Recent reviews by JTizzle

potato

Polished, full of content, and has many quality-of-life mechanics I didn't know I needed. Very addictive; buy at your own risk.

Room 5 when?

Fun caricatures of various action movie characters. Engaging turn-based combat. Good amount of challenge in its combat and macro gameplay. Was not expecting this to be as addictive as it was.

Years after finishing this, I'm still craving the same feeling that this game gave me. It's not just "one of the best" RPGs, it's THE BEST in many of the genres and sub-genres you can consider it as. It's the standard with which I have to compare many Tactical RPGs and very few have come close to the perfection that this is. If you were going to play one game in the TRPG genre, it's this. If you're just about to embark on the genre, don't start with this, it's too good and will taint how you see other excellent games. The only reason I'm even writing this is I went to the store page to look for games similar to it. Nothing will come close, but I continue the search anyway.

Can't recommend for a few reasons:

1. Not enough class variety and the ones that exist don't feel very unique (Vermintide at least had sub-classes that somewhat change your playstyle) - gets stale quick
2. The genre doesn't lend itself as well to the 40k universe. As much as there are guns, it just feels wrong that you still have to melee more than you shoot. (Side note: It's weird how some guns use more than 1 ammo per shot where it would have been better to just lower the ammo count; e.g., Lasguns using 3 ammo per shot for no reason so my 300 ammo count is actually just 100 shots - very unintuitive)

Back to Vermintide for now.

Extra Note: I do like the current system of earning currency rather than lootboxes (as of early game, you earn enough currency in 1 game to get a new weapon). I suspect that's why they haven't included crafting yet cause you don't get as much ♥♥♥♥ loot anyway.

It is the Omnissiah's will that you buy this game.

Other reviews are pretty accurate.
Pros:
Good graphics
Fun customization (both character and equips)

Cons:
Completely weightless combat (very poor feedback when hitting/getting hit)
Game lacks personality (Aside from the angel/devil on your shoulder, nothing/no one else really has a voice) Everything is narrated ala Stanley Parable. It's very hard to connect to a single character cause they don't have a voice.

It's an ok experience. I probably wouldn't pay 60 USD for this either. Depending on your regional pricing, it may/may not be worth. Got mine for 30 USD and for that price, it's an alright experience so far.

The game includes typical systems found in a first-person survival game such as hunger/thirst, stamina-based actions, gathering/crafting/building, and even a few modest skill and tech-trees. What makes Medieval Dynasty unique is its inclusion of family and community systems.

Before you start leading a community, your first order of business is to build yourself a house; ideally, somewhere flat so you can expand from this one house to a small camp, and eventually a town. While it is a survival game, it's not quite completely a sandbox. You will have to do quests for various NPCs. There are Main quests, side quests, and even challenges that can earn you Dynasty Reputation, a resource in Medieval Dynasty's community system. This is an indicator of how well-renown your dynasty is and will also be a factor that limits how big your settlement can be and which NPCs you can recruit to your camp. Recruiting NPCs will eventually be required to expand as the game seems to be balanced around not being able to do 100% yourself, at least not efficiently. While this system definitely shows promise and is a big factor of what would make MD stand out, the system itself needs work. As mentioned earlier, recruiting new people requires you to have a certain amount of Dynasty Rep., something that can only be obtained (at least to my awareness) by completing quests. There are only a few quests and seem to be seasonal. This means unless you really rush doing them from the start, you're unlikely to have enough to recruit anyone before the winter and once you do have NPCs recruited, they seem... slow. The AI for the NPCs display how Early Access this game is. I recruited an NPC that supposedly had a high gathering skill and he gathered... 2 trees in one day. That's barely two walls worth of wood and something that will take the player less than 5 minutes. Is it a dealbreaker? For some, maybe. For others, watching the dumb AI might be entertaining (idk, you do you). It does give me a glimpse of the potential this system has. It's like if Mount and Blade allowed you to do more granular town and resource management, actually building each building and/or watching your people gather the resource and build it.

In this journey, you're also allowed to woo some of the 18-20+ year old women around the various small camps and towns in the moderately-sized map. The conversations are generic across all non-quest NPCs and you'll find that the same conversation line that works positively on one NPC may bring the opposite reaction to a different NPC. Through repeated conversation, you can eventually ask one woman for her hand in marriage then bam she lives with you and you can get a kid. I haven't explored this family system as much as the community bit so won't be able to review it as much.

Other systems that aren't quite unique but worth mentioning: the game does have a currency but I don't think there's a live economy yet. The prices don't seem to change based on supply/demand and NPC gold resets every now and then. Combat is typical of a survival game in early access: Clunky with a mix of funny/weird/slow actions. Skill and tech-tree could use rebalancing as it seems a little too slow at the moment. Seasons are prohibitively fast: between questing, relationship-building, gathering, construction-building, and surviving, time moves too fast to realistically do everything in a "year". Whether that's the intention or not is unclear. What is clear is that this makes the game almost feel like a chore as there's not a lot of time to explore. The way I think about this is with Stardew Valley, you needed to plan ahead, but you still had time to do other things between all the farming. With this, you need to be constantly doing the right thing to be in a good position by Winter (small community + family + a few essential buildings + food + warmth). Definitely needs balancing on this front as well.

Overall though, the game is worth exploring, imho. If you temper expectations to really just see the family/dynasty system in its infancy, I'd say it's worth a 12-30 hours worth of game right now. Whether that much game-time is worth the price is up to you.

[This was a quick review and may change depending on updates]

Looks and feels like a darker Stardew Valley. I think as far as core gameplay goes, this could have been really good. Typical resource management, gather, craft, progress, etc. Main reason I'm giving it a thumbs down is there's just something wrong with the progression system. Think about a typical system where it goes from Wood --> Stone --> Iron. To progress from one Tier to another, you usually need a previous Tier. There's a lot of things here that somehow need the same or higher tier to get to the next tier (e.g., To get the smelter for iron, I need a an iron-based product.) Now, there are ways to gather those things but it really delays your progression so much if you don't realize that early on.

Another issue I encountered is for corpse deliveries. You get a corpse a day until at some point, the thing that delivers you corpses demands for resources that aren't even in the tech tree. Commie Donkey asks for Oil and oil isn't even anywhere in the tech tree. You need to talk to some random hobo to buy seeds to grow a plant. THEN you need to talk to the witch on the very west to learn how to do alchemy. THEN you need to somehow do alchemy on that hobo plant. ALL to be able to do the core gameplay which is to be a graveyard keeper. I just think that the overall progression does not make sense.