Reviews

Introduction

Released back in 2003 hot on the heels of WarCraft III, SpellForce: The Order of Dawn was following what was supposed to become this big trend of combining the RPG and RTS genres. Far from a mere clone, the original SpellForce tipped the design scales closer to the RPG side of things, offering entire sections that played like a more traditional action-RPG in a fantasy setting that gladly embraced all the cheesy clichés.

The game was followed by several expansions and a proper sequel that had its own share of post-launch content. Afterward, the series laid dormant until THQ Nordic and Grimlore Games resurrected it in late 2017 with SpellForce III. The new entry experimented with a more grounded tone and acted as a prequel to the first SpellForce.

But seeing how, unlike in the early 2000s, it's the turn-based games that get people going these days, THQ Nordic has apparently decided to hedge their bets. Enter Owned by Gravity and SpellForce: Conquest of Eo - a turn-based take on the long-running series.

Set after the events of SpellForce III but prior to the original SpellForce, Conquest of Eo is in effect a sequel to the prequel taking place after The Circle of Mages was established, but before they managed to shatter the world into loosely connected bits, and chainmail bikini was agreed upon as the requisite uniform for the resident female warriors.

A Wizard's Tower Has a Knob on the End

In Conquest of Eo, you'll be playing as an ambitious young mage whose master ran afoul of The Circle and ended up getting destroyed for meddling with powers beyond the ken of your common spell slinger.

Upon learning of this development, you take it upon yourself to discover what it was that got your master in trouble, and pick up where he left off. Because naturally, where a powerful mage with an army of apprentices and a grand old tower fails, a neophyte with the keys to a pile of rubble is simply destined to succeed.

But before you set out on your quest for knowledge and power, you will first need to decide just what kind of wizard you are. The game offers us three presets here - an Alchemist, a Necromancer, and an Artificer. These, for lack of a better word, classes determine your approach to crafting and the schools of magic available to you. You're also free to mix and match these and make your own custom preset.

Now, some of you may already be planning a hasty retreat on account of crafting being positioned as such a prominent thing during character creation. Rest assured, here it's not some superfluous system that exists purely to annoy you with heaps of pointless busywork, but an integral part of the whole experience that determines your entire playstyle.

The game is set up in such a way that the regular units you'll be recruiting from towns, assorted settlements, and through random events won't generally cut it. You'll need something extra to get ahead. And crafting will help you do just that.

Alchemists are a nightmare for all those suffering from the too-good-to-use syndrome. They distill various plants, ores, and other reagents down to their basic essences and then use those to brew potions ranging from simple healing rations to flasks housing elemental summons, mind-control elixirs, and bombs capable of wiping out half an army in one good throw. Properly brewing and using these potions can turn hopeless defeats into easy victories.

Necromancers, on the other hand, utilize essences and the souls of their fallen enemies to bolster their ranks with the undead. These lifeless units are cheap, numerous, and powerful, but they don't regenerate health, forcing you to either use them as expendable fodder or go to great lengths to keep them operational.

Artificers mine ores in order to craft glyphs for their units and artifacts for their heroes, resulting in smaller armies that can punch way above their weight class. But on the flip side, losing a single unit can be a mighty blow to their entire strategy. The glyphs you can craft range from simple, but very noticeable, attribute boosts to entirely new abilities that are much stronger than any skill you can develop naturally.

---

Once you decide on your crafting style, you get to choose your primary and secondary magic schools. There's a total of six of them in the game - Death Magic, Nature Magic, Earthmaster, Enchantment, Guardian, and Mentalism. The primary one gives you access to two pages worth of spells, while the secondary school gets you just one. However, you can also pick the same school twice and get access to the full three pages.

You will also be able to cast a number of universal spells available to everyone. These generally include utility spells that let you exchange resources or move your units around the map. And once your campaign gets going, you'll be able to discover some new spell pages even from those schools you didn't originally pick.

Next comes the choice of your starting location. Conquest of Eo takes place on this huge open map with several distinct regions, each with its own geography, factions, challenges, and common enemy types. So this choice will pretty much determine what you'll be doing during the early-to-mid sections of the game.

Finally, you get to decide on a difficulty level. The game offers five presets there. In a refreshing change of pace, the default level is far from a cakewalk. It punishes your mistakes and doesn't go easy on you, provided you don't know how to properly beeline for all the best upgrades and unlocks right out of the gate. Which you shouldn't during your first playthrough. What would be welcome there, though, is the ability to customize these presets, decoupling the economic challenges from the combat ones.

Master of Your Domain

Once you're done setting up your character, you can start your journey. If you ever played the older Heroes of Might and Magic campaigns, you might remember being somewhat frustrated by them essentially being a few short, mostly self-contained scenarios strung together by a loose plot.

If you'd like to play something like that, but significantly more robust, Conquest of Eo is precisely the game for you. In general terms, the game's campaign is essentially an open-world take on the earlier Disciples titles with a combat system inspired by Age of Wonders.

Some of Conquest of Eo's promotional materials might have led you to believe that this was a 4X game, but that's not entirely correct. So, while you'll be doing plenty of exploring, expanding, exterminating, and exploiting in Conquest of Eo, you won't be building and developing cities, advancing through complex tech trees, or creating a vast empire here. And your AI opponents, be it in the form of The Circle mages or various neutral factions, won't be playing the same game as you do, which is usually the case for 4X titles.

The mages especially start the game with vast territories and resources, and the ability to spawn entire armies out of thin air if you annoy them too much. And seeing how mages, as a general rule, are a fairly irritable bunch, the opportunities to cozy up to them will be few and far between, leading to frequent clashes and constantly escalating tensions between you and The Circle. This makes them into more of a dynamic challenge as opposed to other players on the board.

There's actually a curious system in place where once your relationship with a certain mage deteriorates enough, you enter a Cold War phase where they deem it fit to launch probing raids into your territory to deprive you of resources, but without trying to wipe you out for good.

In the meantime, and before things come to that, you'll be rebuilding a collapsed tower, as mages are known to do, and gradually deciphering your master's grimoire. That tower will be your main source of Domain - an area of influence allowing you to extract resources from surrounding lands and take control of special structures that allow you to recruit new units or grant production bonuses.

The game's resources come in the form of gold, mana, and research points. And then there's the Allfire, a special resource that you can spread around to boost your mana and research output, but also gradually increase your mastery over magic, allowing you to cast more and more powerful spells. Reaching certain mastery thresholds also makes your tower grow, unlocks additional construction slots, and grants other useful boons.

