My biggest problem with the game is that the core gameplay loop is pretty boring. It consits of staring at the screen and waiting for resources to spawn and sending your vampires to harvest them or your minions to hunt the animals. That's it. You spend most of the game staring at the map and clicking on resources as they pop up. Hope you like it.
That is my biggest problem with the game, but I also want to adress a few other issues:
1) Minions and equipment: There are a few different types of minions to summon or tame, some with special abilities. For example: Ettins have a 10% chance to hit twice, ghosts have a 20% to heal themselves for half the damage they cause and ents have a chance the inflict damage on their attacker when being hit. The minions also have different damage, health and armour values. Same goes for equipment. Some equipment is more defensive, some more aggressive.
At a glance, this may seem like an interesting system with diverse builds around each minion type and equipment sets. However, because the special abilities all have pretty low values (like ghosts having a 20% chance to heal themselves for 50% of the damage they cause), the special abilities are mostly irrelevant. There are no different builds, there isn't enough gear in the game to support that, even if you wanted to try it, it's purely about stats. Just get the highest stat minions with the highest stat gear. That's all there's to it. No options for different builds, nothing.
2) Biomes:
Biomes are another point of supverficial depth. Just like there is a bunch of different gear and you have a bunch of minion types, there are also a couple of biomes.
Issue 1) Biome choice: River and forest are the only two biomes with reliable access to cloth, which you need to build net traps, which you need to capture humans to turn them into vampires, which you need to increase your minion cap. This makes it feel like you have to spawn in one of those biomes, as you will miss out on minions otherwise, which are an essential component of the game. Picking any of the other biomes feels like a pointless handicap. They all have slightly different loot pools, giving you access to materials you can't reliably get in forest or rivers, but you don't need those materials. As I said in point one, this game is just about getting high stats on your minions, and you get that just fine by never leaving the forest or rivers.
The biomes, while they do all offer a slightly different experience, are ultimately pointless. The different items from different biomes aren't significant enough to encourage you to try them all out. I did try several, and there are two main differences: Forest and rivers means reliable access to cloth, mountain and volcano means a little bit easier access to iron. That's it. There are no special items that can dictate the course of the run or what builds you use (again, there are no builds), it's just a slightly modified loot pool.
3) Combat:
Combat is resolved automatically. Your units attack random enemies, enemies randomly attack your units. There are effects that increase or decrease the chance for a specific unit to be hit, but I consider that irrelevant. As I already pointed out before, this game is just about getting as high stats as possible on all your units. You don't have tanks, healers and damage dealers. The items that provide special effects all have such a low chanc of triggering that you might as well ignore it. So you spend the game getting the highest stats possible across your units, putting no thought but stats into their equipment, and then you watch them attack randomly in combat. The combat itself is just as brainless as the preparation for it.
4) Progression:
Yet another superficial layer of complexity with no real meaning behind it. Progression in this game means: Unlocking more biomes, unlocking more crafting recipes, unlocking more vampire classes and unlocking more artifacts.
I somewhat understand why artifacts are locked in the beginning. They modify the rules of the game a little. For example, there is an artifcat that guarantees that two river biomes will spawn and gives you two chests containing river items. The same also goes for mountain tiles. In a game where biomes give you access to different builds, this would have been an interesting feature, but here, it feels pretty pointless. Still, as the artifacts do technically modify the game rules a bit, I understand why you have to unlock them.
But why are there unlockable biomes, recipes and classes? Why would you not have access to all of those from the start? The biomes are mostly irrelevant, so unlocking them basically does nothing, unlocking recipes allows you to craft stronger gear and stronger minions and unlocking classes gives you access to vampires with new abilities. The stronger gear and minions is basically just stats. nothing interesting there, just higher stats. The vampire classes are similarly uninteresting. The summoner lets you summon animals instead of having to tame them. That class is essentially just a convenice/time saver upgrade over having to tame them. It also gives you access to animals from other biomes, making the biome system even more pointless.
I don't see any practical reason as to why a "large" portion (it's not really much, the game doesn't have much content, but most of what it does have is hidden behind unlockable stuff) of the game's content needs to be unlocked, rather than being available at the start. It feels like it's locked to make it feel like there is a progression system in the game. It's there to keep you playing until you have finally unlocked everything there is to unlock. It's supposed to appeal to your completionist spirit.
So yeah. Not great. It's not a bad foundation for a game, but it is not a good game at all. If it receives updates that make the core gameplay more interesting than just "harvest resource", that flesh out the biomes, make every biome a valid choice and give each of them a unique feeling and if build diversity is introduced to the game, I could see it being a lot of fun. But as it is, I think it's just absolutely terrible.
