Recent reviews by UncleYar

Fun game with mechanics very similar to Luck be a Landlord. The animal theme is quite funny, and fun for children with the cacophony of sounds once various animals' special abilities start proccing.

There's a variety of gods and trinkets you can unlock through metaprogression and enable before a run, that look like they might provide some replayability. The introduction of terrain and upgrades for the various families of animals is also quite interesting, although I'm undecided so far about their actual impact on gameplay.

One major downside I found is that it's actually pretty difficult to unlock all animal families, which restricts your access to content. If you just play casually or for laughs without optimizing your combos you'll likely be unceremoniously be kicked back to the main menu multiple games in a row without any meaningful progression. IMO, that's a design mistake. In Slay the Spire, the milestone for the deckbuilding genre, losing at an advanced stage still gets you quite a bit of metaprogression. Plus StS never forces you to play a higher difficulty, you get to experience all the content casually. A similar system would benefit this game.

Another suggestion I have is to have four animal families unlocked right off the bat so you can play without carnivores. Makes it easier to play with young children who don't really want their animals to be eaten, at least until they get into an experimenting mood.

BTW... is it me or is the Terror Bird really bad? Seems you only get it late when you're likely making so much money off synergies that losing it all and keeping only the base revenue of creatures will almost always be a losing deal.

Anyways. My overall impression is positive, the game is derivative but fun.

RTS with heavy RPG elements for your main hero. Some missions have base-building and some don't, a bit like the campaign missions in Heroes V.

The base-building itself is reminiscent of Warcraft 2, except with more emphasis on resources - in that respect it's a bit more like Stronghold (and frankly not as good as the latter). Resources are infinite but respawn slowly.

Building placement sucks. Their footprint is huge and hard to gage visually and placing a building doesn't automatically destroy trees, which make adjacency bonuses hard to get. In addition, it's possible to block "escort mission" NPCs with your buildings even though there's room around to pass, softlocking quests until you realize what's going on.

Controls are more or less standard for a RTS, but geometry constantly gets in the way. Even a tree can prevent you from selecting something, and targeting enemies for spells in the middle of combat is very difficult, at least in the mode where you click your character's hotbar button first. The lack of active pause (giving orders when game is paused) compounds the annoyance.

Combat so far on normal difficulty can be slightly challenging in small "RPG mode" fights. It becomes a cakewalk with a fully upgraded base and a full army - which so far you have no reason not to get since there's no time pressure.

Loot is ok-ish. It seem very randomized, so my first pickups weren't adequate for my character. Prices in shops are extremely high, especially for spells, precluding you from purchasing anything interesting on the first mission.

The pace of the game is glacial due to large maps and very slow-walking units, plus a need for backtracking - for example to receive quest rewards. I consider it absolutely unplayable as-is; fortunately, this is easily fixed by Cheat Engine's turbo mode. Just attach Cheat Engine, ensure you have a keybind for Turbo, and press the key whenever your troops are on a long, safe walk or slowly demolishing an enemy town.

Finding questgivers in a town is quite awkward. The rotating question marks are not easy to miss when scrolling over the town in RTS mode, and moving around in 3rd-person view doesn't feel very natural.
Map design is overall pretty good, however, with a lot of optional quests and areas that encourage you to explore.

Graphics are not that bad, creature models are distinct even when seen when zoomed-out, but very polygonal and haven't aged that well. The series appears to have an unapologetic love for scantily clad, shapely women, and while I imagine those 3d elf warrior models looked super sexy when the game came out, they sure don't have the same impact today.

Overall I'd recommend it if you use the Cheat Engine turbo mode, because I find that the mix of exploration/combat/story/dialogue/base building is done well enough to keep the player interested.

I gave a fair shot to Pool of Radiance since so many people speak highly of it. I tried both the original, and the remake in FRUA that you can download from fan sites. I wasn't impressed. Dungeons are pretty barebones with a lot of mindless fights against inflated enemy counts. The battle interface is clunky and requires way too many keypresses to perform simple actions, which compounds this issue.

There's also barely any interesting dialogue, nor many secrets or interesting features in dungeons.

Weirdly enough, one of the most boring activities in the game is picking up loot, since most loot is trash, the interface to pick up money and gems is cumbersome, and ultimately there's almost nothing worth buying in shops.

The illusion of having access to the whole D&D system and its variety crumbles when you realize most parties you can create are ineffective, especially if you intend to carry them on to the following games; similarly, most weapons and spells in the game are completely useless, so you'll only pick the few that are actually useful in fights.