---

The thing to keep in mind when it comes to Domain is that the resource-producing structures within it have the rather annoying tendency to run out. This means eventually, you'll need to research a spell that allows you to move your tower to a different location.

This leads us to the game's basic loop where you'll be working on unlocking the secrets of the grimoire by researching new spells and performing various arcane tasks while scouring the world for rare and precious ingredients or ancient secrets. You know, your standard mage fair. But in order to not fall behind and become easy prey for your foes, you'll need to be on the move, in constant pursuit of easy-to-defend resource-rich spots.

But you won't be able to just consolidate your forces in one area, because you'll also have to claim and protect the precious Allfire nodes scattered all over the map that act as a magnet for just about every monster and mage in the area. And if that wasn't enough, you'll need to keep harvesting all sorts of resources required for your crafting. The special worker units you'll have for that, as you might imagine, tend to be really bad at fighting, necessitating an armed escort more often than not.

And once you start looking to recruit some units that are not the basic goblins, you'll need to keep sending your minions out into the world in search of towns that sell useful goods and offer powerful troops, but only to those they trust. And that means building lasting relationships and undertaking side quests from those towns and their surrounding villages. And as you're doing that, you'll also want to explore the numerous points of interest dotting the map.

The game basically pulls you in every direction imaginable, doing everything in its power to not let you become a scholarly hermit in your cozy tower.

The one thing making it all possible are the heroes and apprentices that can join you on your quest. They can lead your armies, equip powerful artifacts, and possess unique powerful abilities. Heroes also come with elaborate personal quests, while an apprentice can construct a lodge that acts as a little piece of Domain away from home but requires constant protection.

You put all of this together and you get a game that's overwhelming in the best way possible. There are so many systems, so many things to consider, so many neat little interactions. And seeing how vast and open the game's world is, it's easy to get so absorbed in the whole experience of going with the flow while juggling ten different things, to completely lose track of time.

The game doesn't hold your hand too much either. Playing as an alchemist, at some point you'll be tasked with procuring three philosopher's stones. And it's up to you to figure out what those even are and where to get them.

Maybe you'll find one as a random drop and start scouring the world for other such treasures. But then you'll be experimenting with your cauldron, and just stumble onto a recipe to create one. Then, of course, you'll need to have the resources to actually do it.

All of this really does make you feel like you're engaging in something arcane and mysterious and not just following a checklist, even though that's exactly what you're doing. It's just a magic checklist, and that makes it much better.

This gradual progression also helps keep things fresh, as you'll be discovering new systems, like the ability to build extensions for the rooms in your tower, a good dozen hours into your first campaign.

Then, there are the neat little touches that make the whole experience that much deeper. Like how most regular units can't cross rivers. But if you have the right spell page, you can freeze said river and just walk over it. Or how The Circle mages don't necessarily see eye to eye with the neutral factions, and so, even though neither of them like you very much, they can fight among each other, in the process saving your holdings from getting pillaged.

---

The one area that could've used a bit more love are the game's narrative sections. The main quest is interesting enough, sure, but the vast majority of side content tends to be rather simplistic.

And that big main quest itself is somewhat incongruent with some of the game's design philosophies. Like how you're incentivized to do multiple playthroughs thanks to the vastly different playstyles and starting locations the game offers. But while that gives you a fresh experience and challenges, all the story events stay exactly the same.

In fact, the game's very map is designed in a somewhat odd way where all the major landmarks and areas are set in stone, and only the random events and points of interest get shuffled around between playthroughs. You do also get a new cast of Circle mages to butt heads with, as there are more of them than fits in a single campaign, and that's a definite plus.

Still, the feeling remains that the game could've used a sandbox mode of some sort allowing you to eschew the big story and instead fine-tune the map's size and features, and maybe the number and identity of your AI opponents. Alternatively, it could offer some tighter custom scenarios for us to tackle.

Conquest of Wonders

As mentioned previously, Conquest of Eo's combat system feels strongly inspired by the Age of Wonders series. It takes place on a hex grid where one side moves its units, and then the other one gets a turn.

Each unit gets three action points, two of which they can use for movement, while the third one has to be spent on an attack or some ability. However, if you forego movement, a unit gets to attack up to three times per turn.

There's also a "paying it forward" retaliation system where units retaliate when attacked in melee, but they do it with action points of their following turn, resulting in them skipping entire turns at times.

Simple on the surface, there's a lot of nuance to Conquest of Eo's battles, with things like elevation, distance, line of sight obstructions, morale, and different damage types and resistances coming into play. The direction a unit is facing is also taken into account, which is always great to see.

Outside of combat, units of different factions have various bonuses, penalties, and skills associated with them. And each unit, except for certain arcane summons, can level up. Doing so, lets you choose between two new abilities randomly picked from a fairly large pool, but once again, these pools differ between units and factions. This results in you getting attached to your troops way more than if they were merely an assembly of set numbers and skills.

Most battles take place in randomized arenas determined by the area you're fighting in. These tend to be generally well-designed and offer a few ways to approach them. But what can be annoying is that whenever you reload, say if you want to retry some battle and refine your tactics for it, you frequently get another arena necessitating an entirely different approach. And that can be doubly frustrating because you can't rearrange your troops before a battle starts.

Whenever you attack a stack of enemies, you get a very general assessment of your chances to win. You also have a convenient auto-resolve button, but sadly, no option to click it, see the proposed results and then decide if you want to keep them or play the battle manually.

---

The game's unit variety keeps things from getting stale for a long time. You might be starting your adventure dealing with brigands and overgrown insects, and feeling overpowered, but then, following a string of mistakes and events not fully within your control, you'll have to relocate to a swamp swarming with powerful undead stacks where you'll be holding for dear life, slowly losing all your veteran units and frantically trying to come up with a plan to get out of this tailspin. And then you finally admit defeat and relocate once again, which now pits you against a faction of racist Dwarves and their pet moles that seem tailor-made to counter your favorite strategies. And that's exactly what makes the whole thing so satisfying.

Technical Information

Conquest of Eo's visuals are clean and crisp, and its maps, both the overworld and the combat arenas, are detailed and pleasant to look at. And its loading screens are simply fantastic. On the other hand, its unit portraits leave a lot to be desired, while all the items and crafting reagents look downright cheap and wouldn't seem out of place in a mobile game.

The trend continues with the game's audio where its soundtrack is an absolute joy to listen to, but the barks you get when you click on your units, especially those belonging to the human faction, are borderline laughable.

