I like LoE a lot. It's among my favourite 2015 RPGs, after AoD and Underrail, and about equal to TW3 (and i'm from Potatoland). While TW3 was pretty good in some areas, it sucked hard in others, Eisenwald was OTOH overall solid game. Some stuff i liked:
- art direction and visuals
- music
- inns. You can hear gossip, legends, get side quests or find a clue for your current quest. Well done.
- 3 endings that you don't choose at the end of last mission
- choices with delayed consequences
- buildin speedhack (except combat but there's an auto-resolve option)
- combat. At first glance it may look like HoMM/Disci3 but it's really an iteration of Disci2's combat.
And the bad:
- LoE is an RPG mixed with RTS. You control your lands via castles but you can only control your only squad and a structure it currently visits. If your castle gets attacked combat will be auto resolved and you are not given any details of how this battle went. If your castle happened to successfully defend itself you can't heal/'ressurect' troops until your hero visit the place himself. This is especially irritating in certain chapter when enemy has infinitely respawning troops that keep storming your castle and only stop respawning when you take other, much better defended, castle.
- the game is clearly designed more for a knight than other classes. I've picked a Baroness an i felt like an adopted child when compared to a firstborn Knight. Or actually i felt like a medieval woman when compared to a man so perhaps i should count this as a positive, for historical accuracy
. A knight is getting better, more pricey equipment than baroness (mystic being somewhere between) and has 3 extra equipment slots: a horse, saddle and a lance. And if you think this arabian horse you get early is a damn good mount, wait until chapter 4. Sure it's not a surprise that a forward warrior is better supported in an RPG than anyone else but LoE has pushed this trope a bit too far for my taste.
Here's a video of a
pretty effective combat strategy i've developed. A little gamebreaking, perhaps, so be careful.
