Szlia
Member
I have been playing this game regularly for while now. We beat the the original campaign doing as much side quests as we could and are now in the process of playing the extension. For me there are two main issues with the game that are making me look forward to the day we are done with it.
1) The game is impossible to balance so it goes without saying that it is grossly unbalanced. Since the only factors that affect the scenario are the number of characters and their levels, things like the composition of the group and the equipment the player have that both have a tremendous effect on the strength and abilities of a party are not factored in. Also the variance in power of some enemies is gigantic depending on how their action deck is drawn. Combine the two, and it's very rare that a scenario hits the sweet spot between bland and impossible. To avoid the blandness, we always play one or two levels above normal, but from time to time, without faults of our own, we hit scenarios that end up impossible to win because we don't have a group that can manage it, because it's poorly designed or simply because it's packed with high variance monsters that randomly wreck us (I guess that also falls under the 'poorly designed' category).
2) The meta narration is not good. Since you can pick and chose in what order you want to do things, there is no flow sense or reason to the overarching storylines. Worse, and this is a light spoiler so you might want to quit reading, there are clues and codes found here and there that hint at some secret story within the story, but that's just smoke blown up our asses because it's incomplete and possibly maybe will pay off over several expansions.
Also 3) many items / abilities / characters are trash.
It all sounds overly negative, but it's still entertaining to play, some scenarios are pretty clever, and since people are always getting new abilities, trying alternate strategies, getting new equipment, changing character class it always stay relatively fresh. I feel it is severely overrated tough.
1) The game is impossible to balance so it goes without saying that it is grossly unbalanced. Since the only factors that affect the scenario are the number of characters and their levels, things like the composition of the group and the equipment the player have that both have a tremendous effect on the strength and abilities of a party are not factored in. Also the variance in power of some enemies is gigantic depending on how their action deck is drawn. Combine the two, and it's very rare that a scenario hits the sweet spot between bland and impossible. To avoid the blandness, we always play one or two levels above normal, but from time to time, without faults of our own, we hit scenarios that end up impossible to win because we don't have a group that can manage it, because it's poorly designed or simply because it's packed with high variance monsters that randomly wreck us (I guess that also falls under the 'poorly designed' category).
2) The meta narration is not good. Since you can pick and chose in what order you want to do things, there is no flow sense or reason to the overarching storylines. Worse, and this is a light spoiler so you might want to quit reading, there are clues and codes found here and there that hint at some secret story within the story, but that's just smoke blown up our asses because it's incomplete and possibly maybe will pay off over several expansions.
Also 3) many items / abilities / characters are trash.
It all sounds overly negative, but it's still entertaining to play, some scenarios are pretty clever, and since people are always getting new abilities, trying alternate strategies, getting new equipment, changing character class it always stay relatively fresh. I feel it is severely overrated tough.