Recent reviews by Lord_Eol

So others might have noticed this prepurchase but I did not, the game has NO plot. While I'm generally a fan of open world games I still like them to have some sort of reason to propel me forward, literally can't find a reason in this game to leave the starting town. All exploring will do will scale my characters which will scale the NPCs (either via locked or dynamic, both are effectively the same) so effectively it's the same fight whether level 1 or level 10; hated Skyrim for the same reason but at least Skyrim had a narrative to complete.

If you are the sort that likes monotonous party micromanagement with mini-games and crafting in an open world, this game is for you. If you like exploration RPGs with tactical battles, this isn't.

Also add the strategic UI really sucks, really needs to allow WASD for map scrolling (not party moverment). On top of that the pathfinding it atrocious and you will often find yourself stuck or unable to navigate for no graphically apparent reason and it's extremely frustrating.

I will give a shout out though to the combat system, it's dull as it's repetitious but before you get bored of them, it's fair and can be challenging hence if nothing else, that part was well done.

Enjoyable game, worth $10 to $15 US; recommend you download and try the demo first. No real complaints about the game itself, it's enjoyable, good narrative, engaging, and a refreshing change from the standard genre.

The only issues/complaints I'll forewarn you is the UI really could use some significant work mostly around notifications, information presentation, and standardization on industry norms around certain functions like the escape key.

Also (not a ding) the game has a high learning curve, it's easy to play it badly and fail a lot and while that's not a bad thing, games you give you a chance to learn, the problem is it really doesn't give you any feedback on WHY you failed hence success is often based on extremely tedious save scumming and hundred of restarts just to figure out exactly what went wrong so you can fix it. There is a big difference between a learning curve / couple restarts and doing it for 40+ hours straight simply because the game doesn't provide meaningful data feedback on the "why" so you cna learn and correct. It's all just blind brute force trial and error.

I say "yes" but with a "ish". It's a fun game, if you loved 90's isometric RPG's, this game is a faithful re-creation of that genre .. which is great except when you are so faithful to it you forget improvements since then and forget many of restrictions were not by design but hardware limitations. I'm not going to get into all the pros, it really is a prefect 90's RPG ala FO2, Shadowrun, Wasteland, etc and that sells itself hence yeah get it and enjoy it. Plus it's a well written story all the way to the end without overduing the fiction or preaching.

That said I will list the negatives just so you understand what you are getting here and also as a way to feedback if the devs read:

(1) UI really should have allowed map rotation as sometimes it's really difficult to navigate / click the square to move. Not asking a movement system chance but rotation would be nice. If you aren't going to map rotate that is fine but then the intervening object should occlude (?/vanish) when you mouse over it so you can see what's behind it / select that square.

(2) Make the objects more visibility. Playing the entire game with "tab" on (object hightlight) takes away much of the exploration fun but same time, you will literally walk past mission essential items because they are near impossible to see in some cases.

(3) More of a bug that plagued 90's RPG's but pathing, in 2023 we shouldn't have to reload from save because our characters get path stuck behind object forever. Not a hard fix, just make it so parties members on the strategic map can just walk through each other.

(4) In combat really should allow "tab" to cycle between characters during setup. Found out afterwards you can do this with the "e" hotkey.

(5) The Mission Log really should clearly communicate "optional" v. non-optional quests including mandatory "win" conditions. I spent an hour before I finally googled it trying to figure out how to progress the game only to find out you HAVE to give the machine to faction; I didn't want as I hated all three of them. In the end the "why" made sense but the point is the mission log in no way suggested it was a progression blocker so had to be completed.

(6) EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING: The lack of NPC's who can join your party. We are no longer 64K limited, no reason couldn't have a dozen or two NPC's that could join your party. I hated 2 of the 4 I found and I think the game only has 6 of which 3 are late game locked, i.e. I want to pick my party members and I want them in a way don't only get to use them the last 5% of the game. I'm not against late gamer joiners as it makes sense storyline but then give way more earlier game party members as well.

I think "Path of Exile" does this best TBH, they just create a late early game recruitment booth which basically says "if you don't like the pre-generated party for RP reasons and don't care about their unique specials, you can hire your own custom non-unique slightly worse stat mercs", i.e. you can RP, non-RP, or mix them as you see fit. The NPC party members still show up in POE, you just dont' have to use them and you only lose out the uniques, the RP'ing, the dialague, and the RP sidequests which might be fine your 10th time playing through.

