Recent reviews by Beje

A bunch of bot reviews around here so here's a real one.

TL;DR: It's an AFK Journey style of game with a Kono Suba skin and a sprinkle of Brown Dust 2 fanservice. Can you spend your time more productively playing something better? Most certainly yes. But if you go in with the right expectations, honestly it's not that bad. Just hold off from spending any money on this one unless you truly enjoy it and wish to support the devs. I'd rate this a 6-7/10.

It's an idle game, but first you have to unlock a lot of the stuff that makes it idle in the first place. Double/triple combat speed for example, or placing the current fight in the background (which will automatically continue to the next stage) so you can do something else even farm another one of the many stages of progression systems (this is actually a cool feature). If you've played AFK Journey then you'll already know the drill here. No stamina systems, rather you are gated by resources and the constant AFK farming that's happening in the background even when you are offline.

The loop is you log in, claim the resources that've been farmed, get a big power spike from them as you upgrade your stuff, clear content for a couple of hours, click on a bunch of rewards, hit a progression wall, log off, log in again tomorrow, rinse and repeat. Sometimes you can brute force it with different character placements and strategies, sometimes it's simply impossible and you just need to upgrade your team. Ofc plenty of monetary ways to bypass the waiting are provided in the shop.

Some quick pointers to look out for: character rarity is ambiguous, you have stuff like R, SR, SSR, SSR+, SSRex (the best, which you don't even know exists until quite late in the progression; plus they do the same retarded pull system like in AFK Journey for them with a specific banner that has a chance to give SHARDS of the character you want and you'll need 60 for 1 copy). On top of that, maxing out a character means getting something like 18 dupes which is ridiculous. Do you need to do that? Most likely not, unless you're try-harding for the top of the leaderboards. But you have to be clinically insane or incredibly rich or both to even consider such a thing. I personally stop at 2 copies of the limited characters since you need a second copy to unlock their second faction/affinity.

Endless menus and rewards for the smallest things. Luckily the game plays by itself after a certain point, giving you time to click through all the buttons and rewards and stuff. But if you are sensitive to mobile / gacha menus, consider yourself warned this one is especially heavy on those.

Art for characters seems the same style as Brown Dust 2: AI generated but touched up by an actual person afterwards. Even a lot of the cutscenes feel similar to BD2, they're probably using the same tools or something like that. The difference is that they never go all in on the fan service like the aforementioned game. It's still decent don't get me wrong, but it's not 16+ content.

Plenty of progression systems, resource farming stages, roguelikes, guild activities, big boss do-as-much-damage-as-you-can encounters with rotating faction weaknesses, like 4-5 different battle passes with free and premium tracks, dating your waifus and raising affection with them, pop-ups with WOW INCREDIBLE 20000% VALUE offers, it's all here. It's very heavy on the monetization, but so far I've been able to progress at a steady pace entirely f2p. I actually caved in and gave them 1$ for a character pack that I wanted but that's it.

I'll also mention that I have unlocked 2 character skins for free so far and they're decent. Not just a different character model, the spell animations are different as well. Pleasantly surprised by this since these games almost never give out skins for free. Another surprise was the fact that after level 100 you can breakthrough and level up ALL characters of a specific class. So if you breakthrough your current level 100 tank, ALL tank characters will become max level then from that point forward you will be leveling up the "Tank" class globally rather than on a specific character. Makes it very easy to switch teams around. Severely underrated feature!

I'd give this game like a 6 or a 7/10. For what it is, I think it's decent enough and I actually prefer it to AFK Journey but that's probably due to me favoring the anime aesthetics and the waifus. I have played better, sure, but I have played much worse. Treat this as a casual game you play for a couple of hours daily and you'll be fine as f2p. One final warning: Steam has it's own separate servers. There's no cross progression with the mobile client. If you're playing only on Steam it shouldn't matter, but if you want to play it on mobile as well you won't be able to use the same account.

UPDATE: There seems to be an issue with in-app purchases via Steam, meaning you might not be able to purchase anything in-game. This was not an issue for me nor another friend of mine playing it, but there have been several reports of people complaining about this and the developers seem stumped as well, I haven't seen them offer a reasonable fix or alternative yet. If you plan on spending in this game keep this in mind. Maybe try to buy the 1$ character pack first and if it doesn't work for you either consider switching to the mobile/emulator version from their website.

