fight after fight for the next twenty hours. I don't have summers and weekends to spend on gaming at my age, so I'd rather just redo that fight. Also, for a piece of historical fiction this doesn't make much sense. How do my vikings survive a defeat by wolves? Why wouldn't the wolves just eat the defeated vikings?
For what it's worth the UI is the biggest issue for me, and the sequel has a much better UI with a totally different engine. I like the flexibility of the skill system, but there aren't enough options to make it viable, so I can see why it was changed for the sequel. I tried this to see how it compared to the sequel, and I came away feeling that Expeditions: Rome is this but better. Get this one on sale, or not at all.