So i just finished the game,12 levels-24 hours of gameplay. I find everything except one secret in the fairy castle. The game itself is a classic dungeon crawler and people shouldn't expect any modern shit in it,outside of a map.
The writing is pretty good,it is a story book adventure than the modern "everything grey,no bad guys,C&C". It is pretty interesting if because it mixes Slav and Tengri old legends and stories. The in game lore and journals are pretty interesting and well written,especially the beastiarity. The dialogue is also good,it feels natural and fun to listen to. The characters are charming and interesting,tho the banter is a lot less in the later maps sadly. Still there a few annoying moments and all of them are with that stupid dike,the mason bitch
.
The gameplay and the exploration is at you should expect from old school dungeon crawler. Run around in a dungeon,kill enemies,open chests,solve puzzles and find secrets. Most of the time the secrets are intuitive and if you miss it,it is on you. The puzzles are pretty fun,unique and interesting,you will rarely see a repeated puzzle. Yet a lot of them are part of the main story and could stop you dead in your track if you are not much of a puzzle guy. The one in the copper forest was very contra-intuitive,it was the only one i had real problem solving because of it. The last level puzzles are interesting,but do feel like more of a time waster because of all the running around needed. In the exploration department the game is great,you have a number of secrets found on the level map and the ability to return later on to finish them. Some of them would need an artefact that you find in later levels. All of them are pretty satisfying to uncover. A lot of them are hidden by unique puzzle or mechanic,yet there is still plenty of hidden buttons and invisible walls. The only negative is that there wasn't more of them out there to find and that some of the artifacts you get are underused,20ish more secrets using artefacts to solve would have been great
. The level design is great and fun to navigate,it is not super realistic but you still doesn't make you wonder why is this room looking the way it looks. It fells like a real place more or less,it is believable. Also the levels do look great,some of them are really beautiful to behold. The music is also great,especially in the second copper forest level.
The itemization is pretty meh in my eyes,i hardly changed the equipment of my party. It is similar to D&D one,weapons do have 1-6 for example and rarely you find something that is a massive improvement. By the end i had weapons that did 2-15 damage or something similar. They do get enchantments added than direct damage increase. Also there are sets that are always fun to just put on. The armours are the same thing,you change it once a few levels if you feel weaker. Inventory is also not very good,it is quite the chore to use and a tad bit confusing.
Almost forgot,there is a crafting in the form of puzzles. It is the best crafting i have seen in a game
. You have to follow a bunch of instructions to put things in the their right place. If you do it right,you get a nice potion. Potions are very useful and they refill on a rest.
Now the combat and the leveling mechanics. You get to choose from three standard classes,mage,warrior and archer. All of them have three unique skill threes and around 12-15 unique skills in them. There are 5 attributes,Strength,Agility,Intelligence,Wisdom and Vigour. On the first sight it looks like a typical dump stat build,but it is not. All of the attributes do effect different stats,thus you will need at least to put some points in different ones. Tho i found wisdom useless for all my characters. You get 5 companions trough the game,and all of them don't have a class but a unique skill threes,thus making them feel very different,even if they are supposed to be in the same class. That will make it around 30 unique skills in a party build of 4,plus 5 party wide skills that you could use every 20ish battles. I found out that by the end of the game almost all of the skills were useful in some way.They are very well balanced and feel useful in combat. Now people comparing it to MMX or Bard's tale 4,should know that the skills here are a lot more fleshed out and useful that both of those games. The game in a whole is better and more fun that both of them. And i do know it,because i finished BT4 once and a half because of stupid bugs and just giving a second chance to MMX...it is still shit.
The combat it self is a TB with initiative and all that jazz. It pretty well made and interesting. The enemies are put in thee lines,yellow,green and blue. Different skills are more or less effective depending on the line the enemy is,same goes for generic attacks. Shooting a bow does have lowered effect on a front line enemy than on back line,and vice versa for melee. The enemies themself is where the combat shines. They are all thematically put in a dungeon and you will not see 5 different types of enemy that don't make sense in it. The enemy types do have different sub types like archers,warriors,tanks,shamans etc etc. They do use the abilities that have in a smart way trying to maximize their output. For example if you have two enemy tanks and one of them is on a low health,the other one will taunt you so to take the target off the first one,preventing you from doing direct damage. They will do stun,silent or focus on a weaker companion. Also with the progressing of the game,the enemies become progressively harder,some times you could even get wiped if not careful. Still in the end the game is pretty easy for a experienced RPG player. I was surprised how many people on retard era and steam run out of supply and die. On the negative side...well the devs as expected are retards and there is no way to speed the battles or disable the animation. Later on they could take a lot of time because of long animations and a lot of debuffs. Would STRONGLY recommend using CheatEngine to speed them up,put it on 2-3 times the speed and have fun.
As conclusion...well the game is great fun,haven't played better blobber/dungeon crawler in years,maybe even decade(not counting replays of old classics
). It could be slow or frustrating at some puzzles,but it is a great fun. Would recommend pirating it,since EPIC is paying for it. The game could be very easy,even if some combats are hardish,mainly because of resting works. If there were some optional side battles that were a lot harder it would have been great,but sadly there isn't.