The options menu is robust and can put a lot of other options menus to shame with all the clearly described and handy options, like the ability to adjust the game's font size, but also a separate slider specifically for tooltips. You can speed up the game's animations to a ridiculous degree, but also you can differentiate between your own units and your opponents. However, certain attack animations take much longer than the rest of them, and this makes fine-tuning the animation speed more annoying than entirely necessary.

All in all, it's a great options menu. Except for the fact that not only can you not rebind the controls, but there also isn't even a tab listing them. Which, considering the rest of the menu, feels like some crazy oversight.

The game saves instantly and loads relatively fast, but could do with some optimization in the latter area. You do get manual and auto-saves, but unfortunately, the game doesn't let you load directly from combat for some reason.

Another point of contention is the game's UI which is more or less functional, but far from aesthetically pleasing. Some of its elements don't mix well with the rest of it, ending your turns can be way more hassle than you would expect, and occasionally you'll be able to enter the crafting menu thinking you can craft something when you actually can't. You also don't get anything in the way of a quest journal. And because of that, tracking your current tasks can be a real chore.

The above is made worse by the grimoire UI that's actually pretty impressive and looks exactly like you would expect it to look like in a game about powerful mages. Well, at least everything runs well and there aren't any apparent bugs. Though the way morale damage works is a bit suspect, but the system isn't transparent enough to know for sure.

Conclusion

A somewhat askew balance of narrative and sandbox content, a haphazard approach to combat arenas, and a far from stellar UI prevent SpellForce: Conquest of Eo from becoming an instant, probably cult, classic.

But even so, it's still easily one of the best and most engaging video games in recent memory thanks to its complex interconnected systems, satisfying level of challenge, emergent elements, and that hard-to-pin-down "just one more turn" feel.

There have always been games geared towards the fastidious, careful player. While they can exist in any genre, they tend to be management or tactical titles, stuff like FTL, Door Kickers, Frozen Synapse, Against the Storm; games in which thinking…

Note: This review contains minor spoilers for the opening chapters of Backfirewall_. Sometimes we take our phones for granted. The marvels of smartphone technology have become ingrained in our society, and for most of us, they’re dependable everyday companions that…

Introduction

There's a good chance you know Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer as the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. But if you've been following the man's career, you might also know him as a bit of a history buff.

As such, it's no surprise that following Microsoft's acquisition of Obsidian, which resulted in greater freedom to experiment with more unorthodox projects, he jumped on the opportunity to direct a very much historical title in Pentiment.

The game itself is described as a narrative-driven adventure focusing on character development, heavily stylized art, and choice-driven storytelling in early 16th-century Bavaria. And with it being the latest Josh Sawyer production, we simply had to check it out.

All the World's a Game

Pentiment, the game's title, is derived from pentimento, a not exactly commonly used word defined as "a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist."

As far as titles go, this one is surprisingly apt, since the game's themes all revolve around this idea of old and long-since-buried things reemerging on the surface and wreaking all sorts of havoc.

The title makes sense if we look at the game's central decades-spanning mystery surrounding a series of murders in Tassing, a fictional Bavarian town, and the Kiersau abbey neighboring it.

It makes sense when we start delving into Tassing's history which stretches all the way from pre-Roman times and to around the invention of the printing press when the latter starts to gradually push the abbey's renowned book-writing scriptorium into irrelevance.

It also makes sense once we involve ourselves in the lives of Tassing's commoners and get a chance to watch generations change, children grow up and older people pass away or become progressively crankier.

And it even makes sense on a personal level for our protagonist Andreas Maler, initially a young painter with a lot to look forward to in life, but eventually a man with plenty of regrets and things he wouldn't mind forgetting.

When it was originally revealed, Pentiment was positioned as a narrative RPG following in the footsteps of Disco Elysium. It was later rebranded into a narrative adventure. Games like Night in the Woods were mentioned among its inspirations. In fact, at some point, Pentiment makes a not-so-subtle nod to Dear Esther, a title you might know as a fairly prominent example of a "walking simulator."

And so, here we come to the rather tricky hurdle of defining what a game even is and whether Pentiment qualifies. Which is only slightly easier than defining what an RPG is.

It's generally accepted that for a piece of interactive fiction to be considered a game, it needs to have express or implied failure states. Pentiment doesn't go easy on us here, as it seems that even if you don't engage with the game in any way other than mindlessly clicking on its perpetually highlighted hotspots, eventually you'll end up solving its central mystery.

If all you care about is learning whodunit, then chances are you'll be disappointed by the lack of agency in figuring it out. However, if you engage with the game on its own terms, you'll soon realize that it's the journey, not the destination that matters here.

Throughout the game, Andreas, being an artist instead of a detective, will have to balance his crime-solving hobby with his professional duties at the abbey. And with Pentiment being set in the simpler times when people lived in communities and interacted with their neighbors on a regular basis, Andreas will also be building friendships and rivalries with the townsfolk.

And it's precisely those parts where you have plenty of room for failure. Once you become a part of Tassing, you'll be able to influence it in various, oftentimes unpredictable ways. Maybe you'll decide that you want to help out some family that's been kind to you or maybe you'll take it upon yourself to expose some crook. But making that happen can actually be quite tricky.

Moreover, it can be hard to predict how your actions will end up affecting Tassing and its inhabitants in the long run. And with the way the game is structured, you'll get plenty of opportunities to face the consequences of your choices.

---

On the more gamey side of things, this also results in a system where people remember their interactions with you, so when you have to pass a persuasion check with them, all your previous actions are taken into account along with your character's skills.

And the great thing about this is that you never know if and when you'll need to persuade any particular character, or what this check will be concerning, making it pretty much impossible to metagame your interactions, at least during your first playthrough. And this, in conjunction with the game's frequent autosave system, leads to organic playthroughs where chances are, you won't succeed at everything you do. And this makes Pentiment very much a game.

Another issue that may be preventing some from giving Pentiment a fair shot is its historical nature. It's very easy to look at a historical title and assume it wouldn't be very fun on account of its critical lack of ale-guzzling dwarves or fireball-flinging robe-wearing geriatrics.

A big exception to this in the realm of RPGs is Warhorse Studios' Kingdom Come: Deliverance which takes place in medieval Bohemia circa the 15th century. And it just so happens that the events of Pentiment transpire in roughly the same area about a hundred years in the future. So, in a way, what with these two games both being based on real history, Pentiment can be seen as a sort of continuation of Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

You'll get to see the changes in the way people lived, experience the increasing influence of the Renaissance period, and stumble upon frequent references to the events depicted or mentioned in Warhorse's open-world masterpiece. And that alone may very well be worth the price of admission.

