Pros:
- reasonably deep (though tedious) character builds
- reasonably diverse combats
- reasonably rich world and lore Cons (descending order):
- Too easy. Yes I am a hardcore spreedsheating min-maxer, but basically after the end of act 1 there is no challenge (highest difficulty). Too many broken things (like make your whole party except the tank low prior targets) and you get too many too powerful items generally.
- LOOONG and frequent loading screens. Not just when you enter big new areas. 10-30sec loading screen every time when you enter your tiny commandment area or access the small world map.
- bugs everywhere (skills and talents not working a skill that should damage the enemy heals them so on and so forth)
- Subjective but I didn't really cared about any of the chars. The story starts of exciting at act1 then act2 is kinda ok act3 was really boring then I got tired and quit the game at act4 ( cause of no challenge, boring story and long loading screens). Summary:
It isn't a terrible or even a bad game. It is very well enjoyable if it matches your priorities about a game. (It didn't really mached mine)
The core idea is dinamyte to me. A Deck-building ARPG mix. I expected that because of the deck-building-random element, the fights gonna be much more interesting and fluid, then rotating the same 5-10 spells from your hotbar as usually. I have some hope that in time this game gonna evolve for the better, but in its current state there are mostly just cons. I played for a week, had some fun, had some hope that after the main story the game opens up to some new cool exciting features, but sadly nothing, at all. Pros: - really great core idea, with great potential - there are some enjoyable combos, and the core mechanics are fun enought to keep you interested for a while ( 1 week for me) - maps and quest are fine, open-world events are all right, and there is some variety in task and challenges in dungeons that can be appritiated Cons: - the deck is 12 cards and your hand is 4 card. this is a joke. Most of the games have larger hotbars then this deck. This amount should at least be doubled (24-30 with allowing maybe 2 copies of the same card) to feel like bit of a deck building imo. - as a deck-building theme I expected large amount of cards with high variety of combos and tricks to play with. But there are only a small amount and boring one dimensional spells, and summons. - the summors are f*kin annoying: I played alone most of the time but when I got teamed up with 1-2 ppl in a dungeon, there is just freakin chaos with all the f*kin summons cause you can't tell them apart from the enemy. - no endgame. You can repeat the same dungeons with some difficulty modifiers, and I can imagine myself enjoy that IF there would be more interesting cards or stuff to aquire, but not really. Verdict: - Just leave it for now. Give the devs a couple of month maybe they can polish some ( a lot ) of the aspects currently not working too well.
Trails of Cold Steel Series in general: Combat: I picked up Trails of Cold Steel as a tactical turned based rpg fan, and as such my main focus is challenging interesting fights and playing around interesting builds. I played through 1 to 4 and from the combat perspective it was generally fun, and most of the time adequately challenging (choose Nightmare dif, don't belive the description that sais its for NG+). I would recommend the series from this aspect if you have already finished the stronger titles of the genre. Story: One of those stories that makes sense on the surface until you start to think things through, but this is part of its charm for some as fans nontheless enjoy theorizing about obvious logic flaws and holes in the plot. It has vast world-building for sure, with a couple of interesting characters and ideas. If you are the type who doesnt get too worked up on details, you probably won't have problems with this story arc either. For me it was mostly annoying and ridicolous.
