It makes me sad, but... I cannot recommend this game. 👎😔
Yeah yeah I know, I've played it for 500 hours. Actually it's much more than that (offline). So - here's why I did. You really can "create the empire of your wildest fantasies"! There are so many possibilities. If you have a favorite fantasy trope, or even a really weird OC, you can probably make it in this game. I've made shadowy spymaster dragons, deadly Nightmare-riding mongols, lush giantesses that love rivers and salad, bite-sized pike-and-shot dog people, cannibalistic tiger men, etc etc etc. Your identity is backed up by the mechanics, and it makes your characters feel real. The game's huge surface area and interconnected systems mean there are tons and tons of tricks and strategies to discover. It's genuinely exciting to read through the encyclopedia and realize some amazing new scheme. I love my action figures and I love making them 🤩🐲🦄
...But despite that, it's a thumbs down. Here is my enormous just-barely-organized-list of reasons why.
First off, the issue closest to my heart. THERE IS NO EMPIRE MODE. That alone has soured me on this game from the beginning. For those new to the series, Empire Mode essentially allowed you to have a cool personalized campaign with meta progress. Now it's gone! I get to make all theses amazing custom dudes, then I can't even take them on a campaign?? All I can do is drive them through one mission at a time and grind my stupid boring pantheon points??? Lame lame lame lame LAME. While I do play to win, personally? I could not give less of a crap about the winning itself. Ever finished a game of Civilization and felt sad that your journey was over? I don't want it to end! I wanna tell EPIC FANTASY STORIES across SPACE AND TIME and watch my guys become AMAAAZING!!! 😭 A match should be an episode in an entire anime series about my guy, not a frikkin one-shot c**ktease!! (Oh btw, if you hate pantheon points too, there's a cheat engine table that will give you as many as you want. Search it up and be free!)
Quality control is extremely poor. Updates - even *paid DLCs* - often contain content that, out of the gate, simply does not function. I don't just mean stuff is bugged - I mean straight up, the feature does nothing or isn't even there. Most updates also break large swathes of old content, sometimes in baffling ways. Fixes take a long time to come if they come at all, and if you report something you'll often be told it's "working as intended" - even if that is a patently ridiculous idea. Most recently Triumph stated to bug reporters that it is not a bug that underground societies forget how to live underground when absorbed 😵💫️ I've completely given up on playing multiplayer, as fully half of my attempts have resulted in save-destroying desyncs. Overall, I get the impression that testing isn't a major priority, or if it is they ain't very good at it. They definitely prioritize making new paid content over maintaining what they've already sold you. Baroque DLCs and new features come through (partially broken) while enormous swathes of the game lie fallow or broken. My heart goes out to the Industrial and High cultures, which have scarcely seen an update *since the game released*. Big Total Warhammer energy. Oh, and those OCs you can make? Updates will totally break those too. Sometimes they become completely unplayable. Updates can wipe out your entire super-grindy pantheon upgrade tree, too.
Models often are ugly, have ugly animations, clip for no reason (like the Simians, whose idle tail animation clips right through their legs), are hideously kit bashed together from old assets, or simply recolored WoW-style. Even though costumes are supposed to be modular, a great deal of them simply do not work together - I swear at least half of all outfits are completely broken for the poor neglected mole people. When the developers want to put a human-shaped helmet on a wolf or goat man, they don't worry about respecting your aesthetic - they just cut off his entire nose and call it a day. Got weird legs? Say goodbye to the bottom half of your outfit. Pants and shoes are for humies only. There are a substantial number of completely unrecolorable costume pieces too. Many of the unit transformations and enchantments just look straight up bad, like Draconian (turn snot green and gain rotting wings) Gaia (piles of sticks pop out of random body parts and clip through your clothes), Rock (same deal but with giant ugly boulders!), and Goldskin (makes your skin gold, but only like, 40% of it, and it's so patchy that it looks like a disease). At least you can turn them off now. Y'know. Since the players asked to be able to. Since everything is so ugly. (OK NOT ACTUALLY EVERYTHING BUT I'M MAD ALRIGHT?)
It's a strategy game so I don't have to tell you that the AI opponents are terrible. Standard stuff: they're stupid, they're passive, they cheat, etc. If you want to fight players instead, well, like most PvP, it's probably going to be sexless and miserable. From what I've heard fights come down to speed contests as one side tries to be the first to one-shot the other. AND you'll desync. The tactical battles are fairly compelling but like many other grand strategy games, the autocalc will constantly kill your dudes, forcing you to manual tons of easy, boring fights until the tactics lose their savor. And as usual, the AI's goal in said fight is not actually to win or do anything that benefits them, but to hurt the player as much as possible. Developing your cities involves following a thoroughly boring and obvious algorithm where buildings, perversely, have lower and lower ROI per tier, so you should build just about every ♥♥♥♥♥♥ building before anything actually cool. A large number of special province improvements are just bad, so you don't have to worry about those. Information is often poor, with tooltips being ambiguous, absent, wrong, or simply missing important information like WHAT AN ABILITY ACTUALLY DOES. Oh, and if you saw they existed and were hoping to do Civilization-style peaceful victory types? Sorry. They suck. Hard. Not only do they take forever, they force you to play King of the Hill against the entire map at once, meaning you actually have to have a stronger military and FIGHT MORE than if you had simply conquered everything like a basic Gilgamesh b****.
Overall, I want to love this game. It's a fancy game. I want to smoke this fkin game 🚬😮💨 but bro. I just can't do it. This game sucks. Sure, I'll probably keep playing it anyway, on and off - but it'll never be what I want it to be, and I wouldn't have spent over $200 to have this experience if I knew what I did now.
😞 The End 😞