The Devil in the Details

The game itself is presented as this medieval illuminated manuscript. Illuminated in this context refers to all the fancy borders and drawings on the margins, and not the act of shining a torch on a page.

As such, Pentiment's visuals are drawn in the rather odd but instantly recognizable style of those old manuscripts, with the game's action positioned as an illustration on a page. And if that alone wasn't enough, at any moment, you can press a button and pull the camera back to see more of a page with all the silly drawings of lopsided cats our ancestors loved so much.

The game then takes this approach a step further and whenever you encounter an older character, they're drawn to look faded and less detailed than their younger counterparts. And whenever you get into a discussion about some book, like the Aeneid, your characters will step from their own pages and into the pages of the book in question and spend some time there.

Being positioned as a book, Pentiment is separated into three acts. The first act deals with a murder of a nobleman and the ripples it sends through the community. The second takes place seven years later and revolves around the growing rift between Tassing and the abbey. And finally, the third advances the clock a whopping eighteen years and delves into the history of Tassing. The later acts are punctuated with elaborate murders as well, but there they serve more of a supporting role to the bigger story.

The third act also lets you play as a new character, which works more than it doesn't. So even though this change happens a touch too abruptly and could probably have been executed better, it also has some really clever moments where you'll be examining the same objects you did as Andreas, but you'll get a completely different perspective on them. And that balances out some shaky developments and a rather forced resolution of the whole murder plot.

In general, the game's first act is the most expansive and full of options. In fact, at first, it may feel overwhelming with all the characters it keeps introducing and all the places you can visit and investigate. But then, the following acts feel significantly more linear.

But in a way, this also makes thematic sense, because, during the game's early stages, you're basically a stranger in Tassing. You're not familiar with the streets or the people living there. But once you get to know all these people and involve yourself in their lives, Tassing starts to feel smaller, cramped even.

---

Initially, though, you'll just be playing as a young artist trying to help his friend who's been accused of murder. If you've seen any police procedurals in your life, you probably know that to prove someone's guilt in a murder investigation you need to establish means, motive, and opportunity.

Not having the luxury of dozens of seasons of Law and Order at his disposal, Andreas takes a more cavalier approach to his investigation. He mostly focuses on the means and motive parts of the equation, while opportunity becomes but a distant afterthought for him.

This starts to make sense when you consider that Andreas is not the detective on the case, and he's actually forced to solve the murder before that detective arrives. As such, cross-referencing alibies and establishing corroborating statements is not something you'll get to do.

In fact, while you'll eventually get whoever was orchestrating the murders, you'll never know for sure if the people you accuse are the actual perpetrators. The way the game is set up, several people could have committed the murders, and a major aspect of the game is figuring out if you want to put the heat on whoever you feel is most likely to be the killer or someone whose guilt will affect the community in the least negative way.

This is further complicated by the fact that you can't physically follow all the leads at your disposal. Now, the game doesn't have an actual time limit to prod you along. Instead, each day you have is separated into several segments. And while most of your actions are free, certain legs of your investigation, like unearthing a grave or eavesdropping on a secret conversation, advance the clock several hours.

You usually have a decent number of options in how to spend your time, and so you'll be forced to decide if you want to continue digging in a certain direction, or instead spread your attention between all the suspects and then make an educated guess with what you've got.

Assisting you with all this will be an assortment of skills presented as backgrounds and cultural touchstones. These are generally determined by the places you've lived before your arrival in Tassing and the subjects you've studied over the years.

So, for example, being able to read French, on account of spending some time in France, will help you out in certain situations, but at the same time, it will preclude you from being able to decipher Italian texts.

By the looks of it, there aren't any random rolls or skill checks in the game. You either know something or you don't. And when it comes to persuasion, it's all about your skills as an orator and your previous interactions with the character you're trying to persuade.

Another notable thing about Pentiment is the way it presents its dialogue to you. The game has no voice acting of any kind, but instead, it elevates its text-based conversations to a new level.

This is very much welcome, as for years, RPG dialogues have not merely been stagnating, they've actually been regressing. We went from Planescape: Torment's complex dialogue trees to Mass Effect's dialogue wheel, and then to its simplified version in Fallout 4.

But then, games like Disco Elysium seem to have reminded people that there's still a lot that can be done with plain old text. And Pentiment is a great example of that.

Keeping in tune with the game at large, whenever a character speaks in Pentiment, it's presented as a piece of parchment gradually being filled with writing. You get different fonts depending on who the character you're talking to is. Peasants and other barely literate people have their own simplistic scribbles, educated people write in a more legible way, monks impress you with their gothic font, while people working in the printing press business type out their words instead of writing them.

As that happens, you occasionally get typos that get fixed right before your eyes to simulate less-than-perfect speech. Parchments get covered in ink blots whenever a character is getting really steamed. And if you assume someone's level of education, but then realize you've misjudged them, the font they speak in will change from that point onward. It all absolutely oozes style and gives you a better feel for the characters than any voice acting.

---

This being an Obsidian title, it also uses the hyperlink system popularized by the likes of Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. But here it's taken one step further. Whenever you click one of those links, an explanation of some term, person, or point of interest appears on the book's margins.

All of it looks really cool, but when taken in conjunction with the way Pentiment seems to know its own themes, its competent storytelling, and how everything in the game is set up and connected, you can't help but be impressed.

Sure, there's room for discussion about whether Pentiment is an actual game, but if we concede this point, then with the way it's executed, it may very well be the best Obsidian title since at least Fallout: New Vegas.

Technical Information

As we've already established, Pentiment's visuals are quite impressive. And with the way the game is structured, it's hard to decouple the visuals from the UI that's also presented in the same manuscript style. As such, while the menus can be a bit fiddly and slow to navigate, on account of them being stylized as bookmarked parts of a physical journal, just the fact that said journal is not a series of minimalistic transparent windows elevates it way above many of its contemporaries.

The game's audio is also a joy to listen to, be it the soundtrack, the background noises, or the sounds of a quill writing the game's dialogue. Now, by the looks of it, not everyone enjoyed the latter, and as a result, following a recent patch, you can now make the dialogue appear instantaneously.