It is a perspective of someone that have never been played the board game, and likes deep and difficult turned-based strategy games (eg. xcom, darkest dungeon). Pros: - lots of strategic depth - decent objective variety, several fairly different bossfights - 12 very different and deep classes to play - a lot of content to play. There is a lot of these turned-based-deck-based-like strategy games mowadays with decent ideas, but most of them run out of interesting possibilities in 20-30 hours for me (eg. slay the spire, coordian quest, tainted grail). This game is much more in the 100+ hour league. Cons: - The narrator of the story is so **** bad and annoying I muted after the first hour. - The "choice" system between destinations is a bad joke and would be better to completely left out. Feels random, casuless, and meaningless. - there are some elements of the game that is borderline needlessly complex. I am the kind of person who is really into that **** so I put up with most of them after a while, but my bet is that most players would probably find them annoying or maybe unbearable. - First and foremost the looting system. You don't get the gold drop by default rather you have to end your turns on the hex where the gold is (every single enemy drops it so that means a lot of playing around with this if you want to get any money). You also have special cards that can collect loot from a bit larger range, so all in all this kindof adds a new layer to things, either you sacrifice some battle cards in order to bring more of these utilities, but still feels kindof a drag. Summary: All in all I liked the game very much. After a couple of hours of Guildmaster mode I played through the campaign on the hardest difficulty. (I used the restart round option a lot to see enemy intent). I was about to give the game an 8, but after writing the review I came to the conclusion that it would be anfair with the truley shining pieces of the genre (XCOM, Divinity 2, Darkest Dungeon). But it is an enjoyable game, and I would recommend it if the pros and cons I wrote feels like a good trade for you.
A really well-rounded and polished game. The Fighting, the different builds, music, lore, even the jokes, all lineing up I would say perfectly. The loop of dying and restarting feels fresh, and exciting most of the time. The challenge level is well set, with komplex yet simple to understand mechanics (this is really not a mindless boring hack-n-slash where you button-mash trhough everything without a sweat). I would highly recommend this game. Its truly one of a kind.
I enjoyed playing around with party setup and characters for a while. But after I have hunted down all the bounties in the exploration maps there wasn't any challenge left sadly. Normal and "Hard" fights are so easy that any of your characters can handle them solo. It is a shame because I would really like to play more but there is just nothing else left to do. I don't know how it was with the online content available, but now without it, the content runs out fairly quickly. I bought the game at a 80% discount price so I am not THAT disappointed, but I would strongly disencourage anyone to buy it at full price now, without the online content available.
Pros: - decent turned based rpg - uniqe lore and art - exciting boss fight mechanics Cons: - content runs out pretty fast. I usually love replaying games in harder difficulties, getting more and more expert on the nuances and stuff, but I had no motivation left after one playthrough. Non-boss fights get boring fast, there isn't too much enemy variety, or build variety with your characters, overall it is a short game. ( around 20 hours I think ). - I for one didn't love the creepy story. If you still have your natural human empathy for mindless suffering and torture, then you probably won't love it either. I disabled voices, and cutscenes and what left is an enjoyable turned-based rpg. - Boss fights gets much less exciting once you figure out you just have to spam all your interruption spells constantly to win.
Enjoyable game with numerous flaws. Pros: - Story missions are diverse and interesting - Characters are kind of decent and rarely annoying - With 17 (or sg like that) playable characters you have some skills, spells and playstyles to play around with - the "losses of war" vibe from the story feels well written and thought out, and had some memorable scenes. Cons: - the "open world" is painfully empty - story endings make zero sence (until you search fan forums for explanations but thats really not ok) - diffucilty scaling is a joke. Let me emphasise I really do like and need challenge and decent difficulty in games, but in this game there is mostly 2 difficulty levels at any point: "kind of easy and boring" or "everything oneshots you". The one shotting isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you look at sg like Dark Souls for example, but here the hit frames are chaotic and inconsistent, so you basically spamming dodge (no stamina cost or anything) hoping for the best. - side quest system is trash. You are unable to accept more then 1 side quest at once. You go out ( to the boring painfully empty open world ) travel through some territories, walk aroun for like 10 minutes to find the mob you need to hunt, then go back to the quest giver to finish the quest, before you are able to take a new one. It is just really boring. - skill descriptions are often not detailed enough to understand without googling it. - visuals are from adequate to really ugly. - more then half of the boss are flying making meele characters ( which is 70% of them ) mostly useless.