Unfortunately I can't recommend this game if you are planning on playing in multiplayer / co-op with some friends.
These issues might not be applicable for single player, but this is a co-op only review so keep that in mind.

I'll start with the worst offender. If anyone from the party crashes / freezes / has to reconnect to the session for whatever reason, someone will lose all their items (and the freeze in particular happens quite often it seems). From our experience so far, that someone seems to be mostly the host. If Friend 1 disconnects then reconnects, the Host will lose all their items obtained prior to Friend 1 disconnecting. This happened to us at the end of a Void Crusade so needless to say, the host (me) lost all the items except for some Chests which were opened after Friend 1 reconnected. If you have played any loot driven game before then I don't need to explain to you why this is a gamebreaking bug. And unfortunately this seems to be an issue ever since the game launched; a search in the forums will find threads about this dating back to 2019. Some people have reported that the game should give you your items back in your stash in such cases, but that never happened to me and we've had this happen to us twice. We don't plan to stick around and test it for a third time and opening a ticket to support to "pls give us our items back" each time we encounter this issue doesn't seem like a good solution to such an ugly bug (but props to the support team for trying).

Another smaller issue: once the Psyker class reaches high Warp Heat, one of the negative Warp anomalies is a tornado that slowly follows the Psyker. This tornado can cause the entire screen of players to go black for all players connected to the game, depending on the angle of your camera, due to a visual artifact / glitch. Not a huge issue you'd think, but in the heat of the battle this happens more often than it should and it's very annoying to not see anything.

There's some other smaller annoyances but they would all be passable if the core of the game worked as expected. A shame I can't recommend this since otherwise I believe this is a pretty solid 7/10 ARPG, maybe even an 8/10 if you're into Warhammer 40k. But what's the point in playing when there's always the danger of losing all your hard earned loot at the end of the day. Give it a try I suppose if you plan on playing solo, but stay far away if you want to play with some friends only.

Honestly this isn't a bad game. The systems are solid, the progression is tangible, the gameplay feels good, the bones of it all are good. But this game has what I would argue to be one of the worst class fantasies I've ever seen in such a game. I picked the Mage since I tend to play spellcasting classes whenever possible. It's just...extremely underwhelming. There's 3 specializations which you can unlock at level 10, but they all feel very same-y. You have like 10 skills + 1 extra class specialization skill on your spacebar, all with their own skill trees which is awesome. But they are just alternatives for your left and right click. And all of these skills are just different variations of "arcane"-ish spells. There's no fire explosion, no frost bolt, no chain lightning, nothing of the sorts. And the specs? Also very same-ish. I don't feel a major shift in how I play the game based on my specialization and I'm still mostly using just arcane inspired skills.

You can unlock some of these actual elemental spells with the ancestral skill tree and some rarer items actually come with an ancestral skill / passive, but they feel very underwhelming to use and they don't have their own skill tree like the main spells. And either way you are still stuck with the initial left + right click spells so you don't seem to be able to commit to being a 100% frost mage for example, at least in the early parts of the game.

It might get better later on, there are probably legendary items that might change my initial grievances but getting there means spamming magic missiles for the first 40-ish hours of the game and I just can't commit to that. Not to mention that the gameplay itself gets repetitive very quickly with the limited amount of skills you can use. I don't see anything in the progression to get me excited and worst of all, I simply can't get to like any of the classes and their specializations. So if you are like me and come into this game expecting all sorts of elemental skills and different ways to play the same class you might be disappointed by the initial experience.

As far as survival games go, I've played a LOT of them. I'm a huge fan of the genre so I would consider myself well acquainted with the tropes and mechanics that come associated with them. Thus I can say that for me personally at least, this is the best survival game I've ever played.

The only caveat I'll mention here is that there is limited to no base building (as in creating huge structures and letting your creativity go wild like in Valheim, Conan Exiles, Minecraft, Enshrouded and so on). Here you can only build barricades, makeshift walls, defensive turrets, traps, mines and the sorts. This is of course excluding everything else like the crafting benches, chests and utility stuff. In Abiotic Factor, your base is whatever spot you find in the environment that you think you can close off / is easy to defend, has enough power sockets, maybe a recharging station and / or a kitchen with a big stove and a toilet nearby + a source of water close. There are a ton of such locations which you can claim as your home base and due to the interconnectivity of all the "biomes" (they're called sectors here) any place is a good place since you will constantly be unlocking shortcuts in a metroidvania / dark souls style. Every new unlocked location almost constantly circles back to the Office Sector (the starting zone) and even in between them. At a later point in the game you also unlock ways to quickly travel between locations so you can have several bases, or one main base + smaller outposts.