(7) Either remove ammo or make it meaningful. You never run out of ammo in this game so why even have it; it's just a time wasting mini game for no reason but banality.

(8) The lack of weapon and armor choices. I mean I get we don't need infinite variance, realistically the ship would only have a few makes and types but how about some variety as opposed to "this new version is just a leveled up version of the previous gun but now mid/late game". Yes I get this is hard from a design perspective.

(9) Would have vastly preferred more meaningful story options, i.e maybe I wanted to side with the mutants, maybe I wanted to start as a mutant or another faction member not in the Pit and do the same from their angle. Maybe I just want to blow up the ship, etc. I guess those could be DLC's but honestly we aren't storage limited here, vastly expanding out the storyline / options would have been nice rather than "all roads lead to rome" which is most RPG's even today. And yes quest decisions should sometimes lead to game over blockers with sufficient warning "this is a bad path".

(10) Game is short, 40 hours and that was the first time run so still learning. And only gets faster from there on repeats.

(11) Combat UI is atrocious, had zero idea how to make optimal decisions and honestly, not sure it even matters. Basically basic attack even in not a hero mode and you will either win, or lose which just means level up and come back. There really does appear no meaningful tactic strategy to the fights. This is a case where they could really take some lessons learned from Wasteland 2.

Game was fun, worth $25 or so so don't take this review as a reason not to buy it or wait for it to go on sale but just realize what you are getting, a 1997 with no lessons learned and hardware improvement ignored for the past 30 years isometric RPG.

Game is unplayable for those of us who despise super zoom games. The original pathfinder had horrible zoom as well but the settings were exposed so mod'ers could (and did) make zoom mods so you could zoom way out (to entire map if you wanted) and still play. PF:WR locked this setting away so just not possible; game been out a long time now and no modder has ever figured it out which basically means they hard coded the zoom. And this is why I stopped after this game buying pre-orders, crap like this as basically money down the tube as it's unplayable and unmodable. Not everyone it addicted to console gaming / FPS and want to see the zits on the parties face, many of want to play full zoom out and just icons on the map until combat starts which even then, is still zoomed about 3 levels above the max zoom in this game.

And don't say the Bag and Camera mods, they only change FOV, NOT zoom level out.

I want to say kudos but after the speed updates in 3.2 Overlord takes a giant step backwards with all it's added complexity (and computation) ... game even on ultra fast speed plays like slow in 3.3. Just can't recommend the DLC until that is fixed, it's like watching paint try to the point of unplayable.

Expansion doesn't do anything but add a bunch of subgames and crafting .. not stuff I'm interested in in a game like this.

It's not a bad game but it's not "good" either, just a timewaster. Worth full price, no; worth 50%+ off, sure. It's just bleh as the game lacks no depth and every race just a reskin with standard 4X RPS issues. It also drives me nuts this is a perfect EPIC scale game but nope, they still use 40K units and scale.

Specific annoyances:

(1) I really despise (not unique to this game) when the AI prioritized player objects over other AI objects, i.e. you will see wildlife engaged in NPC combat immediately break engagement and chase you down if in range. You will see two AI's fighting each other, units with one health, and the second they see you both units will turn to engage you and only you.

(2) Rules say AI doesn't get a resource/unit but at "normal" but I don't believe it; they grind out way to many resources in a small time. My gut feels they get both a bonus to economy (i.e. ignores maintenance is my guess), build speeds, and a better starting tile set.

(3) Do NOT waste your money on "Lord of the Skulls" DLC as it suffers from the issue most of the "spawn" events have, it drops a giant unit in the middle of your backlines with timers you can rarely meet unless you plan for it which you shouldn't have to do. Unit should just randomly drop anywhere on map w/ no timers or respawn. Played it once or two, disabled after that and never gain. It adds nothing. By the time you can kill it you generally already won the game.

(4) Speaking of which, you almost always win the game conquest prior to completely your faction quests unless you make an effort to just not kill them, i.e. park a unit outside their last building with 1 HP and just keep healing yourself while you compete the missions. If they are going to include missions then they should have either made a single player arc with multiple missions / campaign OR made missions that can actually be completed in game AND actually add something .. hell most of the missions aren't even worth the reward and in many cases, negative.

