izigame.me

Incredibly disappointed by this game. While the visual of this game are fantastic and quite stunning it does nothing to make up for the lack of quality of life features standard to any RTS game. To provide specific examples: units in this game have no auto engage feature, meaning that your units will not move from their position to engage enemy units regardless of circumstance. This includes sustaining ranged damage, witnessing friendly units become engaged in melee, and watching as enemy units walked right by. This coupled with the fact that the game also has a poor auto alert system to inform you of units taking damage means that a player can become distracted or focused on other engagements. I experienced an incident during the campaign where I was battling the orks across 3 victory points. While I was playing and microing between 2 separate engagements a powerful enemy unit attacked my third group of warriors. As I was distracted I did not notice this fact until I happened to glance at the map and saw a giant red triangle next to my strong point. curious I panned the camera up there to witness one of my heroes and one of my ranged units torn apart in two separate engagements all while my prosecutors stood there helplessly. This was a frustrating experience because together my army would have been capable of winning the fight but they were defeated in detail. The reason this frustrates me so is due to the fact that many other RTS games feature units with stances. Stances that allow for some degree of autonomy or some form of auto engagement range. The typical stance includes moving withing a reasonable distance to engage enemy units that are spotted or to respond aggressively to ranged damage. Had a feature like that been implemented then a lone enemy unit walked into my battle line would have resulted in death and not a victory. That was one example of many concerning features that other, older RTS's possessed. Even if the QOL features were present the game still fights itself in many ways. Heroes play a vital role in the game for their damage dealing capabilities and durability for a single model. Heroes achieve this through skills and abilities, all of which are active abilities. That means that the player must push a button in order to benefit. This is standard to any RTS however, this game features one of the most frustrating and poorly designed UI's I have experienced. There is a very small unit hot bar that displays abilities for a single unit that is currently selected. This means that in order to cycle between abilities you must cycle through units. The game does feature use of the tab button in order to switch between selected units but even that doesn't work most of the time. Due to the games poor optimization and general slowness I have noticed that many times I will press the tab button and one of two things will happen. Either nothing will occur or I will swap between 2-3 units all in one go. This makes managing hero abilities difficult and reduces overall army effectiveness. Considering that every unit in the game has an ability further complicates the issue. On a different note the game is heavily miss-marketed and does not feel like an RTS, it feels more like a MOBA or some form of squad based hero game like Dawn of War 2. While that is not inherently bad the games execution of this design is poor and lacking. Dawn of War 2 featured a fantastic UI with easily accessible hot keys and the game kept the player very well informed of what was happening at all times. Dawn of War 2 also featured wide open RTS themed maps. Realms of Ruin features MOBA themed maps with a heavy emphasis on lanes and tower construction. Continuing on to the single player experience, the first few missions of the game were interesting, they all possessed unique objectives that severed to introduce the player to basic core mechanics. Following the first 3 missions the game abandons that formulae and instead replaces it with generic skirmish based objectives. "Here go play tug of war for the third time for 20-30 minutes against a brain dead AI that will give up halfway through the match." All in all I feel that for the price the developers are asking for the game falls incredibly short of the mark. While a great multiplayer experience can be had with the right people all other aspects of the game-play are lacking and yield frustration.
To surmise I do not recommend this game for a few reasons.
1. I feel that the game was marketed as an RTS when it is more like a MOBA.
2. The UI and lack of QOL features present in many other RTS games make the experience poor and frustrating.
3. The game is poorly optimized for how little occurs and how slow it happens.
4. For the price point of $60.00 the single player experience is lacking and heavily inflated with un-fun and boring skirmish missions.