Recent reviews by Carobu

I've dropped a decent bit of time in now and think I've experienced a fair bit of the game. So far, after playing the Beta a bit and seeing the direction it's going, I like it. It's a fun game, with a lot of depth and the factions on the surface may seem similar, but with time to flesh out this will be a very fun game.

Right now the issues I see are the lack of proper diversity with the cities, and only having a single city per region basically makes any bonuses to help defend the city are virtually useless. Complaints about the game being too hard are simply being made by people that are bad at video games. I've beaten a few games on easy and normal now and it's certainly not too hard. The complaint I will say is that there's virtually only one 'valid' play style, otherwise the game *is* impossible. In order to actually beat the game now, you basically have to throw all your units into a single doom-stack and run that around the map clearing out your starting area. If you don't do this, you'll capture everything in your area way too late and when you AI comes for you, you'll never stand a chance as they will simply doom-stack as well. There's virtually no viable way to make smaller armies useful right now because of the doom-stacks. If a lower unit cap was put on the generals, I think you'd greatly increase the play styles that were viable and allow people to actually think about their army comp beyond making their doom stack.

Also, the inclusion of no proper multiplayer is baffling to me, why wasn't that out on release? You can steam play together with a friend and it actually works very well, but no proper multiplayer really should have been out on launch.

So overall, a very good first impression, I do think it needs work and don't think it's 'complete' yet at all. I'm going to call it a 3.5/5 and with a few updates and a few small tweaks this will easily move up to 4.5 or 5 even. I don't regret the purchase.

The game is honestly very good, and I've really enjoyed the time I've put into it. So it's sort of hard for me to not recommend the game. But I sincerely can't given that I've had it for nearly THREE years, it's been in early access for just about 5, and it's STILL not complete. You'll have great fun grinding through the game, getting through the levels and then...that's just it. There's nothing. There's no end.

The devs have somehow managed to not finish this game in half a decade. It's absolutely unacceptable. This game will likely never be completed and because of that, I can't recommend anyone purchase it. It's an absolute shame, because if the devs could just sit down and actually finish the game, it would 100% be worth a purchase price of probably even more than the $15 it's currently set at. This game is absolutely abusing the early access model and I genuinely do not believe the devs have any intention to ever finish the game.

EDIT:

It's been TWO years since I originally posted this review, the game is STILL not done. It's been in dev ~11 years at this point and still doesn't have a 1.0 release.

I used to genuinely enjoy this game and it's playstyle, and while I still think it has great gameplay elements, there's simply not enough diversity in the missions, and the addition of microtransactions completly ruins what was a really fun reward system in game. Until they remove the microtransactions the devs promised to never put in, I cannot recommend anyone purhcase this.