Honestly I don't think this is a downside, just a different approach and a refreshing one for me personally. Think of it like going into an abandoned house in 7 Days to Die and think "this would make a nice base" and rather than building your own from scratch, you just reinforce and renovate that cool house.

Everything else is top notch. The progression, the systems, the skills, the crafting, the enemies, the STORY (yes this one has a story and it adds to the gameplay, it's not an annoyance/distraction as it often ends up being in these types of games and also serves as a great progression guide thus you are never stuck wondering what you are supposed to do next), the amount of content (so often our group would think this is the final sector, only to be slammed with another one, then another one; all with their own new progression level and systems and enemies). It knows very well what it is and wears its inspirations on its sleeves proudly. The cheeky humor, the weapons, the upgrades, cooking, farming. I could go on and on gushing about this game but I think it's better if you go in blindly and discover everything for yourself.

If you want what is possibly the best and most fun survival experience on the market, this is it. Just know that there is no traditional base building mechanics as I mentioned above, which might be a positive, a negative or a neutral for you depending on if you're usually the "builder" in your group and that's all you enjoy in these types of games. If you just want to build cool looking structures this game ain't for you. If you don't care that much / you're neutral about that and you just want to have a blast with your friends exploring a half-life style facility where everything went wrong and you are one of the scientists this is a fantastic game and I can't recommend it enough.

(Bonus edit: you can also highly customize your experience, there are a ton of world options to tinker with before hoping in and this doesn't block you from unlocking any achievements. Hunger goes down too fast for your liking? You can adjust the meter. Food spoiling too fast? You can slow it down or even disable it entirely, plus many more)

Here's the perspective of someone with 500+ hours that has been playing since the game came out in open beta via the Tempo Launcher. There's a lot of controversy surrounding this one. I'm not saying it's not warranted, some promises were indeed broken for the initial backers of the game and yes, the community management side leaves a lot to be desired. It's bordering on childish and amateurish, with the attempts to ban everyone for example just because they were expecting a lot of backlash after the monetization announcement. A lot of those bans were deserved, but some of them weren't. This just proves that they greatly need to improve their socials and community management. I was one of the people that were banned on reddit just because I expressed some concerns, but thankfully my ban was reverted even though I didn't contest it or said anything about it. Somebody must have double checked the bans afterwards and corrected some of the mistakes. They could have communicated things better, they could have handled things better, no doubt about it. Nobody has the absolute answers to everything and nobody is perfect, but some people just want to hate and rage, which is just a symptom of the current modern world in my opinion but that's a different topic altogether.

When it comes to recommending this game or not, it boils down to: can you separate the art from the artist? Can you overlook all the controversies and simply enjoy playing one of, if not the best autobattler there currently is on the market? Everyone is acting like Reynad, the creator of this game, is a convicted war criminal and he's solo developed this entire game. Which couldn't be further from the truth. The amazing developers, artists, sound designers, voice actors, they don't deserve all the backlash and the hate. Reynad might not be a perfect human being, but the rest of the team that contributed to creating this piece of art doesn't deserve to be dragged through the mud because of that.

I am of the belief that the positives of the game and how good it is outweighs the bad management and communications. If you are not the same and need to know more about the "artist" before committing to the art, you can read some of the negative reviews posted for more insight. Just don't forget that this game was made by a team of passionate and talented people, not just Reynad himself. I will continue talking about the game itself from now on.

First off, the gameplay. It's an autobattler in the style of Teamfight Tactics or Hearthstone Battlegrounds. You assemble a board of items that automatically activate and do "something" after an initial cast time. There's a heavy emphasis on synergies between said items. All items have tags on them, such as "Weapon", "Aquatic", "Property" and so on. This is to help players find the needed synergies faster. A "Weapon" might just be a very fast, 2 seconds item that simply does its stated damage after the cast time. But another item might buff the damage of all items with the "Weapon" tag. Or make them apply status effects, such as Slow, Freeze, Burn, Poison. Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. It's all about creating the most busted insane synergies within the limited space of your board. And thankfully, this game allows some absolute crazy combos. Not only is this encouraged, it is required if you wish to win.