Game is garbage, it's like going from FO3 to FO4, etc and yes I went back and played WL2 again before writing this to see if misremembered. The game basically became a unity tunnel game with no exploration at the tactical level, i.e. it's just "run in a narrow tunnel to the next waypoint, repeat and at some point a cut scene / spawn will start making your starting position/range irrelevant" ala Shadowrun Returns. For that matter I literally feel like I'm actually playing ShadowRun Returns with a skin mod rather than Wasteland 3, a sequel to WL2.

The tactical maps are way to small ... rifles have effective ranges hundreds of meters but nope, we still got guys killing you with swords doing 300 meter dashes at superman speed. Also maps that make no sense, like "Hey I'm a bad guy, I'm going to surround myself in barrels oil for you shoot because somehow I didn't notice them in my own base. Also I'm going to leave tons of arbitrary boxes around of ammo, weapons, etc unguarded around my base just because, you know, that's what people do and we've never heard of supply or logistics management!!". You have ammo but never actually run out so why bother with it (i.e. Outer Worlds problem), the dialogue choices are meaningless, and even things you expect, like permadeath aren't even if you enable it (if just respawns you at the last autosave point). They also introduced garbage like crafting and pets. On top of the UI is horrible as it does a poor job portraying for example AP's (cost or how many left), cover. Also the game has "magic" now just like HBS wrecked BatteTech, because you know shooting more people in the immediacy powers you up, just ask anybody who has actually been in a combat situation. The more you shoot in the next one minute will eventually get superpowers and can cast magic lol.

That said the three things that did it for me for final straws were:

(1) The zoom level .. I just don't know WTF it is about companies and not letting you zoom out. Game needs the ability to zoom out another 500%. It adds NOTHING to the game dev time, it's an arbitrary limit and we both know internally there is some setting that controls that. And to make it worse, the game keeps resetting your zoom level every f'ing dialogue, like how hard is it to just return to your previous POV/zoom level, it's like two lines of code.

(2) I'm tired of everything has HP games couple with bad guys dropping things they obviously weren't carrying. You know like 30-06 ammo when they are carrying 9mm. Also it doesn't matter how many times you shoot that steel door with your 9mm, it's never going to break. Ditto how many times you punch that military armored robot as v. your first, it has infinite HP. Games really need to bring back the concept of armor classes and yes that means no your weapon may do zero and zero forever on infinite time scale.

(3) I couldn't get past the overly wokeness. I mean sure games are getting more and more woke but I find I can't look past it anymore. Like look at this game, it starts with "Evil white christian men, lets go kill them". Why can't they be black lesbian jews? etc. If I wanted critical race theory, I would talk to my neighbor, i don't need a video game telling me "it's ok to kill people cause they are white christian men and we all know they are the oppressor/colonizers .". Now you can argue that would be "any group" but it's not because it's ALWAYS white christian men. Show me a game where you go hunt down a evil homosexual black vegan group that locks kids up in cages and forces them worship Allah? Oh and make sure they speak with a jive accent but it's sure PC to make our white christian evil men sound like stereotypical racist rednecks.

Basically the game is a bad mashup of Outer Worlds + Shadowrun Returns with a woke theme overlay. Wouldn't buy it even on discount.

Doesn't really add much and the new quests aren't meaningful as in no cool new unique tech or anything game altering plus I'm not happy some of the new bonus ships (like Academy ship) can't "merge" into other fleets but that said it's less than the price of a cup of coffee, it's nice the dev's continue to add content, and so it's worth buying if nothing else, to encourage future content.

PS: Devs if you reading this, fix is so the Academy ship can merge into other fleets!!!. Also another easy cheap context update would be something like "3 new heroes for each major empire + an option to force uniqueness, i.e. no hero once bought/gained can exist twice in the same universe for the same empire".

PSS: Also a way to prevent minors from being annexed via influence if you are playing as Vodyani would be nice. Get's old brainwashing them just to have all your neighbors annex them later. I might as well invade them which defeats the purpose.

Will keep it quick and this is more of a DLC review than the main game. The main game is a bit tedious and unexciting but worth it on a steam sale.

The DLC on the other hand, no. It promised new content, units, etc and what you get is the same stuff as the main game except you can now buy the units instead of just finding them randomly to recruit. On top of that, the new missions are extremely dull and in many cases, just poor mission design period. What is the point of playing an undead faction if your entire army is bought living units? Shadow spam? Yeah dull. Expected a full fleshed out new faction, not "same stuff as main game plus some random infinite spawns"