In fact, the game has a decent number of accessibility options that pretty much everyone can enjoy, like scalable text size. The weird thing about Pentiment's options menu is that you can only access certain options once you've started a game. Another annoyance in that area is a lack of graphics options. You get a vague visual quality slider and that's it. And, this being a Unity Engine game, it's important to point out that there doesn't seem to be any way to enable VSync or limit the game's FPS number. Thankfully, Pentiment doesn't seem to suffer from Unity's propensity to turn your GPU into a jet engine, but it still would've been nice to have those options.

Another frequent Unity quirk - game saves taking forever - doesn't seem to be present here, and perhaps that's why you only get autosaves that happen during scene transitions and no quick or manual saves.

Being originally developed as an Xbox Game Pass title, Pentiment was designed with a controller in mind, and as a result of that the default keyboard and mouse control scheme is far from ideal. When keys like [ and ] see prominent use in your game, you must know you've messed up. Thankfully, the abovementioned patch also added a new option that allows you to navigate the menus using the mouse, and that makes things significantly more pleasant.

Finally, the game seems to be fairly well-polished and the only bugs worth mentioning include a rare couple of game logic lapses where characters go through certain conversations twice.

Conclusion

With its stylish presentation, tight and competently told story, and numerous advancements in the realm of video game dialogue, you would be remiss not to play Pentiment purely on account of it lacking the usual trappings of an RPG.

If you like historical settings, murder mysteries, and touching personal stories, then Pentiment is definitely a game for you regardless of how you want to classify it.

Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider isn’t the only game that seeks to emulate 90s platformers. They are, in fact, a dime-a-dozen, even if we only count those that strictly adhere to the 90s design ethos (spike traps, speed, and turning everything up…

Introduction

Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown is a party-based dungeon-crawling RPG in the vein of Might and Magic III-V. Developed by Silver Lemur Games, it was originally released back in 2019.

But now, with the game's sequel - The Song of Trees - slated for a 2023 release, we figured it was time for us to check it out and see what it had to offer and whether we should be looking forward to that sequel.

An Intro to Amberland

Before we begin, you might want to know that Silver Lemur Games is essentially a one-man studio - Legends of Amberland was designed and programmed by a single developer who then outsourced the game's audio and visuals.

Which makes the whole project quite darn impressive considering how closely it manages to follow in the footsteps of its venerable predecessors. And sure, certain aspects of Legends of Amberland may fall short when compared to those classic Might and Magic titles, but to counterbalance this, the game does offer some interesting fresh ideas and improvements to the formula.

On the most basic level, Legends of Amberland is a first-person dungeon crawler of the blobber variety - you control a party of seven adventurers on a grand quest in a vibrantly pixelated fantasy land.

The general premise of the game is that your kingdom is being besieged by ogres, but the king just doesn't seem to have enough knights to fend off this invasion. And in the meantime, the royal wizard discovers a nefarious spell of forgetfulness that's affecting the land and hires you to discover its origins.

You will then need to explore the kingdom and its immediate surroundings, jump through plenty of hoops to get access to an ancient library, put a stop to the machinations of evil wizards, and reunite the king with his magic crown that allows him to muster a large-enough force to repel the invasion.

Even for a dungeon crawler, the game's setting and story are very basic, but charming in their earnest simplicity. You have your wizards and their towers, dwarves that invariably mine a tad too deeply, marauding greenskins causing all sorts of troubles, and princesses with the worst luck when it comes to getting married.

Pint-sized Dungeons, Full-sized Dragons

In gameplay terms, the above is represented by an expansive world map you navigate one tile at a time. This map is infested with all sorts of monsters, but those tend to be mostly harmless compared to the dangers lurking in the many dungeons scattered across the land.

Apart from dungeons, you can stumble onto friendly towns (represented by a menu screen as opposed to Might and Magic's physical spaces), castles, and various dwellings housing quest-givers, attribute-boosting masters, and just assorted NPCs. And so, in order to eventually complete your grand quest, you'll be signing up for a heap of optional ones and then delving into various inhospitable places to earn some sweet levels and even sweeter loot.

Some of the game's side quests are really simplistic and exist mostly to point you to their adjacent dungeons, while others are more involved and send you all over the map in search of rare ingredients or hard-to-find items.

One of the best examples is a miner who wants a special dwarven pickaxe to dislodge a rare gem from a nearby mine. So, you go searching for the dwarves. But when you find them, turns out their anvil got stolen, and when you retrieve that, you're then tasked with finding a bunch of ore that's hidden all over the map so that they can forge you that pickaxe.

And seeing how after the first few areas, the game opens up and allows you to go pretty much wherever, with little to no hand holding, stuff like that adds a nice element of exploration into the mix.

What's also great is that the game doesn't seem to have any sort of level scaling, so you never know which areas are level-appropriate and where you should be going. You just go, see where you can find enemies you can defeat, flee from those you can't, and occasionally stumble onto some enclave of weaker foes you've managed to miss and go on a bit of a power trip.

---

And if you leverage the game's systems just right, you may find yourself punching way above your weight class. What do you do when you stumble upon a dungeon inhabited by a veritable horde of fire wizards that destroy your party without breaking a sweat? Well, if you've been stashing some fire resist gear away for an occasion just like this, you can run back to town, equip everyone with the right stuff, have your Wizard cast a spell that further amplifies those resistances, and then go back to the dungeon and laugh at the puny fireballs being thrown at you.

Speaking of going in and out of dungeons. If you know your Might and Magic, you're probably familiar with the old Town Portal-Lloyd's Beacon combo. Well, in Legends of Amberland you have Griffins instead. When outside of a dungeon, you can summon one from the map screen and get "teleported" to any tile you have previously visited. This is plenty convenient when you want to level up, deal with some nasty status effect, or sell some loot. However, when paired with how generous the game is with clearing its fog of war, this convenience can make the world feel smaller than it is.

Alternatively, you can rest while inside dungeons. You can go for a quick rest that restores your special ability charges plus some of your health, or a full rest that brings you back to full and restores your spellcasters' mana on top of it. Both of these are capped at three uses before you have to go back to town and restock your provisions.

And as for the dungeons themselves, unfortunately, here I think lies the game's biggest weakness. Sprawling elaborate dungeons are a pretty important part of the whole dungeon crawler experience, and Legends of Amberland, sadly, doesn't have those.

A great dungeon crawler dungeon should have puzzles and riddles scattered throughout. It should have challenging encounters waiting around every corner. Its dangers should include traps and navigational hazards. Ideally, it should have some theme or a trick to it, so that you have to complete some task to reach your goal. Secrets are also a must.