The game is structured around days and hours. A day has 6 hours. At the half of the day (hour 3) you will fight a PvE encounter against a monster. At the end of the day (hour 6) you will fight the snapshot of another player's board that is also at that day. This is not a live PvP battle, it's asynchronous. Meaning there's no time limits, you can always leave and resume the game at a later time.

Before and after the PvE fight, after every hour, you will be choosing 1 out of 3 possible events which can be an item shop, an event that rewards you with a random certain type of item, gives you more gold, more XP and so on. There's a plethora of possible events, but 1 of them will almost certainly be a shop. Shops are also specialized, meaning some will sell you only small items (items can be small, 1 slot; medium, 2 slots; large, 3 slots; the total board space you get will be 10 slots), some only weapons regardless of size. Shops will usually give you a selection of the specialized mentioned items, with the possibility to reroll all selections once for a given cost. Gold is the currency used to buy stuff, you get gold passively at the start of a day based on how much income you have (which can be increased via some items or events), from selling items you don't need (some shops even buy them for a higher price so always try to keep them around unless you absolutely need the empty space!) and from the PvE encounters (after beating the PvE encounter, you get the gold+xp rewards but you also get 1 of the items or skills of the monster). You also have a stash/backpack where you can store items for the future. This also has 10 slots.

There's also a leveling system. You get 1 XP simply by advancing through the hours / progressing through any event, but some of them will give you more than that. PvE fights will also give you 3 XP, with some of the harder encounters giving you 4. After gaining 8 XP, you automatically level up, gaining more max HP and some special rewards, sometimes a choice of 3, sometimes just 1. This can be a free item upgrade, a choice of skills, a random type of free item and so on.

Items can have different rarities, starting from bronze, silver, gold and finally diamond. There's also a "Legendary" rarity for some very special items you can get from PvE fights and events. Upgrading an item can be done by purchasing another one of the same rarity you currently have from a shop or any other source, as long as you obtain it as a reward and it's not automatically generated in your stash (there are items that generate other items at the start of a new day for example).

Skills, like items, have the same rarities. These can be incredibly impactful and can make or break your entire build. Some items can be elevated to absolutely new levels of powers with the right skills. There's no limit to how many skills you can have, despite the initial space looking restricted. It just automatically expands when they can't fit anymore.

There are several types of status effects, which can be triggered once again via items or skills. These range from Poison (deals damage once every 1 second, stacks infinitely, never goes down unless the opponent uses a heal or a different negating effect, bypasses Shields), Burn (same as poison, but deals damage twice every 1 second, slowly ticks down unless you keep applying burn, is blocked by shield), Shield (block direct damage from weapons and Burn and also makes Burn tick slower), Heal simply restores your HP, Haste makes your items cast twice as fast while active, Slow is the opposite of Haste and instead makes your enemy's items cast twice as slow. There's more, these are just some examples.

All of these combined plus the fact you can get items you wouldn't ordinarily have access to from monsters and other heroes make for an incredible roguelike experience with an absurd amount of variance and depth. Take Vanessa for example, the so-called staple beginner-friendly hero of the game. Just with her alone you can put up so many combos, varying from poison+haste builds, burn combined with slow, incredibly aggressive weapons aggro spam, ammo builds, single weapon builds where you buff it to high heavens, the list goes on. I'd argue that you can get at least 50 hours of enjoyment before you get bored just with 1 single hero. And this game has 5 at the moment. I cannot recommend this game enough if you are the target audience, despite all the controversies.

Just doing my part in supporting this amazing game. Very solid foundation for an early access, with a reasonable amount of content for its stage of development. Expect 20-30 hours of gameplay so far. There's a ton of stuff that can be improved but with what we have so far, I think the future is looking bright for Schedule 1. There's so much room to grow and add more features to an already great game with a solid gameplay loop.

Also screw DDS and their ridiculous claims, it's like saying that Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley should sue every other farming sim in existence just because they did it first/popularized the genre. You can't own an idea and there's only so many ways you can implement certain stuff, like the UI. Absolutely ridiculous and childish behavior.

