Recent reviews by KhisanthMagus

The game is legitimately fun to play, and I had a great time playing it. However, I am not recommending it at this time because frankly the game is very unfinished. While walking down roads you will encounter enemies every 10 feet, and the entire game it is just variations on the same handful of enemies: goblins, bandits, harpies, lizard thingies, and at night skeletons and zombies. These are the only enemies you will fight the entire game, other than the boss monsters. And you will see them a lot, because as I said before you will get attacked every 10 feet.

The story is also very unfinished, with basically everything you did for the story in the first half of the game completely abandoned in the 2nd half. The game seems to completely forget about its own story it setup, and the end of the game happens extremely abruptly in a sequence of things that have no lead up at all, they just abruptly happen. Basically they had made a bunch of cool setpieces for stuff in the 2nd half of the game, and then just stitched them together because they didn't have time or whatever to actually write them into the story. There are only a couple actual dungeons or long cave complexes, most caves are just a couple rooms. Your level can go up to 999 but at level 50 everything becomes laughably easy, and friendly NPCs that roam the roads can solo dragons at level 60-70 without your help.

I'm putting down a yes for recommended, but it is more a "maybe". The actual battle gameplay is almost indistinguishable from Company of Heroes 2. As is the graphics really. So if you want more CoH2, that is a great thing.

The main problem with the game is that instead of a linear story campaign, it instead has a rather meh total-war style strategic campaign where you run around with units taking cities, and occasionally getting into fights with german units. This mostly just results in skirmish battles. About 75% of towns can be captured with no actual fighting. The remaining towns have missions to take them, although most of the missions are rather short compared to a CoH2 campaign mission.

Decided to pick this up after 100%ing Vampire Survivors like many other people. I've ran into a few things that I'm not really a big fan of.

1) Stages don't seem to matter. All stages have the same enemies, the only difference is what upgrade materials you can get on the stage. Same mobs, elites, and bosses.
2) Later on in a stage I frequently end up dying without really knowing why. I'm guessing there are just AOEs that are so covered by enemies and my own abilities that I can't see them. Beam attacks are also infinite range despite their box not showing that.
3) There seems to be serious balance issues with weapons. Some are just so garbage, while others are absurdly great. There are also not any cool weapon upgrades like in Vampire Survivors, there are just Bigger Number upgrades you can get.
4) There is never a point where you feel the godlike power you get later on in a VS run. You always have to keep dodging constantly to avoid the aoes(that you frequently don't even see) and enemies just keep getting so much health that you will always have to keep dodging and aiming.

The game crashed a few times after probably 10+ offline hours of gameplay, getting a colony to 15 people, and after I started trying to cram objects into rooms. With the autosave I only lost a few minutes here and there when it happened. I didn't really run into any bugs. I find it to be quite playable with a fair amount of content.

That's not to say I didn't run into problems. The design of this game will sometimes come across as bugs because it is so far from what most games follow. Such as the fact that unlike 99% of the colony builders out there your people won't refuse to work in order to get enough rest or follow a schedule. They will simply die of fatigue if you give them too much to do but you can't see the fatigue level of your people. You are left wondering what happened. You don't know what you need to do, what is wrong, or what is about to go wrong. You are in a perpetual state of guessing.

What's the first thing you do when you load a colony builder? Look for the power, temp, and oxygen report or overlay and info on colonist health/mood. You won't immediately find it. That info exists (well except colonist info) but you'll have to go hunting for it. You have to locate the existence of an item in the build menu that does what you want when you can't just view everything in it. You have to select the objects menu while in the right room or against a wall to see those items. Took awhile to even figure out there was a wall objects menu with a heater. Mouse over the correct area to get a pop up of the needed info or hunt down reports in the email system in the corner that along with your power and alerts also includes requests whether you'd like to listen to someone's music or poetry.

Games like this generally use overlays and organized reports rather than relying completely on mouse overs and little messages. I understand the overall feel the dev was going for with the email system but my gmail is more organized than that and I don't use it for anything important. Using a more limited and rougher system for setting the mood in the game is a very difficult thing that has to be done just right to still provide all the wanted info in easy to access locations without the typical display systems. This attempt comes close to breaking the game.


Overall I've decided maia's gameplay just feels outdated. A game in 1998 to early 2000s might have numbered menu lists to select things, rely on hotkeys, make you mouse over things or check messages that appear on the screen for info,etc... These days most players are used to relying on a mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts and all the needed info ready to access. At minimum you have a direct drop down/pop up menu that after clicking on the icon for the type of thing you want you then just move your mouse straight up/down to click on what you want from that list. In Maia you have to hold alt to get a list in text and then move your mouse over to it while the camera spins wildly in the background. Then fix your camera to place the item. Option B is to select room or object and then hit q and e to scroll one by one through potentially around 19 items to get the right one. Tedious, clumsy, outdated.