Well, Legends of Amberland has no puzzles or riddles, or tricks. It doesn't even have any secrets, as far as I can tell. In fact, I was mostly watching the minimap instead of the actual game screen during my playthrough, as there wasn't anything to miss, and it was much easier to navigate using the map.

Basically, all you do here is go inside a fairly straightforward dungeon, fight a bunch of monsters, loot some treasure chests, and on occasion flip a switch to open a nearby door. You don't even get any exploration or traversal spells of the kind you'd expect from a Might and Magic-inspired game. Hopefully, this gets improved in the sequel.

Now, most of the writing that contextualizes all of this ranges between serviceable and good. Occasionally though, it dips to the point where it's only barely above NPCs straight up telling you, "Adventurers, I want you to go to dungeon X and retrieve item Y for me."

Just in general, the game really could have used an editor, a second pair of eyes to go over the text, and maybe the systems too.

For example, the game has a fairly unique way of scaling damage - your characters have a baseline damage stat determined by their class and attributes, that's then modified by the weapon they wield. Starting weapons add about 100% to the base damage, while some rare artifacts can go all the way up to 190%.

In practice, this works fairly well, but it also makes all the different weapon types not matter at all. Axes deal more critical hits when wielded by dwarves, but apart from that, all the other weapons are identical. But then some of the weapons you find have added effects, like a chance to attack multiple enemies at once. To me, it seems obvious that all the different weapon types could've used a unique always-present modifier like that just to set them apart.

Gather Your Party in a Blob Before Venturing Forth

When it comes to creating your party, the game has a fairly robust system where you have six basic classes and four races, each with several subraces. And then, characters of a certain race have access to unique race-based variants of those basic classes that offer some special features, like Humans being able to become Champions instead of regular Knights and deal less damage in general, but be better at fighting evil spellcasters.

---

The game's combat is turn-based. Unlike in those classic Might and Magic games, here you can't start a fight by firing some arrows or spells at your foes. Instead, you have to walk into an enemy and that starts an encounter.

The game has an interesting approach to initiative, where your foes generally get two attacks per turn that happen at different times, while your heroes' turn order is determined by their position in the formation. Your three middle characters are considered your front line and will be getting attacked most often, while the outer four will usually only have to deal with AoE damage.

Despite being turn-based, the game's combat system is lightning-fast. Your front-liners are your main damage dealers here, with your spellcasters performing a more supporting role - healing and buffing your party. The game does have some offensive spells, but during the early game these tend to cost too much mana, and by the time you get to the late game, most enemies have resistances and immunities, severely limiting the effectiveness of your offensive magic.

Apart from spells and magic, your characters have special combat skills determined by their class. So, for example, your Knights will be able to attack all enemies in front of them, while your Bards will restore a bit of health and mana for your party. These range from borderline useless to somewhat weak, especially considering you can only use them once before resting.

In fact, the main challenge in Legends of Amberland comes not from individual encounters, but instead from your ability to manage your party's health and mana pools (provided you're someone who doesn't consider resting after every fight and then teleporting back to town to restock your provisions a fun and viable strategy), and equipping your heroes with the right gear for the job.

The game's itemization is one of its best aspects, mainly due to the way it handles encumbrance. A characters' class is the main thing that determines how much gear they can equip, with their race, attributes and certain items further increasing their carrying capacity. And it's all balanced in such a way that you usually can't equip enough gear to cover all your bases that include physical armor, elemental resistances, and status effect immunities. As a result, making sure you're prepared for the challenges ahead becomes a neat challenge.

Another interesting idea here is the way armor works. On the most basic level, it merely blocks a certain amount of damage from every attack directed at your characters. But, its value actually scales with your characters' levels, and so, the same piece of armor works better for a high-level character than it does for a novice.

And just in general, the game has plenty of these neat little ideas that make the whole thing quite fun even despite its overly simplistic approach to the actual dungeon crawling.

Technical Information

Now, I don't know if it's just me, but every screenshot of the game makes it look like it's being rendered at a wrong aspect ratio or something, with both monsters and terrain looking kind of squished, for lack of a better word.

To my great surprise, actually playing the game dispels this illusion and the whole thing looks quite neat and cheerful in an old-school pixelated kind of way.

The game's audio effects are a bit limited but get the job done, and the same can be said about its music - it sounds nice, but the game could've used a bit more of it.

The UI and controls can take a bit of getting used to, but they work just fine. By the looks of it, you can play the game by using either just your mouse or your keyboard, but as is usually the case with games like these, a combination of both works best.

The game uses a proprietary engine that I can't really fault in in any way. I've not encountered any crashes or bugs during my playthrough, and the game saves and loads lightning-fast without using too much resources.

Conclusion

While its dungeon design and certain oversimplifications preclude Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown from reaching the same heights as the games it's clearly inspired by, some of its unique and fresh ideas make it more than worthy of a playthrough.

And if the game's developer can build upon these ideas for the sequel, then that one may very well turn out great.

Kukoos: Lost Pets might be the worst game I’ve ever played. Being generous, I’ll just say that it is one of the worst games I’ve ever played, assuming that anything worse than this would’ve caused enough brain damage to make…

Introduction

When Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord launched into early access, it crashed Steam's servers on its way to becoming the platform's biggest release of 2020. I guess you could say people really wanted a new Mount & Blade game.

And since we count ourselves among those people, once the servers were up we immediately started working on our early access review of the game. Back then, Bannerlord was already showing some signs of greatness but wasn't quite where it was supposed to be. Which is exactly what you'd expect from an early access release.

And now, two and a half years later, the early access tag is finally removed, and Bannerlord is available on consoles as well as PC. So naturally, it's time for us to revisit Calradia, fight some looters, besiege some castles, and see what the properly released version of Bannerlord has in store for us.

A Quick Recap

If you're entirely unfamiliar with the Mount & Blade series, you should check out the early access review linked above, as it can serve as a decent introduction to TaleWorlds Entertainment's sandbox RPG formula.

But the general gist of it is that you're playing a character in a medieval sandbox world that's perfectly fine with doing its own thing even without any input from you.

The game's kingdoms wage war and make peace. Their lords run around the map recruiting armies, participating in tournaments, and improving their settlements. Peasants and caravans go about their business while brigands try to waylay them.

Being a free agent, you can participate in all of those activities and more. You start the game as just a lone nobody with a few denars to your name but later can become an industry mogul and lead armies of hundreds or even thousands of men into battle. You can support any of the game's kingdoms or even create your own.

At its core, it's a very addicting formula. But seeing how the game is so ambitious and open-ended, there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. In a perfect world, two years of early access and plenty of people providing live feedback should be a great way to perfect the formula or at least deal with the most glaring of issues. Sadly, ours is not a perfect world, friends.

