Recent reviews by Kazanski

I love everything about this game.

The progression system is interesting and paced well. The game introduces new ants and colonies at a reasonable pace that keeps the game very fresh.

The way they offer difficulty paired with achievements really works nicely for me. There are 6 different difficulties and many of them have their own optional challenges to encourage you to approach a level differently. The levels are highly fine-tuned experiences to challenge the player and I have found myself playing the same level on different difficulties and still enjoying it because the spin is interesting.

The overall story is amusing and I have found myself interested in following it through.

Nothing negative to be said, the game is outstanding.

Excellent game. Good choose your own adventure story with a strong RPG foundation. Very honest about its systems and honest about how average your character is. Loved my time with it.

From what I have played with this game, this is a really poor execution for a game in the user interface, design, and pacing categories.

I will not be able to judge any of the deep content in the game, it was impressed upon me very early that the nuts and bolts of the game were not meeting my expectation.

Interface
This game gives the player extremely limited information. Important pieces of information about the qualities of abilities are just simply missing and you cannot adequately examine things in the combat environment.

For example, you have a defensive stance you can take that raises your defensive attribute. All you get is a buff indicator saying it is raised, you have no idea by how much. Are we talking about a 5% increase or a 50% increase? Is this a valuable use of an action point?

You have a "chance" to incur status effects on enemies. Is this 90%? 70%? 50%? I have no idea, and I don't know how much of a benefit or malus most of these status affects incur. The information is absent.

I must concede, I only played for an hour. I scouted the tooltips and hotkeys and found no way to ascertain any of this information. If it is there, I am sorry, but it is not evident to a player who has a lot of experience with tactical RPGs.

I even tried to pull up my character sheet during battle to see if I could get an update there, but it doesn't appear you can bring up a character sheet during combat.

Enemy capabilities are equally opaque. You can get some sense of their movement radius, but outside of that, you'll have to guess what they are capable of.

Design
I did not make it deep into the game obviously, but the design of the game feels like a worse version of all of its predecessors that it seems to be borrowing from. The class design seems a bit odd at first glance, but I did not have enough time to vet that thought.

There is some really interesting ideas with the variety of weapons that you can use in the classes though -this looked interesting but I don't believe I can tolerate my other problems to explore this.

Pacing
The pacing of this game is really painful for the time I spent in combat. The entire levels are spent in turn-based movements and this really makes the pacing of the levels agonizing and clunky.

You cannot queue up movements of your units and you cannot accelerate the animations of the units while they move. There is an unforgivable amount of time watching units slowly move into position one-by-one both by the player and the AI.

I know that this was XCOM's style, but I just do not feel that it works for this game. A better approach would have been to borrow the combat style that King Arthur: Knight's Tale uses and package combats into bites instead of having the player agonizingly move slowly through the levels on the turn-based platform.

Different players could take it or leave it - but I did not enjoy what I was experiencing.

Conclusion
In my opinion, the overall polish is not there for this game. Too many quality of life features missing, a lack of information, and poor pacing just aren't acceptable when so many competitors have a much better product available.

If you're interested in a Medieval Tactical RPG - look at King Arthur: Knight's Tale instead. It's not perfect, but it looks really good by comparison to what is going on here.

Hands down one of the best Roguelike deck builders in the genre. Significant number of great quality of life features in this game that make it a pleasure to play.

- Static deck size of 20 cards.
- Backpack to store extra cards and swap them in at the appropriate time.
- Ability to see card rewards for an entire board before you start moving. Excellent UI to allow you to mark these areas of interest and plot your route. This allows you to take 5 minutes to do some planning and then you just execute your run.
- Engagements are at a really good pacing lasting 2 - 6 turns depending on what you are doing and how you are doing.
- The classes are VERY distinct. Each one has significant mechanic differences that are much deeper than just a deck of cards. Very well done here.
- The amount of challenge levels in the game is really expansive lending a ton of different ways to experience the run.

For $18.00 this game is basically being given away. You can get your money's worth very quickly and the unique content available to you extends many hours.