All in all: its overall a decent enjoyable game, that gets a bit boring and repetative towards the end but I would recommend it if you like the combat style. - I played my playthrough on the highest difficulty, and I would strongly recommend this for everyone who plays XCOM on legends, or Darkest Dungeon on stygian and the like. At the start it was really truly challenging, there were some fights that even felt kinda impossable and you had to play around a while with positioning, skills, stats, and team setup. The game was a '9' for me for the first half while I was keep getting new skills and new chars to toy with. The mob fights got repetative after like 30% of the game, and often felt like simple reskinning the prevoiously encountered enemys with low variety. Howewer there are a lots of boss fights on every level and those always had some uniqe(ish) mechanichs and challenge, that could keep me interested for a decent time. The exploration vibe also works well for a long time. But sadly after around 50% of the game things slowly gets worse. Nothing horrible of any kind, buts fights get progressively more easy (if you are good at min-maxing, balancing skills, and roles and staff like that). Still there are some difficulty spikes at some bosses, but far less challenging then the first fights. Also fewer and fewer new things both in terms of enemys and abilities. Eventually the last few hours were really uninteresting and I just wanted to go through with it. All in all as I stated before a decent, though not perfet, and I would recommend it. Special mentions: - music: it was just realy interesting to have relaxing and chill music during the whole game, even in battles, an unusual choice for sure but I liked it. - decision making: this aspect was a f*ckin joke for sure. Meaningless situationes, with forced, unreal choices, while on the other hand, when it could matter, you can only go one way without any decision points. It should have been better just to simply leave this whole part out. (not especially annoying, just isn't working at all) - story: It was ok. Some twists maybe felt a bit cheap, the whole main protagonist thing was also a bit awkward to me, but all in all, its kinda interesting, and uniqeish enough.
Cons: trash fighting system, painful body recovery after death Pros: beautiful places, and music, exciting adventure and exploration feeling. Verdict: the game is really enjoyable for a while, the adventuring, building, surviving part truly works, but if you have a standard for skill involved fighting and need for challenges, then you are going to be sick with the fighting system eventually. Pros explained: the game has a nice atmosphere, exciting changing music, cool places to explore, and you can build our camp / bases almost anywhere, interesting crafting system (involves a fair bit of grinding materials though). Cons explained: for casual players it is probably gonna be fine, you go there with your big sword and armor, hit the bosses while they hitting you and you win eventually. YEAH! you ARE the man! But for those who ever played sg like Nioh or Dark Souls, the fighting system is going to be truly painful for sure. The skill level involved is pretty low, and the fights are mostly stat checks. The 'lock on' system is truly terrible. If you lock on someone, you basically loose all of your mobility, you start to move with really slow speed, and also you loose your lock if you start to dodge sideways too much. So you cant do sg like lock on a boss, circleling around them, with clever dodges, while slowly waring them down. Also hits are really inconsistent. Worst of all it is inconsistent if your hits land or not often even if you are literally in the face **** beast. I already talked about the **** lock on system but the other bad part is, that if you not lock the target, you miss your hits like 70%. All in all: the bosses and fights were designed in zerging online players or at least you and a strong thrall / pet who just tank all the hits, in mind, and sadly there is no room for compensate for the lack of thoose with skill and careful experimentation.
A well thought out, well excecuted game in every level (story, characters, music, combat, art). It just left a whole in my heart when it ended. Side note: I would highly suggest to play it on hard if you like to be challenged. I played hard on first playthrough and felt like it is the intended difficulty. Most of the mob fights are easy but some of the subbosses and almost all of the palace bosses put up a real nice challenge that took me a while to figure out and play around.
