izigame.me

What can I say, I played less than an hour but I've got a pretty good measure of what the game is.
So it's a fantastic game, let's just get that out of the way straight up. I don't know if the graphics are all that good, it kinda looks a bit 2002 or 2003 up in here. Reminder that Oblivion came out two years beforehand. Oblivion is not hardly the best looking game ever, but the resolution of the textures and models far outstrip this game's.
However, while the game's graphics are like, okay, they're acceptable I feel especially since the shadows and lighting is nice, the real standout is the fantastic gameplay.
And I will call it fantastic even if it is janky.
So there's some basic fundamental concepts here. If you are going fast in a direction you do a % bonus to your damage of the hit if it lands. So if you are strafing left, and swinging left, you get a damage bonus because you're moving quickly and swinging. Momentum! Not only is it simple, intuitive, and fun, it's... oh wait that's it, and that's all you need.
You also get a speed penalty if you're moving away, so you do less damage if you are only lightly stroking the enemy with your sword, instead of chopping them with it. I think it's great personally.
And it took a hell of a lot less time to develop than Exanima, which at the time of writing is still in active development.
Anyway, aside from the surprisingly advanced, Chivalry-style swordplay (Age of Chivalry came out before this game so it's fair to call it that), there's also ranged combat. Bows feel about as fun to plink with as bows in Oblivion, so they're era-accurate to the 2000s, I guess. But that's okay.
There's also the mounted combat which, I think is also fantastic and it synchronises perfectly with the speed bonus you get to damage in a logical way that just seems right. It's great. I have nothing negative to say about horse combat. Horses kind of have a weird sort of physics to them where it takes some time to get up to speed, but I actually really like that personally.
Then there's the fact that it's all tied in with an RPG system. Just from looking at the basics of how it works, I like it from what I saw... maybe at higher levels things change but I noticed that, it kind of seemed like many skills don't actually just directly make you stronger or anything, so to a degree levelling up translates your character's experience, into skills. It's not just a direct amplification of your power level, necessarily, although there is a melee damage skill. It seems solid to me though overall.
The fact that you don't have to manually loot anyone is almost unbelievable to me, but it's such a good idea. You can pick up weapons and gear off fallen combatants, though. So when a battle ends, I guess every bit of loot on the fallen enemies goes into a big stash and you can pick and choose what you want to keep, or just take everything if you have the inventory for it? I love this.
Then there's travelling the world map. So you just click around I suppose to go places, which is intuitive, then you click onto locations and points of interest to go there and then you get a menu that seems to just let you fast travel to the 'hot spots' there, but you can wander around that town as well by foot and just explore.
My only real criticisms are, I had some trouble with my cursor leaving the window even in fullscreen which was annoying, and, as a tutorial connoisseur I was a little disappointed with the tutorials in this game. They're just a little bit janky, and while they are very simple and direct about teaching you literally how to play the game, since they inherit the difficulty from your options menu, if you have the game set too hard you're probably going to have a bad time in the tutorials.
Although, even while I am criticising, the tutorials overall were also very short, but very direct about what they have to teach you to get you to understand how to play this game. They teach you the simple controls, and how to block, which is not only important but a lot more complex than attacking. That's about it. So even the tutorials are good, and are what they should be, basically.
Though the game doesn't explain some things like post-battle looting and inventory management and such, it seems happy to just let the player figure that out. And these are things that in the end prove to be so simple, you really don't need a tutorial or a manual to understand them.
I think pretty much everything the store page promises, the game delivers on, so uh. If you have interest in an open world squad-based RPG that is just really simple and direct about what it's trying to do, then maybe give this game a try because I loved the little bit I played of it. You just kind of go around, recruit guys, hit guys, and uh yeah.