There's nothing really glaringly awful about this game. It's just .. middling (Yes, i put nearly 50 hours in to finish it. but it took 3 years of sitting in my backlog.) It wasn't terrible, you can tell a lot of thought and passion went into making it. The puppet system is kind of neat, the lore, world building, and setting are great. The graphics hold up well, and even the voice acting is well done.

But beyond that.. it's just wasn't that fun. By the end it was just AoEing everything to death with lizard bro and speedrunning through it. At a certain point (at least on normal difficulty) there's no reason to bother upgrading your gear, new skills, etc. Combat is stupidly easy, and the puzzles (i think there's 5 variations?) become nothing but tedious time sinks to get from one quest marker to the next.

A convoluted mess of an arpg.
Even the first area is so cumbersome to go through.

You have to switch between two realms constantly just to pass through a linear dungeon. I bet the further you go, the more annoying this gets.
I hate that most such games have puzzles sttached on every single corner. It's like they put the mechanics into the game just to make a puzzle areas out of them.

See a moving thing, switch to other realm (character) to stop it, move on the stopped thing to traverse into another room, then switch back to another realm (aka character) and repeat. There are a lot of dead ends, broken paths and backtracking because of this. You always have to switch between the characters. Always. Such a gimmicky, uninteresting way to play through the game. Even in combat you have to switch between characters/realms because the enemies are invulnerable in one state and vulnerable in another. Holy F.... What a time waster. 1h was enough for me. I dislike these "unique" games with "unique" and dreadful mechanics in them instead of being normal games.

Definitely not a game for me.

Concept of time is weird. I've played this for 3 hours but it has felt like 15 hours.

Either there was some memo missing from "aRPG game design" or they tried to re-invent wheel. Sadly it didn't really go as planned in my opinion. I know the description says "tactical combat" like its "real-time jRPG!" but we all know its really meant to be hack-slash diablo-like not "tactical CRPG" like Pillars of Eternity or older cRPGS that had "real-time with/without pause"

Combat is very slow and monotonous. You basically use 1-3 skills, run out of mana and just auto-attack for while. While other "diablo-likes" make you feel slightly OP and trash mobs die in few hits at best, Shadows Awakening makes every trash mob feel like mini-boss by taking quite a while to kill. Thankfully there's only 3-4 on screen at once..
What makes the combat monotonous is that none of the hits really feel "oomph". Its just throwing auto-attacks that land like wet noodles, both audio-visually and damage-wise.

Loot? No sir!
I've played 3 hours and gotten to chapter 2 (28% gotten that achievement..).
I've changed my "human" characters weapon 2½ times. Half because one mini-boss was immune to my lightning weapon.. Theres just simply no loot to be had. You get money drops from SOME urns you kill..And if theres loot, since its aRPG most of the weapon drops you get are "for wrong class". Compared to other "diablo-likes" where you are constantly full inventory and change weapons almost every map, slowly building up power. Here you feel like you're stuck at level 3 weapon for 7 levels..which you are.

"Shadow realm" function is interesting at least. You see solutions to puzzles in shadow realm and then switch to "real" realm to complete the puzzle, But doesnt really save all above.

★★½⚝⚝ if you need a "rating"

Endless backtracking, bad puzzle design- especially the timing puzzles, and encounters/boss fights that are insufferable. The concept is novel and leads to some fun interactions- but they are far too infrequent to keep playing though the campaign.

The game uses puzzles that are not at all hard to figure out (and there are walkthroughs available of course), but unjustifiedly difficult to execute for people without fast coordination skill, even with knowledge of the solution. And while the game has easy difficulty mode, switching to it changes nothing regarding the puzzles. That definitely turns the thumb down for me. More about this is said by other players in this thread.

Also, i find this a sort of foul play, that you can get this game for free from buying its predecessor, Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, but it’s not clearly stated anywhere by the publisher that the games are still bundled this way. Bundle is a nice thing, why hide it?!

PS: It took me 90+ hours to (thoroughly and attentively, and also quite laggy despite playing on exactly the recommended specs and lowest graphics) complete the storyline for the first time on Easy. To 100% achievements, the game must be beaten 3 times because of the story’s mutually exclusive choices. In my 90+ hours i travelled a few forks both ways to pick an extra achievement or just for fun, but those were short, and i believe not less than 24h i spent on sorting my equipment, selling stuff i was sure i would’t need but keeping stuff i thought i might need. The inventory space is capped low and the sorting process is aided by really painful interface and a lot of glitches that made me restart the game a lot when the trade menu stopped even showing the right items. When managing the equipment the player still has to juggle the many available heroes, who can re-use each others’ equipment in many various combinations, between only two replaceable slots. I actually like micromanagement, but i obviously want a better thought-out interface for it. Which is never the case with cross-platform games, but i play on PC and don’t at all enjoy always having to face other platforms’ limitations but never their benefits. Having completed the Easy playthrough, i learned that all this equipment pain was unnecessary, no specialization damage or armor needed, killing everything with only the most general stuff was Easy indeed. But when i played i couldn’t be sure of that and suspected difficulty balance walls at any point. If i ever replay the game on a higher difficulty for the first time again, for the same reason all micromanaging will have to be done again.

It is a great game that hides its good side in a spiky shell of its bad sides. The devs could have worked more on cracking the shell and making the great game more likely enjoyable to much more players, but they gave up on it too son. Sad.

Boring, repetitive. Sure, having the shadow side is different, but just means you have to clear out the same area more than once. The mage and archer seem useless after a point, the puzzles are frustrating, repetitive and boring. Dying repeatedly just to avoid a situation and get to the next level is frustrating.
I'm surprised I lasted as long as I did, but I can't be bothered continuing.

not very good like vikings . too much complicated and too much story in the mission

This looks like a game I would enjoy in a genre I usually find fun, but after an hour I'm bored. Combat is very clunky and the character switching mechanic feels like a chore.

I can imagine combat improving with more characters to switch into and the story has potential. Graphics are great, although animations feel heavy.

Overall the new player experience isn't great. I find the game totally underwhelming and I'm ready to move on.

Not a bad game, just not very fun. Movement is very slow and there aren't enough fast-travel spots. Even the characters complain about the backtracking through empty space just to get somewhere. The switch-in voice lines get grating after a while. Combat is repetitive and dull. You can only equip 3 abilities per character at once for some reason. I didn't feel interested in trying most of the characters that I recruited. The puzzles are just annoying inconveniences. You'll need to pull levers till you find the right order to pull them in or memorize what tiles to step on. I had to look for a guide to learn how to even start some puzzles. Would not recommend.

This is certainly one of the games of all times.. Plays like someones first summer project for game dev school: janky, unbalanced, pointless itemization, story written by a 10 year old and featuring the worst screenshake in history (you cant even turn it off).
I would rather play cookie clicker than wasting anymore time on this game.