Very impressive game.

This game is an excellently well made management RPG. They get all of the things right in balancing the base management with the adventuring. They take some good cues on what made Darkest Dungeon great with the expeditions. The heroes have the right kind of complexity to manage them at scale and the tactical combat has a lot of great depth to it.

If I had to stretch for some negatives, the objectives on the expeditions are a bit bland, but that was also true in Darkest Dungeon.

This game has a ton of potential to expand its content further, but from what I can tell, there is a lot of content and depth to the campaign already. Still only getting started, but from what I have seen, this is an outstanding RPG that deserves its "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating.

I love the concept of this game - but I do not have the patience to go research every item in the menu. It is inexcusable for there not to be a simple explanation or tooltip for what your symbols represent. There are a ton of symbols, numbers, and features. Almost none of them have any helpful information nearby.

Going to watch this game to see if it gets some needed updates, because I would gladly come back and give this another try if there is an overhaul to the interface.

Note: I didn't even make it far enough to deploy my mechs. I made it to testing my engine and weapons, and decided that I was not going to take the time to independently research all of these variables that are not explained.

This is a really awesome turn-based colony builder. The developer brings along some really great concepts and has done a tremendous job supporting their game since they launched it. There is a lot of heart and love in this game and it shows.

There really is not a great comparison for this game and its unique approach to the genre is commendable. Really enjoyed the way the civilization organically develops with a clear goal and purpose to defeat increasingly difficult calamities.

There is a lot of complexity to the game as you are managing A LOT of resources and people and the ways you can approach the game are varied and quite interesting.

The only drawback is that the length of the game is a good bit longer than I would like. Some of this is me taking too long to commit my turns, but the runs that I have completed have taken me between 6 - 10 hours to finish. It overstays its welcome a bit too much, but it is otherwise an absolutely fantastic game to enjoy.

Really neat idea for a game and I see some of the reviews referencing other games that I have not played before. This is my first exposure to a game like this. I generally enjoy turn-based RPGs, so I felt this was up my alley.

I only put 30 minutes in and ended up putting it down because I just wasn't enjoying the style of the gameplay rhythm very much. The bottom line is I just didn't enjoy assigning my equipment and items to movement keys and using this positional dance to choreograph the fight. Instead of feeling dynamic and free flowing it felt clunky and restrictive. This gimmick is necessary, because without it the game would truly be a bland affair, however this gimmick is not interesting enough to me to carry the game.

The relic system is the same thing you've seen in almost any other game that has relics. Neither good or bad - not breaking new ground here. Very safe.

The AI was a bit too self-destructive for my liking, in my half hour I saw multiple enemies wander back and forth in environmental effects and kill themselves. The enemy units run very predictable and reliable attack and movements patterns and don't deviate at all.

From my perspective, the overall concept was simple, which is not all bad, but too clunky for me to get lost in and enjoy.

All the pieces are here for a good game if you like the concept, but I can't recommend it because I wasn't having fun.

This game is a steal for the price. The planning system is the best I've seen of this genre and works very well with the approach they are taking to this game. In my opinion, syncing up actions is a horrible affair in all other games in this genre. It is so smooth and easy here once you learn the interface and I found the tutorial very effective for teaching it.

In other games, you are generally trying to solve to a level and will probably repeat it a few time to get the precision on it you want. This game doesn't want you repeating the same level. You get one shot at it and then you are going to move to the next one no matter what. If you fail and need to restart a chapter, you are still getting a regenerated level. You are not playing the same field or enemy placements twice.

For me - this is extremely compelling and adds a necessary level of tension that gives the planning more weight to me. I can completely see how this would be a turn off for perfectionists trying to fine-tune and execute the perfect plan to win a map or scenario, but this approach is a lot more interesting to me.

I am eager to try some of the other modes, but so far I am about half way through chapter 5 and am fully enjoying the experience and love where they have taken this genre.

This game is incredibly well done.

A lot more complex than Backpack Hero, very solid gameplay loop. Tons of possibilities for its future.