izigame.me

I like this game, but it is still a way off from being great. I'd prefer a neutral thumb than up or down, but I went with UP because I want the score to be better, for more people to play it, and thus the developers to continue to improve it. I see so much potential with this title and I hope they stick with it because it could legitimately be a medieval rival to X-COM in replayability.
TLDR: The game is fun, I'm almost 40 hours in on my long weekend and I'm still enjoying it.
Now let me bash on it a bit.
Right now even the good parts seem a little bare bones, or lazily implemented. Even the strategy guide that comes with the Sacred Edition is full of typos, incorrect images for some abilities, and incorrect descriptions for abilities that must have had their mechanics changed before launch and the guide wasn't updated. Leading to a seemingly overall lack of quality control and perhaps even rushed or lazily implemented features.
My biggest complaint is along the lines of the people complaining about the turn limit on most fights. I think this can be an interesting feature for some specific fights, or for portions of fights maybe, like at the beginning you have a certain number of turns to rescue someone from execution, but after they are saved the timer should be removed. Sure some of your companions can heal themselves and others with skills on a cooldown but there are much better ways to prevent your troop for sitting back and healing up before the second engagement, which again makes this seem lazy.
There is character customization, but its minimal. The animals can have their fur customized, but it seems like an afterthought. For example, I chose for the dog to be white with an accent color based on the 3 fur options, but when you click for both colors to be white it turns the dog into a grey-green sludge color.
There are unique weapons in the game, 5 according to the strategy guide, which is pretty neat. Only your companions get EXP for using specific weapons to unlock higher level skills with those weapons. So by the time you get your first one, which I believe is at the start of Act 3, if you've done any grinding at all your companions will be at rank 3 or even maxed at 4 with their weapons and have to take a substantial power hit to start gaining EXP all over again on the new weapon, even when the weapons are virtually identical to the basic weapons they replace. Example: a Flamberge instead of a greatsword, or a repeating crossbow vs. a crossbow
They have released a notification about addressing the crashes. I've experienced crashes several times. The crash is usually preceded by graphical glitches, for example the status bar that shows how many days remain until a companion is healed will be blank, only showing the green symbol that they are still healing. Speaking of healing, the time it takes a character to recover is a bit too long in my opinion. It seems that around 10-20% health lost takes about a week or more to recover, and upwards of a month if the companion barely escapes with their life. My problem with this, is that with healing skills and items you can recover that companion back to full health right before you extract them and then they have no delay at all before they can redeploy. Either let companions deploy while still injured, make them have to recover based on how much health they lost rather than ended the engagement with, or shorten how long it takes to recover once back at the Domain.
The extraction zones are also *ALWAYS* immediately next to where the enemy reinforcements are coming from, and it is always timed so that they will intercept you as you are attempting to escape. This is absolute silliness, only because it is every single mission that is a rescue or assassination. In the Skirmish you win as soon as you kill everyone, why not these two, why are there infinite reinforcements on those two mission types, and again ALWAYS reinforcing right next to your extraction?
The awareness of the enemy units is also 360* which I think really hinders the gameplay. Maybe a crusader in full plate and mail would be too noisy to sneak up behind someone but the duelists have skill trees for backstabbing etc, allow them to ambush units with their backs turned. Or at least make it so they cant see you when youre behind half cover or something.
The AI can at times be really awesome, I've seen some really clever sequences pulled off by the enemies and have been out maneuvered a couple times. However, it can also be completely imbecilic. The enemy prioritizes attacking your squishy units above all else. I've thrown down poison caltrops, set the ground on fire underneath them, and surrounded an enemy heavy unit only to watch the heavy suffer 3 opportunity attacks and run through the full length of poisoned/flaming caltrops, easily removing 90% of its health to make a single attack on an archer, dealing maybe 10-25% of the archer's health in damage. (This is a heavy unit with very high armor designed to be a damage sponge and it takes itself out). When against enemies that swarm like the Zerg this is an understandable tactic, but with humans (that arent WW2 Soviets) it seems stupid.
Of course in most battles they have infinite reinforcements so maybe it is practical after all.
Also the enemies seem to scale in power as you do, I dont know if its based on your companions levels or if its based on the in-game calendar, but it doesn't seem to apply to the story missions. For example, you can grind your troops to max level and fully upgrade all of your castle in Act I, and all of the enemies will improve right along with you. However once you jump into the story missions they are still designed for low level and you'll steamroll through it.
If you've read this far you'll see I've done nothing but seemingly bash the game, but I'm just hoping the developers add this review to their list when they are making future changes.