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter(lord)

I've revisited Bannerlord several times throughout its early access journey, and each time there were some improvements but also some new broken things and very puzzling design decisions. The game's full release is no different.

Take the skill system for example. Compared to the early access version, the perks you get for reaching certain skill thresholds now work. Some of them are even pretty useful and make you want to build towards them, like the ability to gauge prices for trade goods, convert bandits into real troops, or zoom in further when aiming with a crossbow.

Unfortunately, the well of ideas seems to have run dry well before all the perks were designed, so a decent bunch of them merely increases your speed or damage stats by 2-5 percent instead of doing something interesting. And we're talking about a game where on average you'll be doing somewhere in the vicinity of 20-50 damage per hit or when charging a foe on horseback, just kill any target in a single swing, which makes those bonuses barely noticeable. Some of those perks also affect your army, I guess so that they can be useless on a larger scale.

Perks also tend to have a secondary effect that's only applied when you, or NPCs in your party, are acting as governors, captains, or quartermasters. It's a good idea on paper, but it breaks down when you realize that these effects are scattered all over the skill tree, so for example, being good at shooting crossbows also somehow makes a character better at managing a castle.

But the worst part about the game's skill system is that it doesn't really matter. Sure, it's there. It does something. But at the end of the day, even without any of those skills, you'll still do pretty well even on the highest "Realistic" difficulty.

---

At some point during the game's early access phase, I decided to make a character who was a complete wuss. No more than 2 points in any physical attribute but plenty of social skills. And even so, after getting over the initial difficulty hump, I found myself dominating on the battlefield. And in a long campaign, eventually, you'll find yourself decent, at pretty much everything you do, seeing how the game uses a learn-by-doing system with very lax limitations.

Another major Bannerlord mechanic, the clan system, is now more robust compared to its original iteration. You can now have multiple parties of relatives roaming the map. Your younger siblings slowly grow up and develop into real characters. You can even die of old age and have your children take over, though by the time I completed my release version campaign, my character was 34 and his kids were still toddlers, so I guess it's more of a just-in-case feature.

Your clan members can now also get married to various NPC lords. Which presents a problem. After a few opening quests, you're reunited with your family and are tasked with discovering an ancient banner to then either restore or destroy the remnants of a fallen empire. That's if you're playing the game's campaign mode as opposed to the sandbox mode that has none of that banner stuff and just lets you roam the map without some big quest hanging over your head.

Either way, you have a clan. And immediately after unlocking it in my latest campaign, I got a notification that my brother got married and his new wife was now a part of our clan. Prior to that, she used to be a member of some noble NPC family. This means she enters your clan wearing high-end gear you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford until the late mid-game. You, of course, can take that gear, wear it yourself, and become unstoppable. And the game just throws that stuff at you when you're still mostly dealing with naked guys throwing rocks as the main enemy.

The list of Bannerlord's features that make you scratch your head and raise an eyebrow can go on and on. But in general, the developers may call this a full release, but the whole thing has an air of being unfinished about it.

Let's consider voice acting for example. The release version now has considerably more of it, usually around the story bits and encounter introductions. And what's there sounds great with all the cheesy exaggerated accents. But some characters and encounters are still not voiced at all. So you attack a bunch of looters and they talk at you. But then you attack some forest bandits and you only get silence.

All the social aspects of the game are pretty much exactly where they started. There's no intrigue, diplomacy, or dialogue-based roleplaying. The game doesn't even attempt to justify its wars in any way. Kingdoms just wage war because it's what you do in the game.

At some point in my campaign, the ruler of the kingdom I was supporting died of old age, and I was then elected as the new king. Which is a weird thing to do in a monarchy if you ask me, but at least it gave me a chance to experience what it's like to reign over the biggest kingdom on the map as opposed to some plucky upstart with two castles.

Basically, as a king, you can override any decision of your council if you have accumulated enough "influence," and you can choose between a balanced, defensive, or offensive approach to war. That's it. You can't tell your lords to go here or there, can't tell them to get an army going, can't even tell them to deal with the bandits plaguing their lands.

When a war starts, it just does, without even some pretext at diplomacy, like some other king saying that a town you own used to belong to him and he wants it back, or that running a war is mighty expensive, so why don't you skip the unpleasant part and just pay him.

---

Your clan members are also guilty of a similar lack of depth. They just exist to lead your secondary parties or govern your settlements. They don't even give you any quests like the regular NPC lords do. When it's early access and you click on a dialogue option asking to discuss something with your wife, brother, or companion and are then presented with a dead end with literally zero options, you don't mind too much. But when the same thing happens in a supposedly finished game, it's downright insulting.

Then you go back to check out some of the developer diaries from before even the early access release and you read about these grand plans of complex systems and the next level of medieval sandbox simulation where you'll need to mind your logistics to not starve or how various cultures will have unique breeds of horses.

And the funny thing is, all of that is true on the most basic of levels. So, in theory, you can starve if you don't buy any food, but the stuff is so plentiful that chances are, at some point you'll be getting way more of it just by fighting other lords and forget that it even exists. And yes, there are plenty of horse variations with some being slightly faster and others slightly tougher. But can you actually notice any difference when playing? If the horses are in the same tier, no you can't. And does it have any effect at all on the actual gameplay? I think at this point you know the answer.

At the same time, there are some undeniable improvements in the full version. Faction balance, for example, is much better now. Without your help, there's a constant back and forth now instead of a couple of kingdoms just conquering everything.

The general balance of things has also been adjusted and so now Battanian archers aren't ridiculously overpowered, for example. On the other hand, ranged weapons actually feel underpowered now, with high-end crossbows taking 2-3 hits to kill even mid-tier enemies and barely tickling the really armored ones.

Still, lords and their armies have been tweaked in some ways and now behave more reasonably. Sieges are significantly smoother. There's more scene variety so you're constantly fighting in new places instead of the same forest over and over again.

But as you may expect, this new stuff comes with new issues. Take the rebellion feature where a city may rise against its lord and create a new minor AI kingdom. It sounds cool on paper, but with the way loyalty works right now, a conquered fief will forever have considerable penalties to it.

As such, settlements you own will perpetually annoy you with their lack of productivity as you'll be spending most of the time idling them with loyalty-boosting festivals. But then the kicker is, the developers never bothered making sure the game's AI lords can do the same, so they just keep losing their recently-conquered towns to rebels and there's nothing you can do about it.