The Gold Box assistant is somewhat neat, but since it provides you with easy healing and spell renewal, it completely removes any tension from dungeoneering with limited resources, you just go all in and spam every spell at your disposal. Good luck restraining yourself from using those though, since the game is so grindy and you'll definitely want to use the assistant for automap - so the cheats will always be dangling in your face.
(Edit: people explained to me that later games in the series the game is more generous with letting you camp, so the Assistant is kind of backporting that feature to PoR. Though probably making it even more accessible and safe, IIUC.)

I'm disappointed since I love classic games - I discovered Wizardry 6 (SNES version) not so long ago and loved it despite the nonsensical world. Since in Pool of Radiance I barely made it in-game to the point you can explore the overworld, I don't know if the game would become more interesting to explore. But monsters are so powerful outside that it seems reserved for a much higher level party, and I'm not up for a dozen more hours of grinding.

Crashes on start.

Well-made game. The table (with animated surface) and pieces are cool and a reasonable amount of things are automated or assisted.

I wish there was a way to return mission cards to the mission discard pile automatically instead of having to drag them across the table. Choosing missions is already long and boring enough for other players who are waiting after you already.

Placing the ship pawns on specific hexes can sometimes be hard if you have even a slight camera angle. I think it's more Tabletop Simulator's fault than this module's authors' though. Same for the occasional functionality freezes or disconnects one player in our group experienced.

Some things from the physical boardgame such as ship cards being unique and therefore pickable by only one player don't seem to be enforced however.

It would be very appreciated to have the expansion Embers of a Forsaken Star included with this (as well as the other minor expansions the game got), as it's widely considered an improvement over the base game.

This DLC just adds a ton more content, which ultimately means more cool stuff to encounter on the map and more crazy hero skills to experiment with. Enjoyable - and I haven't even played the new factions yet.

My experience has been bug-free so far.

Some features are needlessly obscure however, such as the first fourth-row skill you pick for a hero getting a bonus level and becoming upgradeable independently of its predecessors in the tree. There's zero indication anywhere in the game of this, you might as well think it's a bug. Features like this should be left out until there's time to make a UI for them, or at least document them properly in a manual if you're going the old-school way (you had the time to write a lore dump, so...).

So, a shovelfull of good stuff: yes, possible to master without a lot of trial and error or community help: no. It's a lot less intuitive and rougher around the edges than the base game.

Update: Major, sweeping changes of debatable usefulness are being done to the game version after version. Not only that, but some updates such as the recent 2.8 town screen obviously lack design and testing. In a baffling move, the new screen doesn't let you preview which units a building will give you. These manic changes to the game start resembling some kind of unhealthy, cyclic, obsessive-compulsive seek for perfection.

What makes things worse is that to alleviate this, rollback betas should at least be provided forever for all past major versions, but they aren't. This in my view substantially lowers this game's score compared to devs that do provide a full history of rollback betas like Paradox Game Studios, Minecraft's, and so on. Then you get the dev babbling on in the release notes about how he thinks he made the right decisions for the game, which if you read between the lines, means the right decisions for YOU, the player... so you must be forced to play on the new, superior version for your own good. No, dev dude. Stop trying to impose your "vision" on the players. If they clicked with some older version of the game and dislike your new oh-so-though-out changes, just friggin let them be and play what they want.

With this in mind, I cannot recommend the game anymore, because who knows what kind of schizophrenic changes are still going to be forced upon players. It should be labeled as Early Access, what you buy is not what you'll get down the line.

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Original review:

Scratches the Heroes of Might and Magic itch while offering its own spin on the battles, as well adding a bunch of interesting innovation on top of those classics, such as creative or crazy spells, map buildings, castle features, hero skills, and so on. There's a sense of humor permeating the whole thing, too.

The game also has some interesting quality of life features HOMM veterans will appreciate, such as unit caravans that can be toggled from manually controlled to automatic at will (they can't pick up treasure and do "hero" stuff, but at least you don't need dedicated mule heroes as much), easier digging for treasure, and various little details such as being able to end turn with one click even if you have a city screen open.

I must say though, the cursor is an abomination. And some things are really annoying, like pickups tending to stack on the map so you're forced to pick up an artifact you don't want (and thus drop something potentially valuable) if you want to get what's below. Not to mention pressing N or clicking a hero not scrolling to that hero's portrait in the heroes list.

You only have three save slots per game in-progress that automatically get overwritten by autosaves, so you can't go back more than three turns. Since games can run long and feature a big "slippery slope" aspect, you can be doomed way before you realize it, so it sucks that there's no other way to go back to an earlier turn than manually backing up your saves (not tested).

AI and pathfinding are a mixed bag. The enemy seems to beeline for you even without map visibility whenever it thinks it's at an advantage, and it will chase you for days. Also, you can pathfind through unexplored terrain, which feels like an exploit.