*EDIT: Some of my suggestions have already been added/resolved with later updates. Irrelevant text has been strikethrough-ed.

TL;DR: This game is basically just Loop Hero with a bright fantasy theme instead. The short version of it is, Loop Hero is the better game in my humble opinion. If you haven't already, play that one instead. If you already finished it and you're itching for more of the same core gameplay loop then get this one as well. If LH was a 10/10, then this one is a 7/10. It's a decent game that could use some much needed QoL features, but it's playable and offers a similar experience. Be warned tho, no mid-run saves. You will lose your run progress if you exit.

Needed improvements:
- Tooltips/clarity. There is a severe lack of tooltips, making it unclear how stats affect your character. How does 15 Lifesteal translate to 13 healing? No clue. (Btw, Lifesteal in this game heals you AFTER you kill a minion, which is a bit odd I guess. Again, a tooltip could have explained this). What does Retaliation even do? I have a hunch, but it would be better if the game actually showed you what they were and how they work.
- UI is decent for the most part, but again slightly misleading/unclear on the stats side. Defense for example; there are elemental types of damage and defense, such as fire frost poison etc. Thus you will get items that roll for each individual type of defense, such as +5 Fire Defense, + 4 Physical. But the game sums them all up in your stats screen and I don't know, do I actually have 9 total defense when something attacks me with Fire damage? I suspect not, it should be just the 5. But the game shows the total 9, followed by shield icons that you can hover to see how much defense you have for each element.
- Mid-run saves. At the moment of writing this review, the game does not have mid-run saves. If you exit during a loop it's gone forever. Lost a 9 wave run because of this. Now this wouldn't be that much of a deal breaker if the game at least warned you about it, but it doesn't. The button on the menu says "Save and quit" then even tells you that the game will be saved. I don't think this is a bug, they just used the same buttons across the board and didn't bother to change them during a run vs when you are in the hub.
- Too many materials. Now this wouldn't be an issue if the game had an in-game glossary/journal where you can check what you need for that next meta progression unlock, but you can't. So if you lose a run, you will be prompted to select X number of resources based on how far you've gone, but what do you select? What goes where? You literally have to write this down on a sheet of paper so you know what's needed and where. Tooltips or a glossary would solve this.

Positives:
- Item combine system is nice. At the loop start zone (2 squares before and 2 squares after it), the combine button becomes available. You can select 2 items of the same type (helmet for example, or weapon, pants etc) and the same rarity (goes from grey, blue, purple, orange, not sure if there's anything else after orange) and combine them into an item of the next rarity and of the same type. Also, stats from both items carry on and they are added on top of each other. So if you combine 1 grey helmet with 10 defense with another grey helmet with 15 defense and 5 max health, it results in a blue helmet with 22-23 defense (if it's the same type of stat, it gets reduced by 25% something like that) and 5 max health.
- Abilities are decent. There are 5-6 different heroes and each of them have 4-5 different skills each, that also have upgrades. You get to select 1 randomly when leveling up every couple of levels. Each hero plays differently and has certain strengths and weaknesses.
- You can craft items to start with in your next run only; sometimes you just don't get a weapon or a certain item, yesterday I finished a run without a helmet for example. You can alleviate this somewhat via crafting, which is done from the hub. This is not an unlock type of thing, just an extra boost to help you in your next run.

A lot of people in the reviews seem to have an opinion influenced by their own feelings regarding the MAIN game, so they will leave a negative review here just because "game still borken sieges no work". I understand that feeling completely but you're more than free to leave a negative review on the WH3 game, that has nothing to do with this DLC.

With that out of the way, I can say that this is the first proper and good DLC for WH3, with some caveats. Champions of Chaos I did not like so much (the free update to warriors of chaos that came along with it was amazing! but the 4 LL themselves not so much) and we don't talk about Ogres (they're OK tbh, just need a bit of fleshing out but the practice with preorder DLC-s is not something I can endorse).

