Recent reviews by danieldeming

I was skeptical at first of AoW deviating from the high fantasy setting but mechanically there were many improvements and I think I enjoy Planetfall even more than others in the series (which is probably my all time favorite 4X series). I still hope they do another fantasy AoW similar to Planetfall but it's an improvement over AoW3 nevertheless.

A pretty fun tower defense/battle arena/RTS card game. Doesn't feel very pay-to-win which I consider a good quality in a free to play game. Seems like there are multiple deck-building strategies and options and they regularly tweak the stats of cards for balance reasons.

I got this game on sale for $6.99. Being a fan of Age of Wonders and Fallen Enchantress, I wanted to like it but I think it falls short in many ways. So much so, that I doubt I'll play it again and I'm only a few hours into it.

First, the UI really needs polish. The menus scale poorly for 4k. Some commands have keyboard shortcuts, some don't (or they are not apparent). I didn't think this would bother me that much but it made everything feel more tedious.

The game feels poorly coded. I have a fairly powerful computer that I built within the last year yet the game is slow between turns, slow to load and just generally lags. However, the developers seem to be aware of that as they go out of their way to awkwardly break the 4th wall in-game to comment on their bugs, their gaming engine, funding, etc. I feel that breaks immersion and most of the time felt like pathetic excuses. I get that it's hard but don't rant to the consumer - deliver a finished product or leave the early access flag on.

The game balance seems all over the place. One problem for me was that it seems like the first hero snowballs into a powerful main stack but leveling up subsequent heroes is very difficult. This is partly because there doesn't seem to be a way to combine armies for a coordinated attack so the rookie army has to roam around looking for an encounter they can actually tackle to earn XP.

Certain encounters are also unavoidable and there is no apparent way to flee combat. This has resulted in some fairly absurd unexpected and unbalanced turnarounds. For example, in the *first* campaign mission I entered a province near my starting location that had me face off against multiple units with over 4 times my hero's HP that could one shot anything in my army. I tried to avoid entering the battle but the dialogue options forced it (and there seems to be no flee mechanic). There also doesn't seem to be a surrender battle function to end the inevitable loss. None of that amounts to very fun, strategic gameplay.

It lets you play multiplayer co-op with a friend. Like much of the game, it could use some polish but it works and it's fun and it's free. It's hard to downvote free, optional DLC.

Pretty buggy right now, wait for release