Price: First and foremost the 3 banner saga is but one game with around 20 hour playtime each, and with one story. Selling them separately is just money-grabbing consider the price of the 3 when you make your decision. Battles (Turn-based strategy): It has one interesting aspect: the strength is both your health and your damage stat so the current health of a character is equal to the damage it deals with an attack (against health). You also have armor, and the damage one character takes is lowered by the flat amount of armor it has. Means you always have to decide either to go for breaking armor (in order to be able to deal higher damages for health later) or try to damage their health while they have higher armor in order to lower their damage output sooner. Otherwise every character has only 1 ability at the first game and 2 from the second which is a bit underwhelming, and there is also very very (very) low variety in enemy and terrain-types. The difficulty level isn’t dull, but isn’t too challenging either (in the first game the first fight when I had to rethink one or two times was the last boss). All in all the Battles are fine and aren’t the weak part of the game. Decision-making: - It is real bad. Most of the time there isn’t any choice option that is close to what would you do in that situation. The decision-points feel far-fetched too often, the consequences are thoughtless and / or random, and worst of all: sometimes provably doesn’t matter. (when you have 6 choice in a dialogue, and eventually all get you the same results). In this regard nothing works like it should have. Eg. there are several decision points when you can recruit / allow people to join your caravan. If you do something unpopular or you run out of food then people start leaving. So the game expects you to feel like it somewhat good or ‘right’ to have a bigger caravan, but it gives you no actual benefits, on the contrary: you have to feed more people which isn’t easy. So the whole logic collapse. The game punishes you by taking away people from your caravan that has no benefits but eat a lot. (after 2 games they seem to have realised it too because at the third game these man are at least able to forage for food). *** spoiler *** Another taste of Banners Saga’s logic: There is a point where one of your man stabs you in the back and leave (with several of your soldiers) after a conversation. I reloaded several times to choose other dialog options but the results were the same. Then I looked thoroughly in the events leading to this (by replaying), and found nothing special really: He helped me against a guy that seemed crazy then join me. Some times before that there was some dialog when someone – out of the blue – said not to trust masked mans. Maybe that was the point when I should have been “””smart””” because the guy wears a common foot solder helmet that covers one third of his face? Or maybe the fact that his ability called “backstabbing”? The whole thing felt cheap, and I felt the same on several other occasions. ************ Story: The main plot builds up some exciting threads, and made me curious but in the end left me disappointed. All in all the story is mediocre in my opinion. Atmosphere: At this point I feel particularly misled, because watching the intro of the game, it had a really cool atmosphere with several drawed-cartoonish cutscenes, and vivid music that I liked. But in reality, those are the only cutscenes in the game, and there aren’t even background music at most part, just the mind blowing, while your caravan traveling from A to B. No voice-acting either.
Price: First and foremost the 3 banner saga is but one game with around 20 hour playtime each, and with one story. Selling them separately is just money-grabbing consider the price of the 3 when you make your decision. Battles (Turn-based strategy): It has one interesting aspect: the strength is both your health and your damage stat so the current health of a character is equal to the damage it deals with an attack (against health). You also have armor, and the damage one character takes is lowered by the flat amount of armor it has. Means you always have to decide either to go for breaking armor (in order to be able to deal higher damages for health later) or try to damage their health while they have higher armor in order to lower their damage output sooner. Otherwise every character has only 1 ability at the first game and 2 from the second which is a bit underwhelming, and there is also very very (very) low variety in enemy and terrain-types. The difficulty level isn’t dull, but isn’t too challenging either (in the first game the first fight when I had to rethink one or two times was the last boss). All in all the Battles are fine and aren’t the weak part of the game. Decision-making: - It is real bad. Most of the time there isn’t any choice option that is close to what would you do in that situation. The decision-points feel far-fetched too often, the consequences are thoughtless and / or random, and worst of all: sometimes provably doesn’t matter. (when you have 6 choice in a dialogue, and eventually all get you the same results). In this regard nothing works like it should have. Eg. there are several decision points when you can recruit / allow people to join your caravan. If you do something unpopular or you run out of food then people start leaving. So the game expects you to feel like it somewhat good or ‘right’ to have a bigger caravan, but it gives you no actual benefits, on the contrary: you have to feed more people which isn’t easy. So the whole logic collapse. The game punishes you by taking away people from your caravan that has no benefits but eat a lot. (after 2 games they seem to have realised it too because at the third game these man are at least able to forage for food). *** spoiler *** Another taste of Banners Saga’s logic: There is a point where one of your man stabs you in the back and leave (with several of your soldiers) after a conversation. I reloaded several times to choose other dialog options but the results were the same. Then I looked thoroughly in the events leading to this (by replaying), and found nothing special really: He helped me against a guy that seemed crazy then join me. Some times before that there was some dialog when someone – out of the blue – said not to trust masked mans. Maybe that was the point when I should have been “””smart””” because the guy wears a common foot solder helmet that covers one third of his face? Or maybe the fact that his ability called “backstabbing”? The whole thing felt cheap, and I felt the same on several other occasions. ************ Story: The main plot builds up some exciting threads, and made me curious but in the end left me disappointed. All in all the story is mediocre in my opinion. Atmosphere: At this point I feel particularly misled, because watching the intro of the game, it had a really cool atmosphere with several drawed-cartoonish cutscenes, and vivid music that I liked. But in reality, those are the only cutscenes in the game, and there aren’t even background music at most part, just the mind blowing, while your caravan traveling from A to B. No voice-acting either.