The negatives:
- increased price compared to other race packs (from 20 to 25 euros for my region), combined with...
- only 3 playable legendary lords instead of the 4 we used to get. They gave us a Legendary Hero instead, which is not bad! But I feel that it doesn't quite make up for the lack of a 4th LL
- the 3 factions aren't really that distinct from each other; all 3 have the exact same campaign mechanics (there are some minor differences which I will touch upon later, but they aren't enough I believe to give you distinct and entirely new experiences with each lord).
- each LL gains a different passive bonus from each tower constructed (which is good!), EXCEPT for Astragoth (which is sad). Drazhoath gains extra research rate for each tower, Zhatan gains extra replenishment factionwide for each tower and Astragoth gains....nothing (all towers also give conclave influence besides the mentioned effects). Mind boggling really, I don't quite get it especially since he's supposed to be the faction leader and you would expect him to be the strongest. Astragoth's faction gains extra conclave influence from all sources and I suppose that should make up for the lack of a different effect? But I personally don't think that it does
- unit caps can be both a positive and a negative, but I'm listing it here as well due to the way the cost to unlock new units scales, which can get to insane numbers in the late game; as you unlock more of the same unit type, the cost ramps up more and more for that unit type only so you are encouraged to spread out and evenly unlock new stuff.

The positives/other remarks:
- each of the 3 lords actually have a difficulty curve to them, which I think is a great approach for future content: Zhatan has the easiest and comfiest start position; Astragoth has a medium amount of challenge to his start position: he's safe from the north but he has a couple of big threats in the area which he should deal with asap; Drazhoath has the most difficult start from the 3, absolutely surrounded by enemies and legendary lords, but is also the most rewarding and fun campaign. So there's a campaign in here for everyone, depending on if you want a challenge or if you want a more relaxed one.
- in terms of differences, Drazhoath and Astragoth buff a particular type of unit or units (favoring doomstacks with them) and Zhatan buffs everything really, allowing you to build any army you want. Other than that also see my take above on the tower bonuses for each faction, which I consider is a positive but Astragoth not having one is a big negative;
- playing in co-op with friends with the chaos dwarves can feel....a bit restrictive. All playable Chaos Dwarves factions (so just the 3) have access to the Tower of Zhar mechanic, which is like a mini-tech tree that works for all 3 chaos dwarves, not just yourself. The problem is that each tech is a "seat" and only 1 faction can claim that seat using conclave influence. You can dethrone an already taken seat by paying even more influence. It's a good mechanic for head to head or free for all, but not as good for co-op since you'll be fighting with your friends over the stronger seats. Yes if all seats in a district are occupied (regardless by whom) then everyone gets the district bonus so you can co-op to finish a district, but those bonuses are not nearly as strong in general
- best empire-building faction in the game in my opinion, simply due to the building mechanics which are engaging throughout the entire campaign. You have 3 extra resources as the chaos dwarves: laborers, raw materials and armaments. You also have 3 types of settlements (which you can freely exchange between at any time; it will take 1 turn to convert to a different type) and they each have their own specific chains of buildings: towers - only in capitals, these are your main bases of operations; outposts and factories. You use laborers in outposts (sometimes in towers as well if there are resources) in order to extract/generate raw materials. You use raw materials to build most of the buildings and upgrade them, and also to produce armaments (which are required for constructing advanced military buildings + the hellforge). Resources matter a lot more, Iron for example will give you armaments! Marble will give you raw materials and so on. + buildings producing raw materials need a certain amount of laborers to operate at full eficiency so you need to keep a steady supply of laborers in those provinces (which you get from battles and convoys). Factories don't require laborers! They only need raw materials which are used to produce either gold or armaments (or both).
- the Hellforge. Armaments are also used to unlock new unit caps. All units excepting hobgoblins are locked behind factionwide caps (you can field armies comprised of only different hobgoblin units, but they are not nearly as strong). You need to use armaments in the Hellforge to unlock more units of that type. The fun part is that as you do it, you also unlock improvements and buffs for that unit type, which you can activate from the Hellforge for some very powerful bonuses, such as Barrier for your monster units or artillery, or magical attacks for ranged infantry units. These cost armaments upkeep tho, per unit, per turn and that cost can REALLY ramp up. Which is why armaments are so important in the late game, thus making factories the most important settlement type really
- convoy system is better than Cathay caravans in a lot of ways and a very good source of laborers early on, but it's not as good of a money maker
- unit diversity is great! They're essentialy dwarves with magic and monsters. But the unit caps will slow you down from perfecting those doomstacks. Units range from the chaff like hobgoblin fighters and archers, which are decent early game units (can be made much better by the legendary hero), to monsters like demonic spirits entombed in mechanical constructs, centaurs, flying bulls, to heavy artillery like dreadquake mortars which can also be pulled by a train! and have 360 degrees aiming, to heavily armored infantry that never dies and devastating ranged units like the blunderbusses (they have low range, but they are absolutely devastating to the point where if you are not careful, you might end up killing your own units which are in their firing range).

