Recent reviews by a green reverse card from UNO

This game is wonderful and well worth the price if you're a fan of tactics games, particularly if you're at all familiar with Dungeons and Dragons (which the game seems loosely based around). My one complaint is that there is no saving in combat (if you're on Ironman, which is unfortunately the default option and many players will accidentally wind up on an iron man file. There is no way to disable iron man other than restarting completely). This would be okay and understandable, except there are a handful of atrociously long fights in the main story with dozens of enemies at a time. Pair that with a semi-frequent crashing issue and... well, I think you get the picture.

Until the crashing is smoothed out, DO NOT PLAY ON IRONMAN. You'll lose hours of time and have to redo long, grinding combats.

I'm at least 80% sure that fishing with a baseball bat is illegal in real life, so it's nice to finally have a space to live out my dream

Just... fine. If you love the base game, and love dragons, buy it on sale. It adds two powerful tomes based around dragons and evolving units, they're both very powerful but have limited synergy outside of themselves and eachother. The tomes focusing on their own summons/units means they don't benefit from your race transformations (ironically including the ones *in* the new tomes), which is unfortunate. I never felt the units were weak though, and some of them work for animal builds as well, as a minor upside. The spells are fine. Siege project is strong. Buildings are decent.

Dragon rulers are probably what will attract most people. They're cool and fairly varied in their playstyle, and I never felt they were significantly weakened by not having items. Their dragon abilities are powerful, particularly the 'transformations' at level 4 and level 16. Getting to choose the AOE type for their breath attack is a nice touch as well. The DLC is completely disconnected from the pantheon levels system though, which is a bad sign for the future of that mechanic in my opinion. They should have added a few extra customization options for dragons (maybe armor or something) with like... 5 or 10 extra pantheon levels to unlock in a separate DLC menu.

The new map (singular) has its own custom mechanic (dragon war). There's an extra option for Dragon rulers as well, which is nice. The final addition is the lizardfolk race, which are pretty neat for RPers (multiple different reptile themes are available). Not much to say here, as I believe the race trait they use was added in the free patch (even if I'm wrong, the trait sucks so it's not worth using anyways). If you like lizards, they're here now, simple as that.

Honestly feels kinda light for $10, but it's not egregious. You can experience all of the new content in a single game (including every achievement) without much effort, so the overall value/play time is pretty damn low here, but what's included is fine and I could see myself playing dragons for fun again in the future.

Pretty solid 4X game, but in classic paradox fashion it feels pretty empty right now. The ocean and the underground are currently super lack-luster (because all of their content was left for the inevitable DLC onslaught). Land feels fine but after a couple games you'll have seen everything. There's a lot of customization options but ultimately they mean very little; people compare this to Stellaris but the (non-cosmetic) customization is nowhere near that in-depth. There are 5 "cultures" (pre-DLCs) with fairly distinct playstyles, everything else is just minor tweaks and number changes. You can get pretty different tactical combat strategies from race to race though (including within the same culture) thanks to tomes, so it doesn't get as stale as you might think as long as you don't abuse auto resolve. For some strange reason, there is a roguelike progression system in this 4X game. Each win you get gives you 3-6 points you can spend on unlocking "pantheon rewards", some of which are important racial traits or hero items. Most of the rewards are cosmetic though, so if there's a trait you really want to try you can just bee-line it in a couple games without missing anything cool. Ultimately a weird addition and somewhat annoying, but not overly offensive after the first few games.

As of now I have completed the game, 100% achievements, tried every race, used each tome at least once, etc. I think I got pretty good value out of it, and I'll definitely be coming back whenever the DLCs release. So you can reasonably expect 70-100 hours before you're "out of content" in the base release. I'd recommend it to people that are comfortable with Paradox's DLC policy and launcher, but if you're coming from games like Endless Legend you may be disappointed until the rest of the game releases.

I really want to leave a positive review for this DLC. I love Victoria 3, and I don't even care that they moved from "Big DLCs" to smaller content packs and then put the major features as free updates so they can improve down the line. But, once again, it is clear that nobody played even a single test game of this DLC before it was released, and I'm sick of Paradox pulling this ♥♥♥♥. My (first ever) game of this DLC currently has France stuck in an infinite loop of revolutions forming and disbanding every single day. They don't have the support to do anything, but they form one every single day and then get instantly disbanded anyways. Because there is a revolution at the start of the day, every day, I get the stupid revolution events that are ruining my entire country. Even worse than that though, every single time one forms or is disbanded, it plays this super obnoxious loud sound effect. There is no way to disable the sound effect other than completely muting the game. Please for the love of god TEST THE GAME before you put it out, there is no way in hell somebody could have experienced this and thought it was working as intended.

Pretty solid for 2 or 3 playthroughs if you manage to dodge the bugs and performance issues some people have. Not a whole lot going on and every country starts feeling samey after that. Paradox just released a plan for future content that looks like they have a pretty solid grasp of what needs to be done to fix the game and how they're going to do it, and best of all they said they plan to do it in *free updates* rather than DLC like the usual paradox gameplan. I'd say wait for a sale or those updates, whichever come first.

Seems mostly like what I was hoping it'd be so far. Ironman mode IS forced, which I'm not a huge fan of, however it's more of an ironman-lite mode. If you die you can choose 'return to main menu' and then continue your save from the last ironman mode save statue, there are usually about 3 per floor plus a free save when entering a new floor or returning to the ship. So in practice, it only prevents you from saving in front of a hard fight and reloading until you cheese through it, and it doesn't even prevent that so much as just make it more annoying.

