izigame.me

You play as a band of mercenaries making their way across a beautiful isometric overworld; moving from town to town, taking on quests, camping etc while managing resources for fighting and travelling. The battle system is decent turn based combat on a flexible grid system. Each class of mercenary has a skill tree, levels, attributes, traits & professions (which allow them to do things like tinker or cook, and give them combat bonuses). Line of sight also actually matters; I shot my own rogue in the back with my archer by mistake. And you can rename characters, which is always fun.

Pros
- In combat, instead of it going Ally 1, Ally 2, Enemy 1, Ally 3, it goes "any of your units", "Enemy 1", "any of your units", "Enemy 2" etc, so you get lots of control over things like focus fire or making the most of where an enemy is at that moment, rather than in some games where you can only delay your character's turn.
- You can customise your units' appearance and name them
- The engagement mechanic is really nice. If you attack a unit, you become engaged with it. This enables backstabbing, and opportunity attacks if one of you leaves. It also ties into other combat abilities.
- Units take more damage if they're surrounded
- Everyone can be inspected
- Sometimes you get finisher "cutscenes" where you see your character end an enemy
- Status effects like mud, poison, slow, burning
- Environmental effects: lightning, rock falls
- Everything is voice acted
- Your characters unlock more traits over time based on what happens in combat
- Each character can have one of 8 professions for crafting and gathering
- Occasionally when resting, small events happen with your companions, like getting sick or someone thinking a new companion doesn't fit in, then you have 3 choices of how to react, with different outcomes, sometimes needing items for special outcomes
- There's a system whereby every new thing you do earns you knowledge (like discovering places, or creating an item for the first time). Knowledge can be spent on perks or crafting recipes
In addition to knowledge, there are also 4 main paths. Each path has a set of challenges. Completing challenges fills the path progress bar, which unlocks new kinds of perks
- There are old ruins to explore. Fights in these ruins are pitch black, and it matters if your characters are holding torches. Fire also lights up the area and reveals nearby units

Cons
- After 10 hours in the first zone and doing some reading, it looks like the game doesn't change - new regions are just more of the same. Given that's the case, it's kind of entertaining, but way too long and repetitive
- Don't get me to make permanent game-changing decisions before telling me how the mechanics work. How am I supposed to know if -1 carrying capacity is a lot, or if -1 happiness when resting matters?
- Lacking in tutorials. Valour points unexplained. No idea when units get healed
- Lag between when you use abilities and when they happen. For example, using Encouragement - my warrior shouts, then 3 seconds later my allies gain the effect
- After a fight, you're given the option to repair one person's armour in exchange for one Raw Material. - Materials cost money, and it repairs 10 armour points. Id' like to maximise how much repair value I get, but the game doesn't show you how much armour you're missing on that screen, so it will eat up your materials
- People with first aid can't heal themselves
- If you accidentally sell something, you have to buy it back at full price
- You can give ranks to members of your party, like assigning a captain. That's great, but the game doesn't tell you what that does. I had to google the fact that it gives them a new ability to use.
- You can sort the inventory, but you can't filter it - which makes it difficult to see how much food you're carrying
- All the wikis are out of date. None of them mention the Pugilist class
- Although the game appears to be about adding more companions and growing your party... there's literally no upside to doing so. Having more people means more gold expenditure and more food consumption. Battles add more enemies if your party gets larger, and fewer if you don't, which means there's absolutely no point in it.