Somewhat older players used to keyboard controlled list menus, hotkeys, and limited info presentation will have the easiest time adjusting to this game. Majority of players will likely just get frustrated and quit before they figure it out or after they figure it out they won't want to play with the slow UI design. If you need everything right there at your fingertips without hotkeys and to know everything going on all the time then this game is not for you. If you can't handle failing over and over again while figuring out game play that is not at all obvious then don't touch this game. One attempt I just ignored everyone and let them die while running my mouse over rooms and walls, scrolling around outside, and looking at what was available to me before trying again. If you want a challenge, like discovering things for yourself or solving puzzles, and don't mind using a keyboard based selection system then this game may have many interesting hours to offer.

I'm really not sure what to call this game. I started it up and immediately got overwhelmed by everything going on and the amount of unique gameplay to learn. It's kind of a mix of today's typical banished style city builder, civilization, and a board game. You have a large map of provinces with other AI cities on them and resources marked. Coal mines will only get coal from hills in a province marked with coal and so on.

Zoomed in to your territory you then have your town center and all your typical buildings except your standard build menu doesn't contain much of anything. You can build houses, roads, and storage piles all you want and eventually farms, decorative shrubs, and other small things. The rest you get via drawing cards from a deck and picking one out of each group every turn in exchange for some coins. You can only hold so many cards before you have to use or discard one to get another. The rest of the game mostly ignores the turns the cards follow so it's more just a timer to get a new building rather than a turn based game. Some cards can be applied to buildings for buffs and your town center holds global cards that affect the whole town.

Through research you can gain some bonuses or abilities and unlock buildings as you progress through eras. You buy provinces with food or coins to expand, gain more resources, and potentially more influence. It also costs influence to maintain your border and coins to maintain your total territory so expanding does not always make for a more impressive town.

Some game aspects seem like they would be far more interesting in multiplayer. Cards that steal or give things to other towns exist including kidnapping their citizens. The response from the AI towns to these events is a bit lacking. On a large map I find I can just ignore the other towns if I want. On a small map you'd probably try to box them in or you can use influence to turn them into your vassals. Hopefully options for city interaction and negative consequences of upsetting your rivals gets improved a bit for single player. The fact global cards take up your hand is also a bit of a problem. Your town center only holds so many and different ones are beneficial at different times while most are not very common. You can't just sit on them if you also want to collect useful cards for expanding your town so after applying some that deal with ongoing problems I had I've mostly been ignoring the global cards. They might need their own storage to really make them useful.

This is not your typical city builder and 5hrs in I'm on era 3 of 8 still isolated in my little corner of the map so it may last awhile.

Do not get this game if you don't plan on spending more than the base price of the game on it. I figured it might be fun to play around with it in "casual play", which matches you against "players of similar experience", using just the starter cards and the packs you start with, but if you aren't lucky enough to get many top cards in your starter decks, be prepared to play against players who either did or were willing to dump money on the marketplace to get them. Your decks made of what cards you got will go again and again against the finest netdecks that money can buy from other new players.

Excellent game if you like battletech. You are going to want this on an SSD for loading times, but the game looks great and runs excellent on my 7 year old i3 could and gtx 960.

I was watching streams and videos of this game before it came out, so I knew what to expect, and I was not disappointed when I got it myself. You can kind of think of it as a survivalist Tropico where there is a real chance that all of your colonists are going to suffocate to death because a dust devil just took out all of your oxygen production, storage, and the drone hubs needed to repair them. You can also wildly vary the difficulty depending on what sponsor you pick, the location you pick, and your job. Highly recommend if you like Space colony builders and/or Tropico games.

Do you like Age of Empires? Do you like zombies? Do you like tower defense? If you answered "yes" to all 3 of those, get this game. It is still a bit rough around the edges, but overall is one of the most addictive games I've played in quite a while, even if it can be very frustrating.

This is an excellent follow up to DoW1. Everyone who says that this is just a MOBA either has never played this or never played a MOBA. The only similarity is that the only existing multiplayer mode is building-destruction objective based. People are just crying that this isn't exactly DoW1 or 2, despite the fact that DoW2 was nothing like 1 so why they expected 3 to just be a reskinned 1 or 2 I don't know.

I've had some minor technical problems, like the game freezing after a single player campaign mission once, but it did still consider the mission complete and gave me the rewards for it.