The game's main quest was also expanded with a new activity in the form of conspiracy quests. These mostly just tell you to go across the map anytime you're busy with some military campaign. And even if you ignore most of them and let them fail, they seemingly don't penalize you in any way. But at least you get a neat little cutscene once you finish the main quest now.

When it comes to combat, I did enjoy the way you can now slow down time when you're actively issuing orders on the battlefield. Not merely useful, it somehow just feels satisfying.

You also can now place your troops and adjust their formations before a battle begins. Unfortunately, that whole menu seems like it was designed for a controller specifically, as you can open radial menus and press buttons there, but you can't click on things. And, for some bizarre reason, adjusting the camera height with the mouse wheel on that particular screen and it alone is reversed, so you'll be constantly trying to pull out for a bird's eye view but get buried in the ground instead.

---

In general, trying to command your troops on the battlefield is extremely frustrating in Bannerlord mainly thanks to F6 existing. You see, F6 lets the AI take over and just do its thing. And when you press that button you see it do such cool things like splitting the cavalry into two groups and protecting your flanks, skirmishing with your ranged units, attacking a particular enemy formation, and so on. And the kicker here is that none of those commands are available to you when you're trying to control your troops manually. You can put your guys into a shield wall or some other formation and tell them to attack or retreat, and that's about it.

Knowing that the AI has all these tools while you don't is extremely frustrating. Doubly so when it keeps misusing them and turning what's supposed to be an easy win into a massacre. Which happens all too often in large battles where reinforcements are involved, as the release version likes to spawn fresh enemy formations right on top of your archers.

And if you think that's bad, how about the fact that the full game currently has reduced functionality when compared to the initial early access release? Back then you could manually assign any unit to any combat group. This was extremely useful at times, like during the quest where you get some low-level peasants to train and you don't want your strong units to run in and get all the kills, or when you want to put your medics and engineers with no ranged skills together with the archers so they just stay out of harm's way.

That feature is no longer in the game. At all. Infantry is infantry and archers are archers now unless the game randomly decides otherwise and sends your companion without a melee weapon equipped into the shield wall. You can't adjust things in any way except by splitting your computer-assigned blobs into smaller computer-assigned blobs when setting up your units before a fight.

Well. This was supposed to be a shorter review to quickly update you on Bannerlord's progress at the end of its early access journey. But I feel like I haven't even started listing all my grievances with the game. There are just so many things here that fall short of even the most reasonable of expectations.

You enter one of the settlements and just walk around it, and it's gorgeous. You want to do things in that space. You want to talk to people, explore and perform various tasks there. But it's all so static. Trying to talk to various citizens mostly ends up in them saying something to the effect of, "go away, I'm busy."

And then we also have a bunch of half-baked systems like minor clans with their unique units and backstories. But they mostly just serve as lords with dubious loyalties. You can't join them, can't add them to your clan, can't reliably recruit their units, can't do any special quests related to their backstories.

In the end, the game just devolves into massive wars that happen for no reason and then end, allowing you to restock your troops before kicking off again. And even restocking troops in the late-game is a hassle because there's no good way to train your recruits. Bandits just don't scale enough to matter past the early game and there are no Warband-style training fields in the world.

This brings us to mods. Mount & Blade is famous for all the wild mods turning it into all sorts of different things, and Bannerlord even has Steam Workshop support, allowing you to skip dealing with any third-party mod sites.

Even so, most of the currently available mods require you to have other mods installed and that's just mighty off-putting to me. But some just work, and among them is a mod that improves the game's garrison system. Once installed, it integrates into the game and looks like it belongs there. It expands what's essentially a very basic system in the vanilla game where you put units into garrisons, and they stay there, defending your towns and castles or acting as a reserve in case you lose a bunch of men in a bad fight.

---

The mod then completely overhauls this system and allows your garrisons to recruit and train new men in your absence. It lets you tinker with the specifics of this process, and even create a template listing specific units you want to be trained. The garrison then will create a recruiting party that will visit the nearby villages. And once you have some battle-ready troops, your garrisons will be able to create guards that protect your lands from raiders.

This is pretty much what I expected all of the game's systems to look like following the early access phase. Instead, we got some sidegrades at best and even managed to lose some features.

And as for multiplayer, it was showing quite a bit of promise during early access, especially the Captain mode where every player commands a squad of AI soldiers and fights over various objectives.

The release version of the game's multiplayer side greets you with a fancy menu with various cosmetic and progression options, and several ways to play the game.

But after clicking on matchmaking and waiting several minutes, I got into a game with one other guy in what was supposed to be a 6v6 match. I was then informed that skirmish was currently bugged and people mostly played on custom servers these days. Most of those were fairly barren, with only a few having any action going. And since after quitting that first empty skirmish game I got locked out of matchmaking for a bit, I just gave up on the whole thing.

Technical Information

Bannerlord's early access release was met with some grumbling about bugs and crashes. And while I encountered plenty of the former, the latter were extremely rare for me. To the game's credit, the full release had no crashes at all and bugs were far less prevalent.

There were still some, mostly visual glitches like the ground flashing in some desert scenes or certain rocks not having any collision. Then, the later stages of the campaign have you fighting these unique conspiracy units and once you beat them you get the prisoner screen, but you can't take them as prisoners. And during sieges, it feels like enemies can just fall through the textures on occasion, leaving your army standing around while a lone unreachable enemy exists somewhere. I also got several error messages every time I quit the game.

Another rather amusing glitch that reflects the game as a whole is the fact that the workshops you can own in the game have levels, but there's no way to level them up.

Other than that, all the points from the early access review still stand - the game looks and sounds great, especially compared to its predecessors. And it runs pretty well considering how many objects you can have on the screen.

Conclusion

If I were to sum up this whole review in one word, it would be "disappointed." You can play the Hercules gif/video yourself.

At the end of the day, this is still Mount & Blade. It's still very fun to ride around the map, get into fights and gradually paint the map green. But with how ambitious Bannerlord looked at the start and how long it took for it to get here, I expected more.

From the looks of it, the developers intend to keep working on the game now that it's released, and hopefully, this will eventually allow the game to realize its full potential. But at this point, over a decade after the original announcement, I wouldn't hold my breath. Let's just hope we get some fun mods at some point.

I’ve always enjoyed the Metrovania genre. It feels good exploring, finding upgrades and new powers, and defeating challenging bosses. There have been a few twists on the formula over the years (like Dead Cells’ roguelike-meets-Metroidvania), but a combination I’d never…