Recent reviews by Iskhys

TL;DR - This game's selling point is massive, redesigned cities that allow you to defend siege attacks in a more in-depth way. Unfortunately, you will never see any of it because now your garrison units start taking ruinous attrition at the very beginning of the siege, instead of waiting 6-8 turns for food to run out as in every other Total War game, forcing you to sally out and attack on the field immediately every single time.

Longer Review:
I am a huge Total War fan and have been playing their games since the original Rome when I was 10. I own almost all of the games and have stuck with CA through thick and thin. I never leave reviews for games, but this single change was so horrific and so disrespectful to long time fans and supporters of the franchise that I couldn't stay silent.

In the masterpiece that was Warhammer II, siege defense was where you could turn your game around on even the highest difficulties. Your food would always last long enough so that usually the AI could construct its siege engines and begin an assault before attrition set in. Fun side note: this is how it actually worked historically in the real world; if besieging armies tried to starve out city inhabitants, the sieges could last many months and many sieges did. I spent countless hours positioning my Skaven garrisons just right behind the walls and sending Imperial doomstacks packing 2-3 at a time; it was one of the best feelings I have ever experienced in a strategy game.

That is all gone now. Your troops start dying the instant the enemy arrives and in 3 turns you are so weak you will be lucky if the garrison can take a single enemy unit with it. The idea of a fortified city is to serve as a hard point and force multiplier so that a much smaller force can defend against a larger attacking force. In WH3, if you don't have an entire army dedicated to reinforcing your cities, you will lose all of them because there is no force multiplier effect.

As an example, I played a game as Cathay, one of the major new human factions. Cathay is supposed to have intricate and grand city designs that are well protected and difficult for enemies to penetrate. Once again this is a huge selling point for the game. A full enemy stack laid siege to my capitol but I wasn't concerned; I had a level 4 garrison building and 20 units there after all. Then I noticed the attrition. Fortunately, in this instance the enemy was kind enough to attack before literally all my men were dead. Then, I made another discovery: In my capitol city, with a level 4 garrison building, there are two large gates right next to each other with no towers anywhere near them. That is the default design of the Hanyu Port city. In past Total War games, especially in main settlements, your gates have always been protected by nearby towers. But not in the game that claims it has the most advanced and special new siege system. But wait, you might say, can't you construct towers within the city? Yes, you can! But only at very specific, limited locations. In Hanyu Port, which is once again my bloody capitol, I couldn't even construct a tower that could hit the armies besieging my main gates. Also, even though my towers were supposed to be shooting rockets, they only shot arrows; although I am fairly certain this was a bug and not yet another intentional attempt to eviscerate the gameplay.

With all that said, there are some campaigns where AI just don't lay siege to your cities all that often and those campaigns can be fun until you realize you have been savagely robbed of the one single new feature that was supposed to be the selling point of this game.

I am willing to tentatively recommend this game. If you buy, you need to remember that you are purchasing early access to an unfinished product. You cannot expect it to be free of glitches. TaleWorlds has been great about pushing out patches and fixes. However, please note that the only thing that currently works in this game is open combat between two armies. Sieging is broken, kingdom management is broken, and nearly every single quest in the game is either unfinished or broken. Also, entire skill trees, like "Trade" are broken.
You cannot gain "Trade" skill no matter what you do. These things don't matter to most people because the open battles are what made this franchise famous. I just want you to be aware.

With the negatives out of the way, let me say that this game has limitless potential. I mean LIMITLESS. Even without any coherent story or questline of any kind, you can still get a hundred hours out of pledging yourself to a lord and then riding around and fighting. The world is amazingly well built, beautiful, and enormous. The combat is fantastic fun. However, TaleWorlds needs to deliver on the story and quests if they are going to save this game from oblivion because the world feels utterly hollow. Great graphics and great mechanics are not enough to make a great game. You need a context and reason for the combat. You also need depth to the world. Right now, all of the towns, cities, and castles feel vacant because although they are full of NPCs the NPCs are just wandering around aimlessly. The quests offered to you at random by village NPCs are pulled from a grab bag of the same six quests.

Let me offer an example of the hollowness I am talking about. When you get married, there are no unique interactions or conversations with your wife or husband after your marriage. You have the same stock interaction options you have with any other noble. The only difference is that when you leave the interaction, the husband/wife says goodbye husband/wife. So what interactions can you have with any other noble? Basically just offering them presents in a trade window. Your spouse will randomly get pregnant and bear you children but don't try to talk to them about those children.

The bottom line is this: if you get this game, know you are getting it for the combat and gambling that when the full game is released, TaleWorlds will patch in enough quests, enough story content, and enough voiced dialogue to fill the aching void at the center of this game. If they do, it will be one of the greatest video games ever made. If they don't, you are paying Triple A prices for what is only a medieval battle simulator.

I recommend Kingdom Come: Deliverance wholeheartedly. All of the magical things said about it are true. It is the dream of anyone who wants an immersive sandbox RPG. HOWEVER, I feel the need to warn you all- as of a recent update, you can no longer get on your horse if you are overencumbered. This is gamebreaking for a lot of people in a very real way. Because of the necessity of wearing and carrying armor, weapons, and food, you are nearly always overencumbered if you loot things, which you will. A LOT. You could already not fast travel when overencumbered, but you could use your horse to get to a merchant. In fact, I have spent the lion's share of my time in the game riding my horse to black market merchants and others trying to get rid of all my loot. You can no longer do that as of a week ago. This has forced a good many people to stop playing the game entirely. I hope Warhorse fixes this soon.