This is not going to be a very positive review. While the gameplay has entertaining elements, they are horrendously overshadowed by so many things the game does poorly.

- Loot does not feel rewarding, even when you equip something new it doesn't show, your character just looks the exact same so there's no visual progression. Medium armor is also entirely pointless as trying to find a balance between defense at the cost of speed ends up being a moot point since your frontliners will rarely outpace a fast enemy anyway, so what is the point of sacrificing any amount of potential defense, and your backline cannot afford to lose an iota of speed as losing the chance to CC an enemy due to speed can spell doom for the entire party.
- Classes are very unbalanced. The Guardian class for example is horribly underpowered, and in fact everything a high leveled Guardian can do can be done better by a mid level Balladeer.
- Very quickly you learn that to deal with the constantly overwhelming numbers the only tactic is stall and control while doing gradual chip damage, since enemies will have an average of 650 health all while basic AA will do 150 damage, and often times abilities not much more. This is exacerbated by the fact that a fight will usually pit you against 8 or so enemies starting, with more on the way after the first 2 rounds, so enjoy trying to constantly combo mechanics that either stun or freeze enemies while slowly chipping down HP bars, or turbo buffing a storm mage with Valkyrie and Pyrolance so it can do high damage to single targets all while the ice mage and archer simply stall for time with stunning overwatches or freezing.
- The limit of only having 5 party members even though the game can clearly support 7 (as evidenced by key battles where you're allowed to bring more) is a HUGE question mark, and what's worse is because of your limited party size in comparison to the enemy, you can't try to do anything resembling experimental tactics or enjoy other classes, because not bringing certain mechanics can lead to a harsh defeat whose only barrier was that you did not bring certain classes to a dungeon or fight. Sorry Guardian and Balladeer, you guys shouldn't go any higher than 3* difficulty or we might have a TPK.
- Loyalty and Affinity are completely wasted metrics. What is the point of them as they don't seem to do anything. Party members will slowly grow this bond between each other over time but I have seen nothing that affects stats, attacks, interactions, ect... Loyalty as well seems to grow over time from just completing missions and buying them occasional rounds of drinks, which again, accomplishes nothing.
- Recruiting is a pointless headache where they attempted to rip off the "random good and bad" metrics from battle bros, but some of the negatives are so wildly negative that that character will NEVER be recruited, so it only serves to waste a slot of a potential recruit at the inn.
- Shopping has zero benefit as you will always loot gear much better than anything you will ever find in store, so what is the point of even offering gear in store since nothing above 3rd tier will be available, and even that will only be after a good while.
- The worldwide events that affect cities NEVER GO AWAY. There is no fluctuation in events! It seems even after 15 years the world is still undergoing the exact same blight as before since no single city ever gets rid of the modifiers of the previous one, no matter how many times you clear missions elimination the blight! I did an entire region worth of blight clearing just to see if changed anything and it changed nothing. Doing caravan escort missions, or wildlife clearing missions, also change NOTHING for the cities you do them in.
- The negatives from dungeon exploration are just... wow. You can clear a dungeon with extreme efficiency and still get hit with one or two additional negative modifiers, which have ZERO progression on how much they will impact that run. There is no "The first modifier will be bad and progressively they get worse over time", nope, the first modifier can be you now fight twice as many enemies right out the gate and you hadn't even fought your first enemy yet, vs the third modifier being a slap on the wrist penalty of -15 morale. The system needed a progression of bad to worse, not just a roulette wheel.
- The legendary quests... what a massive let down. You finally find one, and slog through a 5* dungeon, only to be rewarded with an accessory (which mind you there is no other way to get one besides these quests) which can BREAK AND DISAPPEAR FOREVER or even NOT WORK AT ALL (looking at you spyglass). Other accessories don't necessarily follow the same vein, but also do not reward you enough for the amount of buildup needed to finally fill that 4th inventory slot for an endgame party.

There's so much more to point out but I cannot bring myself to. I made sure to really give the game a chance, I put in a good amount of time and I don't typically leave reviews, but all the comparisons to Battle Brothers left me genuinely excited and willing to purchase a game that looked somewhat lackluster. To any of the BB fans reading the hype reviews... Just go download the BB Legends mod and Perk Tree Rework. Save yourselves the money.

A very hard ARPG. Not very good toolstips. You cannot see if you have debuffed the enemy or not.
Character progression is not that engaging or fun.
As of right now. I cannot recommend it. Will update when I have played more.

Fun turned based dungeon crawler rogue like.