So I know I've played a lot of this game and I'm giving it a thumbs down. That's because there's no "meh" option.
Parts of this game are pretty good. Some of the combat is fun, especially at the end once you're super strong, but it gets tedious. Not necessarily because I dislike the fights but for 2 main reasons:

1) Even at 300% increased speed I'm fairly sure 50+ of my hours are just waiting on animations to resolve. Including really unneeded animations like the buffs backline units give. And that they wrest control of the game from you to start casting whenever a new enemy gets summoned (or a lich drops a phylactery). There's a fight near the end against a bunch of dragons where the first enemy turn takes over 5 minutes at max speed just waiting on the dragons to flap their big scaly butts across the map. How that made it past Alpha testing I have no idea. How could anyone find waiting on the game to do that to be fun is beyond me.

2) The game relies pretty heavily on cheating for its difficulty. And by difficulty, I mean making things damage sponges. Enemies have vastly more hp than your units. Enemy units 5 levels lower than yours will have 15-20% more hp than your equivalent units. Equivalent level enemies will have 40-50% more. And this is on Normal difficulty. And yet you still ramp up to godmode and obliterate them all at the end of the game which makes one wonder why the game bothered. It just makes the early game a slog, and the end game fights take a turn or so longer (while you wait for animations and buffs/debuffs from big clunky high tier units with lots of passive effects.)

The story is tongue in cheek dark fantasy. Humans are evil, demons and undead are funny, elves are pricks, nobody is a good guy, but somehow everything is played slightly for laughs. That can be OK, although it makes guessing what will improve or harm your relations with any given faction a bit hard to determine ahead of time because they aren't consistent.

The voice acting where it is, is decent, but it's a tad sporadic. I enjoyed most of the characters.

But lets be honest, this game plays like a eurojank game. So much so that I was honestly surprised to find out that it wasn't. I'm past the point of sunken cost fallacy in terms of time (although a bunch of time is also just me leaving the game open while I do something else.)

So no, I can't quite recommend this one unless you're willing to sit through a lot of waiting a tedium. I suppose it's good for letting you watch a show on your other monitor while you play.

This game had great potential, trying to mix it up and be "multi-genred" by taking influences from various cool games that many of us love. However, it ended up being mediocre or even less in almost all areas. Nothing has been fully fleshed out, it's buggy, unpolished, unbalanced, the story and most characters are uninteresting and the overall feeling that you get is "meh".

*Why even have mana/hp fountains instead of healing after every fight making us run around?
*Why make us waste so much time in long and maze-like but mostly empty dungeons?
*Why have world "blockers" that you unlock with character quests if all I will get is going to be "generic randomized item #58?
*Why is the story so incoherent?
*Why are the fights so boring for the first 10 hours? 2 skills per character, really?
*Why do I have to go through multiple unnecessary steps to fast travel to other areas?
*Why do you randomly lock me out from doing that after I end a part of the main quest?
*Why do we have to go back to the main area to collect resources?
*Why is there no button to train all of your characters at the same time?
*Why do you make me hold my clicks to do anything?
*Why make us phase out buildings if there is clearly not enough resources in the game to progress quickly through tiers?
*Why have so many levels when they barely change anything? Adding just some hp/power points per level..
*What's the point of leveling at all if wherever you go everyone will be basically the same level?
*What the hell is the point of getting 5 leadership points at some levels when everything you may add to your roster is 10, 20, etc. points??
*Why is the UI made in such a way that makes me feel like I am playing a mobile game?
*Why are the heroes absolute boring carbon-copies of higher tier units?

Those questions and so many more really make me appalled by the decision-making process of the developers of this game. It felt like they tried to mash in as much as they could without ever thinking if they should. There's so much time you waste backtracking, going through boring dungeons, leveling everyone individually, healing and much more crap that half your playtime feels like a chore. You don't need to pretend your game is long, just make it fun.

I had this game in my wishlist for such a long time, I really REALLY wanted to like it, I gave it a lot of my time waiting for it to get better, but it barely did.. The game looks nice, I liked the aesthetic, I liked the variety of creatures, the animations were great, the music was cool. But everything else? Simple mediocrity. That is the feeling that I was left with in the end.

Dear Developers,

the game is quite fun.
However, I don't appreciate your manipulative behavior.

First of all, the game has an obligatory launcher, that does NOTHING except spying and showing ads, but the game of course cannot be run without it. I can't even adjust game options from it, which I would have at least appreciated, so it has literally no practical function. For the players, of course. It sure has a function for data harvesting.

Second of all, the game has a pointless un-skippable logo animation every time it's started. I literally couldn't care less about your company, and the fact that I can neither skip it with a keystroke, nor remove it from the installation directory, makes me want to never to buy anything again from the same company.