You start the run with 2 characters if you talk to everyone before leaving town, and are (as far as I could tell) guaranteed to get a 3rd character as your reward for the first floor. Maybe I was just lucky, but new characters do not seem overly hard to come by. After you return to town (more on that later) you can recruit more characters for gold, which can negate bad luck on recruitment opportunities.

There is a merchant in town (available before you have to even fight a single enemy, despite what other reviews say) but he's poorly marked, his name is 'Chaplain' and he looks like all of the other dozen or so NPCs standing around that just give you one liners. He has 4 diffferent shops you can buy from which cover magical items, regular gear, scrolls, potions, etc. It might be beneficial to put him behind a shop stall, or maybe have him call out to you when you walk past the first time?

This DLC has an optional stand alone mode which is VERY nice because it prevents you from having to play through 30 hours of the main story every time you want to do some dungeon running with a new build or just mess around with funny character ideas. However, contrary to other reviews, it is also integrated into the main story. You gain access to it in chapter 3, with extensions to its story in chapters 4 and 5 (Assuming the patch notes are accurate).

Personally, my main problem with it is that once you set out for an "island" (boss fight), you are locked into that until you win or lose. Unlike in the Kingmaker DLC, you are only allowed to return to town to buy/sell gear and party members every 5 "floors". This means that you have to cover all your bases before you set out and you don't really have enough money to do so. In kingmaker, if Floor 4 was the poison spider hell death floor, you could just go back to the dragon, sell your floor 3 loot, and buy a scroll of communal delay poison. In WOTR, if floor 4 is the poison spider hell death floor, you better hope you used all your limited starting money to buy a scroll of communal delay poison, or you're going to be fighting the first boss with -8 to every ability score. I'd prefer just removing Alushinyra from the equation altogether and putting the merchant and the recruiter/retrainer directly on the massive empty ship.

I may be updating my review as time goes on but those were my initial observations.

Fox is too strong, Monkey is too weak (and thematically pretty boring), guns all feel well balanced though. Great game overall though and I'm happy to spend money on a smaller DLC pack like this if it means the quality free updates and support will keep coming as well.

Game consistently crashes on the "endless legend; Symbiosis" screen after the publisher splash screen, no fixes work. Some people online have suggested it won't run on windows 11, which means it's a 100+ dollar waste of space. If I ever see it get fixed, I'll change my review.

Neutral review, if it were possible. I've had a lot of fun with the game in the time I've played already and I imagine I'll play much more of it, but it has some flaws that prevent me from just saying 'yes'.

The balance is all over the place, there are a handful of 'normal enemy' fights that are substantially harder than even the elite fights in the game for EVERY character (the exalted warrior and the game fights come to mind), and additionally there are some bosses/elites that kind of just feel like they were designed to ruin the game if you made the mistake of playing a certain class. For example, good luck beating the gorgon that randomizes the cost of every card in your deck (including generated cards on the turn you generate them!) with the "make a bunch of 0 cost attacks" guy. Sometimes you run into a fight and it's either save-scum and go a different direction or lose because your class simply cannot deal with that enemy.

Additionally, the classes don't feel overly distinct and I can't quite place my finger on why. There are 4 classes that each have 2 subclasses focused on a different build for their character; for example you have the Rogue that can go either 'combo' build focused on building his combo and using massive swift attacks to take down enemies in a couple hits, or 'bleed' build to quickly stack the bleeding status effect and defeat them that way. The problem is once you're actually in the run you can get any card in the class as a reward, subclass only impacts your starter deck...which is great for the cards that are good for both but really sucks when you want to play bleed guy and just keep getting cards for combo build. As for the other classes, they each have their own subclasses and playstyles but they never felt as distinct to me as, for example, the Silent and the Construct from Slay the Spire. They have unique mechanics but feel too similar still.

This is a little nitpicky, but I also think the names for the difficulties should be shifted down one. Normal is Easy, Hard is Normal, impossible is Hard, and Impossible+ is Impossible.

The last problem I want to mention is that the game encourages you to rebuild your deck for each specific fight in the game, learning the enemies so that in subsequent runs you can better plan the cards you have for that specific battle (you have an active deck of 20 cards and then every other card you pick up is carried in a bag, you can freely shift out your active 20 cards at any time as long as you aren't in a battle). I have found in practice this is almost never worth it, simply because your cards are either good or bad, not situationally useful in specific fights like that sort of system would require. They either have synergy with your other cards and are therefor always good in your deck, or they are worthless to you and should be bagged permanently. However, even if this was fixed, the voidstone/upgrade system would make switching out cards a pretty bad idea, because you would be choosing between your "good" card that is upgraded and has an extra voidstone bonus, or your "situational" card without either; there simply isn't enough upgrade points and voidstones in the game to have both (unless you play the daughter of the void who can freely move voidstones between cards, something that I frankly feel should be a universal ability to make them useful).

As for positives I'd like to quickly list, The game has a lot of quality of life features (like being able to mark your map to plot out your path through each level) that I haven't seen anywhere else. Every character is fun and seems to be at least viable if you get lucky with them, if not optimal. Upgrading cards feels more strategic in this game, as upgrades are sometimes sidegrades that change how the card works instead of just a flat bonus (sometimes getting that buff card to be twice as strong will make it cost twice as much as well). Voidstones also add a similar feeling as they can drastically improve the power level of otherwise bad cards, particularly the unique voidstones obtained from Queen. The points system offers nice rewards for completing runs, I like the idea of using them to unlock the special challenge runs and extra cosmetics (boards, card backs, etc.), though personally I do wish there was maybe a little more of a rogue-like element in the game to spend the points on. The art in game is all very well done as well, which is always a plus.