Some exploits that were present in Heroes 3 are here too, but worse: you can ferry units an infinite distance just by making a chain of hero-less armies. I'd prefer the game to be easier, but with less exploits tempting you to switch on dumb mode.

The map has a bit of respawning going on, so you occasionally find a new treasure in already cleared out areas. A good thing since the number of buildings requiring regular visits is very low compared to Heroes, so you could be twiddling your thumbs for a while. If your hero really has nothing to do, you can set up camp near a mine which will boost its production - pretty clever.

The biggest flaw is probably the army management. Since your hero can lug around an unlimited number of units (which on the bright side, does allow for a lot of unit-producing hero skills), a restriction was put into place whereby you can only bring to battle an amount of units proportionate to what the enemy can field. You can then field the rest in reinforcement waves as your presence on the battlefield depletes.
This causes at least two problems:
- Determining your army composition at start for every battle that matters gets old real fast. This is worse if you're the meticulous type or playing harder difficulties where you need to pay more attention to what you're doing.
- You almost never want to make a second army unless the map is huge, as you need the reinforcements to win against the equally bloated enemy heroes. So other heroes are relegated to running around and picking up stuff. What's more, map fights seem to be balanced around you lugging around a massive amount of units, making secondary heroes useless even for clearing a few monster dens. Heroes was much more fun and sensibly designed in that regard.

The battles are also quite messy and hard to read, by the way. In a way they're a less readable version of the autobattles in Conquest of Elysium, minus the friendly fire. Thankfully casting spells is well done, and that's what you'll be spending your time on because unit controls are pretty much useless. It's frustrating to see your dragons fight to the death and constantly return to combat with a sliver of health while you try to make them escape to a corner... have some self-preservation instincts or something, geez.

This said, combat still manages to stay interesting thanks to the sheer variety of units and the numerous ability they sport. Some are pretty fun, such as units that can jump over walls, or turn enemies into gold which gives you income after the battle. Even naval combat is intriguing, with most units having a good chance of falling off in the water and dying, which gives an advantage to units that are aquatic and can just swim back to the combat.

Music is pretty good and catchy, and graphics have some charm but are certainly not as good as even Heroes I. The difference in pixel resolution between monsters and the rest is quite jarring and seems like a way to save money on assets more than anything else.

This said, I enjoyed my most recent game on a large map with naval exploration quite a bit. I recommend to play on Easy at first, as the game is way harder than Heroes I-V on normal difficulty, which will only work to exacerbate the annoyances with army management.

All in all, there's some fun to be had and the game has an amazing amount of content and creative mechanics, but army management would need an overhaul and combat some serious tweaks in order for the game to have real lasting value. There's also a certain amount of jank and abilities that appear unbalanced or in the game just for laughs, which discourages you from playing any other way than very casually.

Not a great first impression. Compared to Slay the Spire card variety seems lacking, I'm constantly being proposed the same fairly basic cards. After adding about 20 cards and a few artifacts, I don't feel like much synergy has built up, either.
Card upgrades are also pretty lame, it's almost always increased damage. StS is way more bold in making some upgrades really powerful by reducing the card cost or boosting the *other* effect that's typically more interesting that a few more points of damage.

Also, enemies are bullet sponges right off the bat, and spending mana just to change lane feels lame, especially when many cards cost 2 and you have small hands of cards.

Very good demo. See my review of full game for more info.

So far, so good. It pretty much takes the Slay the Spire formula but adds a slight tactical dimension, and crowds of enemies. What's nice is that the tactics are simple enough that it can still be called a card game - no counting spaces or measuring distances here, each character has a near and far zone and some specialize in damage in one of these zones, and that's it. It's enough to create a tense atmosphere as enemies close in on you.

There's slight power creep as you unlock stuff, in the form of initial relics you can pick. I don't know where it stops, but the first fights will likely get increasingly boring, which is concerning. You want a roguelike to be challenging throughout. I would've strongly preferred the Slay the Spire model to be followed, where unlocks are side-grades and besides the random initial boon, your character doesn't get more powerful as you play. Instead, you get progressively harder challenges to beat as you get better.

Besides that, I enjoyed the mage synergy that lets you go nearly infinite as long as you finish off enemies, and the crazy AOE powers you can sometimes get. There don't seem to be a ton of companion types you can get (yet?), and how they upgrade and get new cards isn't clear.

I didn't really like earning so few gems that you're severely limited once you reach the post-battle rewards on every floor. It doesn't feel good to dangle a bunch of rewards he can't get in front of the player. Also, the option to gamble one gem to get three is pretty silly. I like the other mechanics but wish this reward step would get completely revised. Slay the Spire has a perfect system honestly.

Overall though, it's fun to play and I can't wait to see more content.