Recent reviews by DDkiki

Pretty to look at but overly restrictive and not fun city builder, with lots of annoying and useless micro-management. No ability to rotate buildings, even long one, makes whole city building process just frustrating. Game trying to focus on logistics, but its the most annoying part of it. Just honestly, its like devs tried as much as possible to create the most frustrating game in the genre.

Cringy dialogues of advisors are really off-putting and looks like mocking culture they are trying to portray in the game.

Not recommending. Play Against the Storm, Stronghold or Pharaoh/Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. And devs should play them too to learn how to make better city builders.

Its really hard to recommend this game because Im honestly not sure if I like it myself or not.
On one hand its an interesting RTS/RPG combo but diverse races and cool world and story, revival of an old series for modern audience and all...But its just shallow in almost every aspect compare to SF1-2 and just as a game in general.

While character builds are kinda interesting, many of abilities are just perks that raise some & which is pretty boring, UI of ability usage is terrible, when in SF1-2 it was basically perfect for such game, its really strange why they (literally) introduced new wheel when there was no problem with it before.

RTS part of campaigns is just...bad, repetitive, unimaginative skirmish battles with stupid coward cheating AI. They are hard at the beginning while your heroes are weak but as soon as you can roflstomp in 1st few minutes its better to just rush enemy asap. Sector system is too automatic for my taste and takes off too much of a player agency and at the same time annoying cuz only heroes can build flags. There are no interesting mission, no puzzle to solve duing them, no problem to overcome, just skirmish and i wasn't having fun there.

Most RPG maps are also not really deep or interesting, there are no choices, encounters are pretty boring and easy, not many puzzles, itemization is overbloated with some random effects which don't feel interesting, most purple items feel more powerful than artifacts that are crafted from items gotten through pixel hunting or just bought from traders. No actual epic questlines or adventures to get powerful armour or sword.

Game is overall feels to grey and tasteless to me, its like it was ashamed of its past(sf1-2 are very colorful epic RPGs, with half-naked elves, fantasy armour and basically everything so-called "modern audience" hate). Instead they focused on dark realistic fantasy with lots of mentions of r*ape, constant f-bombs...its tiresome and this writing is just disappointing. Character and armour design is just bland, i dunno why they even allowed to create our own character when customisation is so ugly and terrible. Game is too serious, scared to by funny or wacky. Its like devs either didn't play SF1-2 or thought that they are better than this and utterly failed.

Story overall is the only thing that imo kinda interesting in this game, if not some retcons and reimaginations of stuff that was mentioned in previous games, but SF3 being prequel it took of most interesting part of the SF1-2 world - it being shattered into multiple islands, so it feels like another generic realistic fantasy world ala GoT. But its still fun to follow the story and voice-acting is good.

From what i know(hard to check due to online of this game is basically dead rn) MP part of SF3 is actually very well done, matches are interesting and looks like all mechanics that are bad in campaign are like this due to MP focus, which is a shame and honestly feels like a common mistake by many recent RTSs. They focus too much on MP matches for small % of playerbase forgetting that most casual players play such games for campaigns.

But yeah, only worth for MP, single-player is kinda broken and boring to play, hard to recommend unless you play only for online matches.

Might change later but now I feel pretty disappointed with the game.

Forms as expected to me feel terrible and don't even stay near actual designed races in quality, everything around them is soulless and homogenized. It feels like a big downgrade for a series that had awesome race diversity, which was swapped with amorphic blobs wearing skins of fantasy races.
Tome system is a good improvement on specializations, but it should be added to better base, which forms+cultures are not, in my eyes. But it provide less than classes/special techs in identity of your build and if you compare them id prefer class/tech system.
Story realms are not good exchange for a full hand crafted campaigns. Lore of old games barely matters. There are no more lore description of units at all, who are Lighbringer fish? Who are Balors? Why eagle rider is suddenly inquisitor unit. Lore bits from units in AoW was a great thing and erasing them is a very wrong and bad move.
Transformations look awkward and I didn't find visual appeal in them. Talking also about visuals, devs seems to be hit with rating, so dont expect to see succubus units, any melee female fighters, and especially not someone like blade dancers or spider queens. Beardless dwarfs, none of dwarf-form tome unit seems to have one, oof. Bootless animal races make me think about Morrowind beast races.

Heroes are kinda boring, without actual classes, not having bonuses of your culture, they are basically what you expect from generated homogeneous blobs.
Gameplay seems OK, but feels less interesting than Planetfall overall. Healing looks to be overtuned, even with temporary HP system, just make it 1 use per battle, but im not game designer to give ideas, but something is very wrong with it.
Can't really say much about endgame balance, but at least they got rid of max-tier unit spam a little with Imperium upkeep.
Imperium itself is actually good addition and much more interesting that Cosmites from PF, its a resource that is important for many things in the game so having a choice where to spend it is interesting, just wish other systems had as much thoughts put into them.

Looks like AoW4 tried to become Stellaris too much(which i heavily dislike), over being Age of Wonders, to the point that spin-off which is Planetfall is more faithful addition to series than 4.

I hope they will improve 4 with time, or mods will improve it. 3 had many bad issues on release too and only near 2nd expansion it became good in my eyes. But for all old AoW fans - I don't recommend right now. Stellaris fans probably would be happy.

Race, it's army and mechanics as is really great work. but the mini-campain is bugged, ai is cheating like crazy breaking all game mechanics, it's impossible to the way it's boring. I asssinanted enemy generel(not morghur, he was in another army)...and intead of himon the same turn in this army appeared...Morghur, with goblin archer icon and as a unit, so after this turn this army have 21 units of 20 with Morhur unit, while another Morghur leads another army, great.

The elves Ai is stupud, they killing each other when beastmen just slaughter everyone, how about...i don't know, start protecting the forrest?

It's not worty buying right now, just like a base game it's still unpolished and somewhere even unplayable, wait for the 1st expansion and edition with all DLCs before it.