Price: First and foremost the 3 banner saga is but one game with around 20 hour playtime each, and with one story. Selling them separately is just money-grabbing consider the price of the 3 when you make your decision. Battles (Turn-based strategy): It has one interesting aspect: the strength is both your health and your damage stat so the current health of a character is equal to the damage it deals with an attack (against health). You also have armor, and the damage one character takes is lowered by the flat amount of armor it has. Means you always have to decide either to go for breaking armor (in order to be able to deal higher damages for health later) or try to damage their health while they have higher armor in order to lower their damage output sooner. Otherwise every character has only 1 ability at the first game and 2 from the second which is a bit underwhelming, and there is also very very (very) low variety in enemy and terrain-types. The difficulty level isn’t dull, but isn’t too challenging either (in the first game the first fight when I had to rethink one or two times was the last boss). All in all the Battles are fine and aren’t the weak part of the game. Decision-making: - It is real bad. Most of the time there isn’t any choice option that is close to what would you do in that situation. The decision-points feel far-fetched too often, the consequences are thoughtless and / or random, and worst of all: sometimes provably doesn’t matter. (when you have 6 choice in a dialogue, and eventually all get you the same results). In this regard nothing works like it should have. Eg. there are several decision points when you can recruit / allow people to join your caravan. If you do something unpopular or you run out of food then people start leaving. So the game expects you to feel like it somewhat good or ‘right’ to have a bigger caravan, but it gives you no actual benefits, on the contrary: you have to feed more people which isn’t easy. So the whole logic collapse. The game punishes you by taking away people from your caravan that has no benefits but eat a lot. (after 2 games they seem to have realised it too because at the third game these man are at least able to forage for food). *** spoiler *** Another taste of Banners Saga’s logic: There is a point where one of your man stabs you in the back and leave (with several of your soldiers) after a conversation. I reloaded several times to choose other dialog options but the results were the same. Then I looked thoroughly in the events leading to this (by replaying), and found nothing special really: He helped me against a guy that seemed crazy then join me. Some times before that there was some dialog when someone – out of the blue – said not to trust masked mans. Maybe that was the point when I should have been “””smart””” because the guy wears a common foot solder helmet that covers one third of his face? Or maybe the fact that his ability called “backstabbing”? The whole thing felt cheap, and I felt the same on several other occasions. ************ Story: The main plot builds up some exciting threads, and made me curious but in the end left me disappointed. All in all the story is mediocre in my opinion. Atmosphere: At this point I feel particularly misled, because watching the intro of the game, it had a really cool atmosphere with several drawed-cartoonish cutscenes, and vivid music that I liked. But in reality, those are the only cutscenes in the game, and there aren’t even background music at most part, just the mind blowing, while your caravan traveling from A to B. No voice-acting either.
