Oh you arent a metaslave ♥♥♥??? GO ♥♥♥♥ YOURSELF AND YOUR MONASTICS!!!

A Concept Worth Loving, An Execution Worth Criticizing

My playtime looks low because I haven't played since the Steam page migration, but I have well over 300 hours in this game overall.

After being away for about four years and recently returning, I can't in good faith recommend it at this point in time. The concept is genuinely fun on paper, but in practice it's a bit of a mess from a gameplay standpoint.

The biggest offense coming back is the sheer amount of F2P bloat: multiple season passes stacked on top of each other and grind mechanics tuned so aggressively that progression stops feeling rewarding. Add in the heavily overtuned seasonal and meta units, and roughly 80% of your roster becomes dead weight if you actually want to compete.

The frustrating part is that the developers have little incentive to fix any of this. It's genuinely the only game of its kind, and players have nowhere else to go for this specific style of cross-cultural sword-and-shield unit combat. That monopoly removes any real pressure to improve the experience.

The overall Mixed rating feels accurate. This game is remarkable as a concept, but in execution it's yet another example of F2P design philosophy seeping into a product that didn't need it, with systems built less around fun and more around exploiting engagement psychology for maximum retention.

This game is hard to recommend to anyone. Plenty of people will tell you about meta and f2p issues. Let me tell you about the new player experience. You load into the game, and as per usual, the game "holds your hand", or in other words, forces you through actions until your about level 15-20. Up until then, you're restricted to play matches with and against ai only. Which, on paper is a good thing. It'll help teach players the basic of how games go. But this isn't on paper. This is in execution. In reality, you're likely to get mollywhopped most games. Mostly because your ai teammates all have gotten lobotomies, and the enemy ai won the pro leagues. In my experience, 1 of 2 things happened. 1, the enemy team rushed out of the castle as soon as the game started, and kept spawn killing my ai team. Or 2, we breach the castle, and my ai team would just sit in the corner of the castle, leaving me to deal with the enemy ai by myself. It's not a good experience. Eventually, you'll get past that, and unlock proper pvp. Kind of. If there aren't enough slots filled by players, the game will put in ai. So it's still a hit or miss on whether you have a good game or not. You being a new player, the game will constantly block half of your screen mid battle with information you already know until you reach a certain level. What level that is, I don't know. Speaking of leveling. You level up really quickly, which is both a blessing and a curse. The game gives you a few high tier units when you start out, until you reach a certain level, then you can keep 3 of them, but discard the rest. Which on the surface seems like a good thing. At first, I really liked that idea. But here's the catch. Since everybody is using high tier units at low levels, and because of how the meta is. There are some units that you simply won't be able to do a thing to. You aren't geared enough to do enough damage to take them on, but they're still there, wrecking you. There's been a few times where I've jumped into an engagement with full health, and died not even 3 seconds later. Not to mention the maps are unbalanced. Some maps require the attackers to capture 3 points. Some require 2 points. Some maps are easier to defend. Some are hard. Spectating could also be better. You don't have free cam on these huge maps, so trying to find a specific point of action, like where your units are and how they're doing is almost impossible. And also, this game has a bad problem where many class weapons can just knock you down for 5 seconds. So there's a good chance you go into a fight ready to kick butt, but then you get ganked by rats and don't get an opportunity to fight at all. This game is unique, and is the kind of game I want to exist. But the devs just fumbled the new player experience in favour of making money. Which, for a free game, I can't hold that against them entirely. They have to make money somehow. But balancing the game the way they do, and how grindy it can be, it makes retaining players hard. And seeing as this game has a couple thousand players at a time... uhh, yeah. Baseball, huh?