Overall, I'd say this is a 9/10 DLC for me and some of the most fun I've had with a faction probably since the Tomb Kings. A shame it had to release under some controversies like the more expensive price and arguably less content. I blame the suits for all these really because it really shows how much effort and love the devs poured into this DLC. Direct your hate towards the correct party, people. The devs don't have a say in any business decisions. Thanks for reading, hope this was helpful for someone out there.

EDIT: Somebody in the comments section (thanks Stix_09) pointed out an aspect that I overlooked when I initially made this review. There is an additional merit to this DLC: if you own the Champions of Chaos DLC, it will also expand the Warband upgrade system, allowing you to devote a normal Marauder for example to a different Chaos God then also take him up through the ranks, from a normal Marauder of Khorne all the way up to Chosen of Khorne. If you don't own the DLC, you are able to do this only for normal chaos undivided units (like normal Marauders). You can still change alignments...but you need to have that exact unit. You can't "level" it up. Even considering this, I still don't think it's worth the full price. If anything, this aspect makes things even more confusing for me and kind of sad that it wasn't included in the base game as FLC.

Original review:
It seems to me that a lot of people are confusing the free 2.0 update (which reworked Warriors of Chaos entirely) with this DLC, hence they're giving the DLC waaay more credit than it deserves.

I own almost all the Warhammer DLC-s, except maybe 1 lord pack since it was for something I'm not interested in. This is the first DLC I kind of regret buying. I mean it's not bad....but I don't think it's worth 15.99 euros either for the amount of effort invested (compare this to the Tomb Kings or Vampire Coast DLC-s....there's no comparison really). MOST of the effort went into the 2.0 free update which is amazing, but that one is free for all Warhammer 3 owners.

So what does this DLC actually give you? 4 new Legendary lords which are very cool, but I can't shake the feeling I'm playing a half-baked version of the mono God that Lord is representing. Valkya's Bloodletting is....disappointing to say the least, when compared to Skarbrand's. Vilitch has only a quarter of the Changing of the Ways mechanic that Kairos has, Festus has almost the same Plague Cauldron that Ku'gath has, but with slightly different less effective plagues. Azazel I haven't played yet but I suspect it's more of the same story; just stolen ideas from the mono Gods, but a much weaker version of their mechanics.

Hey but why are you comparing them to their mono Gods? Warriors of Chaos are an entirely different faction. Well I think you can understand why I was comparing them as such, but fine. Let's use Archaon the Everchosen as a staple to compare to (Note that you have to own the Chaos Warriors DLC for Warhammer 1 to be able to play Archaon, I believe; but you can find both the first 2 games and their DLC-s quite heavily discounted on third party authorized resellers).

All 4 new Legendary Lords can dedicate their heroes/lords/units/chaos gifts only to their respective chaos God (or keep them undivided), so Valkya can only dedicate to Khorne and has access only to gifted Khorne units, can upgrade her units as Khorne variants and can offer only Khorne Chaos Gifts. Well Archaon has access to all 4 of them. He can dedicate his units to any chaos God, can access basically the entire roster of demons and can have Gifts of Chaos for any of the 4 Gods. Also worth mentioning here, you can only have 6 gifted units in a standing army (trading between armies doesn't work, it's still 6) and this applies for all of the Warriors of Chaos.

This is why, overall, playing any of the 4 new Legendary Lords not only does it feel like a half baked weaker version of the Chaos Mono God (for me), but it also feels like playing only a quarter of what Warriors of Chaos can actually do. I think this could have worked if we got some entirely new mechanics rather than the borrowed ones we currently have, but that's not the case. I would have been less harsh if this was priced at 10 euros, but I can never ever recommend getting this over something like the Tomb Kings DLC which is similarly priced. Thank you for reading.

Muck