Recent reviews by orb

This game is overall fantastic. Excellent turn-based board-game-feel with a nice UI. The pacing is excellent -- if you don't have a lot of time, my friends and I were able to get through the shorter game modes in only 45 minutes. This is incredible to be able to get through a decently strategic game with a good amount of agency for players in such a short time.

I've had a couple crashes here and there but it's overall been running smoothly and we've been having a really good time playing. There are no microtransactions and the unlockables come pretty quickly. Major props to the devs!

Overall a great game that's very enjoyable. Building an empire feels very satisfying and there is a lot of depth that isn't immediately apparent, such that I am still learning new things about how game mechanics work despite being hundreds of hours deep in the game. In some ways this might be seen as a bad thing in that it signifies there isn't a lot of transparency in the game on how things work, but that's not the case for the most part. For the most part it's just that there are so many things to do that until you look each one up in the in-game civilopedia you only understand the basic concepts and not the behind-the-scenes mechanics.


There are some things I would love to see improved in the next iteration, like combat. Especially the way simultaneous-turn multiplayer combat is handled. Right now in multiplayer it's kind of a click-fest to see who attacks with their units faster. I can empathize with the devs because it's hard to come up with a perfect way to fix this. When a combat starts, do you just kind of pause the game for everyone and wait for all units on either side to take turns making attacks? That wouldn't be fun for players not in combat. But if you allow players to just attack each other at full speed in real-time, it creates an element of a real-time-strategy game that feels out of place given that this game is turn-based. My idea for this would be to just adjust the way that combat works to give less of an attacker's advantage except in the most extreme circumstances. For example, if a slinger attacks a warrior, the warrior shouldn't just sit there and lose half its health. They should engage each other simultaneously so it doesn't matter if the player with the warrior clicked first or the player with the slinger clicked first. The only times this wouldn't be the case is when attacking from more than 1 range, such as an archer 2 hexes away, in which case having a melee attacker run all the way across 2 hexes wouldn't make sense and some advantage should go to the player that is using range. That being said, if an archer is attacking something that can attack back like another archer, they should simultaneously attack each other whenever either player attacks so that it's more fair and isn't just "who clicked first" or "who is host and has less delay."

But other than the multiplayer combat issues and some minor multiplayer desync issues the game is a blast

This game is great so far. I understand other game developers are intimidated by the scale, but they should be taking note for the completely scale-unrelated aspects of this game. The way you can move separately from your co-op buddies in your party, yet join/listen in on any conversation from anywhere. All the UI elements and the fluid way combat works.

For example, I was playing Wartales not too long ago and it was just this game but significantly worse in basically every possible aspect. I understand it comes from a much smaller developer but I see no reason they could not have made similar design decisions at a smaller scale.

Major kudos to Larian, this game is amazing from what I've experienced so far.

What a fantastic, charming game. This game is a great example of what can happen when game developers really care about making a fun experience for their players. There is so much attention to detail with little interactions that are hilarious and somehow never seem to get old. Get a group of 4 together and play this game!