Recent reviews by Mason

This game made Darkest Dungeon unplayable for me.

They took the Darkest Dungeon formula, and found the various spots that could be improved and expanded and made it better in almost every way.

Some of the highlights include:

Iratus is very clear about what stats and effects do, which helps in your planning.
Important information about what an ability does is clearly displayed with colors and numbers making everything very certain.
Interesting resource management and levelling up of your town (the graveyard).

Overall the combat and building your minions is tactical and interesting and I definitely recommend it.

The negatives: I'm going to write a long paragraph here, but don't let it put you off the game.
The difficulty scales in very big jumps. It needs something between the 'normal' difficulty and the 'hard' difficulty.
Established norms of the game *sometimes* don't apply. Eg: You are taught that there is no regeneration of health without some kind of resource cost. Except for times when the enemies can fully heal between battles.
Or you are taught that a unit gets 1 action per turn, until you come across a boss that takes 3 actions per turn. These things would be ok separately, but together it can result in a frustrating, dead end situation which isn't fair within the games established rules.

A simple game that has some hidden depth. The general atmosphere is relaxed, the graphics and sounds are cute and functional. This game is good for when you want to play something like Factorio, but not think too hard or have much stress.

I completely finished the game in 16 hours and there isn't much replayability, but the hours played were very enjoyable. Worth it if it's on sale or if you have disposable income.

This game is really close to being great. A lot of love went into it and it has some really good parts. Great atmosphere, world building, the visuals are good, animation does it's job. Sound is amazing, small scale tactical combat is enjoyable. However it has some damning flaws...

A large part of the game loop is going from room to room in an overmap, rooms can be 1 of 3 things, a battle, a glyph or an event that has 3 choices.

Battles: The actual combat is good, interesting, definitely one of the strongest features of the game (although character customization can feel a bit shallow sometimes).

Glyphs: These just feel like a chore, you don't know what they mean, so you have two options, randomly choose them while taking notes of the effects (usually only 1 of 3 is positive so you have a 66% chance to miss), or just look at a guide. Either of these outcomes is a chore, but it isn't fun to be punished by chance.

Events: Speaking of being punished by chance, the random events that can happen in rooms are interesting, but there is usually no hint, no way of knowing which of the 3 options is correct. It just feels like rolling a dice and 2 out of 3 times you get shafted. If the results were less opaque this could be fun, as it is, the events add a lot of character, but they also feel very frustrating.

Also, overall the combat is very good, but by about halfway through the game you just want it to be over, luckily the difficulty is that I was able to skip about 30% of the remaining missions and kill the boss (without difficulty, so there are difficulty scaling issues, too).

A short game however multiple characters gives it replayability. While it is clearly an indie game it has been well polished and the UI is very easy to interact with. Worth a buy.

Steam only allows a thumbs up or thumbs down, but this game really is a middle thumb game.

It shows so much promise, and I really want to like it. Interesting systems, a wide array of factions, interesting tactics.

However the game is really let down by the level of polish. It feels as though the publisher demanded a certain breadth of content while not allowing enough money and time for it to all be polished to the necessary level.

The main area that this lack of polish hurts the game is in speed of play, I get it, turn based strategy isn't supposed to be fast, but the amount of time spent waiting for the enemy to make their turns is too much (I wouldn't be surprised if their animations were all playing off screen).

That coupled with the limited inventory space, various unskippable animations and long winded movement system mean that doing a single mission often takes 40minutes to an hour.

Very similar to Diablo, however the aesthetic is completely Warhammer 40k.

It also plays differently to diablo, it has a greater focus on being a bit slower and more methodical, rather than trying to go break-neck speed.


Some of the Pros:
It has lots of unique weapons, skills are tied to the weapons.
There are lots of guns, they also have a unique (to this genre) reloading system which is fun.
You can dual wield weapons, which lets you mix and match the skills that come with those weapons.
Most builds seem viable. Talent trees and perks are interesting. Both melee and ranged builds seem fun.
Sounds and graphics are good.
The devs clearly thought about the genre and what would be interesting to change.
The devs did a great job integrating not only 40k lore, but also flavor, without being overwhelming.



Some of the cons:
I encountered a decent number of visual bugs. Once or twice in 50 hours of play I had bugs that prevented me from completing a mission. Edit: Coming back after a year, these bugs seem to be fixed!

Some of the systems (especially late game) are not intuitive and explained poorly (see enrage tokens, berserk tokens).
I personally didn't enjoy the sudden introduction of new stat types on high level gear (once again, the enrage/berserk tokens).

Overall, it is a fun game, worth the price. Final point to add, the devs are still active and adding to the game! They clearly are invested in continuing to make the game better and better.

This game is a simple dopamine drip with a low-level story and humor suited towards 12-13 year olds (which I believe is maybe their target audience).

Any lack of strategy can be overcome simply with grinding.

Overall it's a dumb game, but, guess what, it's fun, sometimes a simple dopamine drip of a game is nice. Games are meant to be fun, this game is fun (for about 10 hours).

This game has a some good ideas, character creation is unique. A lot of love has been poured into this game and I don't want to take away from the work the creators have put into this, however...

This game has a serious lack of polish, the sounds are amateurish at best, the UI is unfortunately obtuse (I understand it is a complex game so the UI is difficult, however I believe at least some more tooltips could help it.
There is very little visual feedback during combat, the development team being comprised of only programmers definitely shows.
The enemies are completely static.
Overall it has some hope, but in it's current state it feels like an early access game that isn't worth picking up just yet.

This game is very close to being great, but for me, there are two things that break it.

1: Oh, I fired a crossbow and now for some reason my legs don't work?
2: Ok, I killed 5 out of 10 guys in their troop with ranged units, time to attack in melee. What, the enemy counterattacked when they only had 1 out of 10 units left, but they still did the damage of 10 units?

I feel like number 2 really lowers your tactical options, apparently the devs wanted 'for the combat to remain brutal' but instead they just made it kinda simplistic.

A very simple hex based strategy game. I completed it easily in 3 hours. Nice as a little game to play in between big games, but don't expect much from it.