As expected, the single player story mode is superior to the multiplayer campaign mode that was in the beta.
The raven phase is really fun, and made me laugh on occasions.
The battles are also quite good.
Now the problems:
-The strategy map seems to be a very minor part compared to the battles and the raven phase, but it's not too bad.
-only 3 chapters? The story feels somewhat short, playing through only once, and left me wanting more, now i know that it has replayability, but more chapters would've been nice. Here's hoping they will add more to the story in dlcs or expansions.
-The multiplayer campaign still feels shallow and empty, the same old spam units and send them in. In my opinion, even the custom campaign is superior although true that fully implementing all of the features as it is into multiplayer is not a good idea, however, a simplified version of them, for example a pop-up window for decisions and such at the beginning of every turn would be nice.
-The story mode is a bit too easy, even on hard.
-generals only seem to advance their skills from how you interact with them, they dont seem to get any experience from battles, which is a bit weird of a solution imo.
-Where is the giant mechanical moving fortress that was mentioned in the newspaper within the game?
-Your enemies don't have any character development at all. Why aren't your siblings talking to you or even taunt you, there isn't even a cutscene at their deaths that would add some more immersion, they're your siblings afterall. Also the "boss battle" at the end was a bit disappointing as well. Your enemies have no personality whatsoever.
-Units have too many usable skills, that the ai can use simultaeniously, while you cant, but for you to be good, you also have to use such skills, but can't because you don't have 10 mouses and hands, please add an autocast feature.
-Trooper's spoils of war skill is op.
-Would've been nice to see actual fortresses in campaign when fighting in the enemy's capital instead of plunking down a building named imperial city and just start with defenses.
-croud control effects last too long
To sum it up:
The cutscenes, story and the raven phase were extremely well done, so much so, that the other features seem a bit lackluster in comparision, and feels very incomplete at times. To me, it seems, that they spent a bit too much time on character development(which is not necessarily a bad thing and the raven phase is the best part of the game atm), and not enough time on the other parts of the game.
Seeing as how this was Larian's very first rts that implemented 4x elements, this was rather good, but the game still needs a lot of work on some of the features of it. And i do think that the release of this game was a bit too early(they could've spent some more time in fleshing out some aspects, or adding stuff like actual boss battles).
Last edited by Zolee; 07/08/13 06:15 PM.