This Game is NOT "Amazing" or "Fantastic". It certainly hits the "OK" mark, but I really don't understand those overhyped reviews. I just finished my first playthrough on "Very Hard" which is described as the intended difficulty by the game itself. (I don't know why we can't call it normal then, and easy - very easy the rest but whatever). This is certanly not a bad game. Apart from some tolerable nuance it has no bugs, saves and loads swiftly, the gameplay is smooth. If you like the genre you may very well enjoy it, and I would recommend it. BUT - the overhyped stealth system is really not that mindblowing. What it means in practice: You cannot really afford to confront them head on ever (in ‘very hard’), because they kill you no time so you are circling around their camps until you picked of all of those who at some point walk away from the rest with silent guns, then kill the remaining 2-3 with laud guns. It feels more like puzzle-solving ( like the old Commandos games if you played those ) then strategising, or even worse, just simply observing then executing without much creative thinking. - compared to XCOM: far less variety in all aspects ( weapons, character types, enemy, terrain, mission types) far less strategic depth. - half of character abilities are useless - the story is dull the ‘tiwsts’ are expected the humour is mediocre (at best). - playing through is not too long, and don’t really have potential replayability Summary: If have already exhausted the far stronger members of the genre like Divinity and XCOM, then it could be a decent pick (preferably at a discounted price)
We liked the first one so we tried it. It is terrible. We quit after it turned out that the game have you to grind every quest 2 or 3 times in order to reach the level req. of the next one. And those quests are in of itselfs just the worst kind of boring "kill this **** a cauple of times". This game is just a lazy re-working ( mostly downgrading ) of the first version.
It has one unique and creative thing I liked very much: The wizard char have an orb-type spell that he can move with the right joystick, while his own movement in the left joystick. Its fun, and skill based, and a really great idea. Otherwise the game is just ugly, repeatative, boringly simple.
Played around 10-20 hours so far in coop. The level design seemed creative, with some puzzles and chest places, but every other aspect is of the game is mediocre (not actual bad for sure though). The battle mechanics doesn't have too much depth but a bit better then just pressing X and kill everyone. The passive skill tree and unlockable abilities doesn't improve this either. But the bigges problem is that it has (so far) no variety between enemies. There are 3-4 type mob and even the sub-bosses are the same 2 type, which makes a game feels really repeatative. ( because of this I am unsure at this point if we going to continue playing it )
I just cannot take this much loading time. Otherwise the game would probably be around 7. I liked the story very much, the voice acting is great, the battles are a bit chaotic and found the window of tactical possibilities a bit narrow, but still decent. I feel like they just stole the whole class and progression system from D&D, but since that is decent too I don't really consider it a downside. So it would be a good game really, but the long loading screends just **** the good out of it. I would want to finish it but cant make myself doing it. I could accept if it had like 5 minutes loading time between 2 big areas. Then I would drink, pee, take a short break while it is working. But it has like 1 min loading screen between two levels of a house, or when you enter a tiny cave or anything similar. Imagine: the task is simply to speak with someone in town. You are already in that town but she is in the neighbour-disctrict and in a house on the second floor (ex. one of the main quest giver is like this) that means 5 (FIVE) f*kin loading screen. Out of town when you don't have that much closed spaces it is tolerable (just barely, but it is). But in town it is just too much.
This game doesn't bring anything new or mindblowing to the table, but decent in every aspect. The battle system is fine, and challenging most of the time ( this one is a tie braker to me and I wouldn't say it lightly ). The dungeon design is decent, the atmosphere is fine. Toying with perks, crafting, enchanting and skills have its depth. I would recommend if turn-based rpg-s are your thing.