And third of all, I wouldn't have written this petty review at all, if you weren't sooo insistent on it, dear developers. When I start a game, I want to have fun and to jump right into it - not waste time staring at a launcher, staring at your logo, and I certainly don't want to waste time staring at a message telling me to write a review - which, by the way, CANNOT be dismissed permanently, it comes back and back and back every time you start the damn thing.

So, here is your review. Enjoy the thumbs down.

P.S.: Saving game configuration through Steam cloud is one of the stupidest design decisions I have ever seen - I actually want to have DIFFERENT resolution on both of my computers (because they have... different screens) but the game of course cloud-saves all options, so I have to change it back every single time I switch computers.

Disciples II was my favourite game when I was a kid, and I absolutely loved playing with numbers, trying different builds and "rasing" my initiates into vampires, liches and deaths. It was fun, satisfying, crunchy.

Then there was Disciples III which was so bad and buggy that I don't even want to talk about it.

Now this. This is waaaay better than Disciples III, but is still pretty bad. It's almost ok, but not almost good. Here is why:

1) The feel of the game. For me the main feel of the game of Disciples was growing your units over the tree. Here you kind of have a similar system... But don't worry if someone dies - you can always just hire the next tier unit. Moreover, your veteran zombie who fought 100 battles isn't worth anything - you can't upgrade them to the next tier. Just buy the next tier unit and upgrade with gold and steel to the max level.
This completely ruins the feel of unit development. D2 was the deepest unit-development game of that time, and DL is more shallow than pretty much anything that has any unit development.

2) Game mechanics. It was my favourite part in D2, but here in DL it is very weird. First of all, most of the shown numbers are boring and the same for most same-tier units. E.g. almost all tier-2 warriors have the same HP and power. But, they have all different skills, which is almost cool, except unless you try each of them and use pen and paper (or spreadsheet) to calculate them - you won't know the power of each strike. Different units with the same stats for power deal different damage, but nothing nowhere says how much damage they deal. Even just saying 75% of power, 115% of power etc. - would be super helpful. But alas. If you are not into spreadsheers and testing - sorry. If you are - choose another game, where number crunching is funnier and less confusing :)

Yet, despite being somewhat chaotic, battles become quite repetitive and boring, because due to poor unit development - almost nothing changes from battle to battle.

3) And yep, since it is an "RPG" now, I have to say about this part as well. First of all, it is as linear and banal as it gets. Narrative is awful. All the role-playing feels completely fake and more of a filler than a core. Even strategies nowadays usually make better stories and better roleplaying, yet this game calls itself RPG. Sad.

The only somewhat good part is aesthetics and lore - although it also feels super outdated, it is still rahter appealing - as long as you skip all the childish dialogues which completely ruin the feel.

Yet, compated to D3 it is at least playable. But I couldn't force myself to finish it.

They shouldve stuck to the old Disciples 2 format, which was pretty unique and only matched by the Warlords series (e.g. Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria).

I actually feel bad giving this a "No" as the story and character development is good - plenty of dialogue options and you actually grow attached to the characters - theyre not just some overpowered grunt.

But the combat grew stale very quickly - slow animations, repetitive skills on all but your main hero, WAY too easy difficulty for anyone who has every played Heroes, Kings Bounty etc. I couldn't bear to force myself through wave after wave of fights that felt too similar, just to advance the storyline.

Maybe i've just been spoilt by the Heroes series, but the legendary Heroes 3 (and to a certain extent 5) remains the benchmark to beat, even after all these years.

So this.... this is a essentially a mobile game.

A very pretty mobile game to be sure but a mobile game nonetheless...

The mechanics of essentially any "state of survival" style mobile MMORPG have been replicated in whole or in part as a "PC" game at PC game pricing.

Good lord they even sell a version with extra skill point for $10 USD more!

Game areas are tiny and extremely linear (like a mobile game area would be).

The interface often just has you picking up materials laying around like a hoover (the way initial stage of mobile games do).

You have *timed* resource build-ups you need to harvest manually (sweet jesus?!? on a PC game?????!??!?). Really... timed resource pick ups! SERIOUSLY?

Your "character" (which they don't allow you to create) is a meaningless tabula rasa since literally any available dialog choice always works out.

You can choose to "romance" your equally meaningless companions even though there is no build up of semblence of sense to the romances. These are "romances" the way weebs and incels think romances work.

The combat challenge is almost non-existent.

There is an auto-combat option when your group is way over powered (always a great indication that the areas are filled with nonsense mobs and that combat is rudimentary). Sadly the auto-combat doesn't kick in nearly OFTEN ENOUGH as you will routinely be forced to do a very bland TBS "battle" against a mob you will wipe out while your guys take less than 10% damage total.

As a 9$ USD mobile game this would be fine. As a full priced PC game though? Save your money.

Not TOO bad, but the whole game is both confused AND confusing. Gimme back Disciples 2, with a remaster.

First of all this is not Disciples as we know it. This is just another game in Disciples world, do not relate it.
The only good thing in this game is story, it is fine. Everything else is bad.
UI seems to be designed for mobile. There are lots of not needed clicks that take your time.
To dismantle an item you have to click and hold the button, and there is no dismantle all. The same thing is with leveling-up your units and heroes. Was it hard to add "Train All" button for units and heroes?
Not every dialogue has voice, this looks very cheap.
Units design is fine, but variety is terrible. Every unit of every faction has SAME abilities that units of other factions.
Modificators like bleeding, poisoning and burning work in the same way, the unit just gets damage every turn and that`s it.
There are other things that are just bad.
Please do NOT make sequel of this game, just make good remake of Disciples 2.

This brand was killed... they lost what it made it unique, the leveling and advancement is a joke, also the environment use to be dark, now its full of bad jokes... and you cannot play a free map, you are limited to a fixed character... not recomended if you, like me, loved the first three titles

I have fond memories of playing Disciples II from back in the day. It was a pretty decent Heroes-like game with an interesting setting and great art style. When I heard about Liberation, I was immediately interested and after reading the game's description and seeing a few pictures even more so. Mature dark fantasy, nice. Meaningful decisions, yummy. Nice looking art, always a plus. All it would need is some great gameplay and we'd be set. Spoiler alert, set we were not. But let's try a slightly longer explanation.

The plot revolves around a single main hero, Avy, who along with her childhood friend Orion gets tangled in the intrigues of the world's competing factions. A fair number of plot clichés later, Avy finds herself in control of an ancient, forgotten city and, along with a bunch of merry tagalong companions, at the helm of an army trying to liberate the people of this world from oppression. The easy way, or the hard. The plot is nothing to write home about. Not necessarily offensive, but certainly contrived. The game claims to be a dark fantasy work, but the plot falls short of that promise. Melodramatic and occasionally cheesy, there is just not enough of a punch here to justify the claim. It is a shame, the setting certainly had the potential for a lot more. It comes with a rich backstory covering several epochs and an interesting cosmology. Unfortunately, the potential was not to be realized.

Let's discuss a few more elements that seem to contradict the game's claims of maturity. First the companions. Don't get me wrong the companion characters were generally very fun to interact with. But they can also be awkward, at times flippant and bring a fair amount of cringe. I liked them anyway, but I would not call them dark or particularly mature. Then there is the sex. I suppose including funny casual sex in a game must make it more mature right? The more the better right? Wrong. Not unless you are an adolescent boy with more hormones than brain cells at least. It seems that's the audience the game had in mind though and goes completely overboard. Succubus orgies? Check. Boning the undead? Sure. Shagging every companion around? Why not. It is entirely optional and I would often times laugh at the absurdity of some of those situations. So it's not like I hated this or anything. But mature? Just no.

So far, so mediocre. If that was all, I might have said fine. Unfortunately though, the problems continue to mount up. There is an obvious lack of polish. The game is buggy and inconsistent. The interface obtuse and ill-explained. Promising systems, like inventory, entirely underutilized. Known bugs that were reported months ago remain unfixed. Little time for that, a DLC was more important. Priorities I guess. This lack of polish affects the way the plot plays out and hampers the ability of the game to deliver on yet another promise, meaningful decisions. I have had quests I couldn't start, or even plot points where the characters would say one thing and then jump to a different narrative thread forgetting my earlier choices. The way that quests and side-quests are positioned on the maps can be problematic too. There is often little premeditation or care for the order of events. And so on, and so forth.

It is core gameplay though, that finally breaks the camel's back. First, I should clarify that the maps are beautiful and generally fun to explore. The game does a good job on that. Exploring, encountering events and completing missions. It makes for an engaging loop. It's probably the reason why I stuck with the game for as long as I did. And it was a struggle. See, there is another element where the game truly fails to deliver. A key element. Combat. If I had to describe it in one word that would be boring. But I can think of more. Repetitive, tedious, slow. So slow. Even the fastest speed setting didn't help. The game does give the option to auto-defeat significantly weaker enemies. A band-aid at best, especially with how inconsistently that feature is implemented. Combat is the heart of such games. Yet, I spent half the game avoiding enemies, not because I couldn't beat them, but because it would be more fun to watch the grass grow taller outside.

I can't say I can recommend this game. And that is a pity. There are things to like here. The compelling world, the fun exploration element. But the poor combat and inconsistent design kill this game. Maybe it didn't have enough of a budget, maybe the developers behind it lacked experience. I don't know. Whatever the reason it is a lot poorer than it ought to be. Hardcore fans of Disciples, thirsty for more, might get a few good hours out of this. But the rest probably should look elsewhere.