If you liked Nioh 1, and DS series you probably gonna like this too. I think I liked Nioh 1 better. This monkey main character is just soooo f*ckin irritating, a real misarebla piece of **** from the start. Not to mention after he gets some power. I just don't understand how the developers thought anyone would like him. Whatever of course this is a fighting game, no one cares that about the story. Also I would say the theme that you transform into a half-omni is a bit off-puting too. But all in all. They give us several new weapons and enemy types (along with the old ones) so you can continue enjoy fighting as Nioh. (which is great)
It is Dark Souls 2.0 imo. It builds ( / steals / copies whichever you prefer ) on everything that is good in dark souls, and improves it in several places and also let go some of the 'harder to like parts'. For example I really don't mind that I dont have to cross half of the map every time to reach a boss. In Nioh there is always a shrine near the bosses. ( I feel like thats why Nioh can afford to have more difficult bosses then DS, because you don't have to spend 50% of your efforts just to reach them after they killed you again ) Also the stance system ( low stance when you have faster, but weaker attacks, and best dodge - mid stance with superior blocking - high stance with powerful but slow attacks ) is a definitely a great improvement. The other aspects like story and music are also fine.
A really good tactical game with a powerful unique atmosphere. I basically liked all part of it, the art, the battle mechanics, the skillset of the characters, the economic of the hamlet, but above all: the narrator. This game wouldn't have be the same without him. He is responsible I would say for 50% of the games flavour. It is a really challenging game thought I wouldn't recommend it for anyone. Also it could be a bit slow pacing, which is maybe its only bad trait. If you expect an action games constant rush, this is probably not your game.
Imo it is the best twin-stick-shooter out there atm. Great game overall. Fun, challenging, strategic, especially when you have friends to play with. (The only bad part are the cyborg patrols who appear out of thin air sometimes.)
This game is not great. But it is loveable. The graphics are old, the load times are long, the battle is odd and clumsy. But it is fun, especially when you have someone to play with. It has a nice atmosphere, and music, its story is kinda uniqe, and exciting-ish, the survival-adventure-crafting flavour works.
When I read here the negativ comment "needlesly complex battle system" I considered it a recommendation rather then a complaint. But the game is just bad. Its note the worse, it isn't completely unenjoyable but it is bad. Main problems: - there is a REALLY low variety of skills in the whole game. (There are a few power strikes and aoe-s both for meele and ranged, and basically tahts it. And the enemy have mostly the same skillset. Be it a goblin, or that snake-eyed race, or other humans, basically all battles are the same. Its boring.) - half of your characters are a but tankier, and the other half are REALLY low on hp. The game ends when any of the party members die. It cause a lot of frustration, because there are SEVERAL occations, when at the moment you finish one battle, there are some random doors opening, there comes 3 gunners, and just kills one of your f'kin supports right away. Its not like bad strategy or anything. You couldn't expect that, they just come and kill. - the battle is frustratingly slow. You cant skil enemy turns (you can hasten them a bit but that is not enough), you have to watch all of them move and cast there spells. Boring. - the worst joke of this game is that you cannot move freely after the end of a battle, but you have use the same turn based system to get your characters back at the "extraction" spot. And no it isn't like at XCOM, that is fine. But MUCH slower and painful. Also it takes the system considerable time only to switch turn between you characters. Most of the time it takes SEVERAL minutes to get your characters at the end area. - and the BATTLE SYSTEM: I don't have a problem with the linking system. I would say it is pretty unrealistic, but I can see it as I do a board game. These are the rules and you are trying to do your best within those rules (if those rules work great as a system). But the link-attacking system is just terrible. In a nutshell it kind of means that when there is one of the characters turn you can most of the time move and attack with all you other characters as well. As do the opponent. This makes the whole turning system really chatic and unpredictable in a way that you cannot really strategise against it too often. The enemy have 3 times your number most of the time, and if 1 of there gunners catch one of your freakin supports even once, you are probably done. (if not, then there is some random door opening at the and of the battle and snipe your support down for you)
It is one of the best games I played maybe my whole life. It is really great. The story is exciting with lots of unexpected twists, and great multi-dimensional characters. Difficulty level is great. Classic is really challenging, then if you like to dig in for nuanced mechanics and min-maxing, and against a bit of an unfair challenge (like I do) you will definetly enjoy replaying it on Tactitian. The one small thing I regret is that I feel there isn't that many viable builds on Tactitian which I would gladly replay again otherwise. All in all, if you like rpg and turned based strategy it is deffinetly a must have.
