Unlike most negative reviews, I have played through and beat the game (on Mythic / Hard (3rd out of 4 difficulties)).
I think I can recommend it for avid lovers of Minecraft, but not for anyone who enjoys a good RTS. If you've never played an RTS, this is a very watered down version of that, if you end up not liking the game, I would not take that to mean you don't like RTS's.
For Minecraft fans, it has a lot of new unique characters and mobs as well as a ton of Piglin variants. It also has a really cool bit of lore about the origin of a certain mob that I won't spoil. A lot of the systems are very in-line with Minecraft themeing, such as using Allays to gather resources, the way buildings pop up block by block, the concept of the enemy base being a nether portal, etc. It is beautifully designed and themed.
For RTS fans, I'm sorry to say that this game falls short in a lot of regards. It tried to be an action RTS where you are the leader and charge into battle too, but this is its biggest flaw. It doesn't feel like you are leading, especially later in the game, are often the weakest link in your army. On top of that, controlling your forces is unintuitive, and you can't control them from afar? You have to be right next to your army to command them, combining that with a really small army of 20 to start, you often find yourself charging the enemy base, attacking until most die, running outside the base to get reinforcements, and repeat for 30+ mins per base (that there's at least 12+ of). There is only a handful of troops to pick from and some are just straight up better versions of others. The enemy piglins don't play like a traditional RTS opponent either, they have a variety of enemies, but they are not manged, so you'll just face a random array of enemies constantly coming at you. Because it's somewhat random, the forces you control usually end up being a generic jack of all trades assortment that never changes. On top of all of that, there is no automatic reinforcements or resource gathering, so if you run out of resources you'll have to travel to a zone to collect them (assuming your villages don't have any in their chest), and if your troops die in battle you'll have to run and go make more. There is no eb and flow like you feel from most RTS's. At least on Mythic, the enemies felt unforgivably tough. My bases stopped using walls entirely and I started making walls out of offensive buildings. Crude, but it worked. And my attack strategy boiled down into cheese strategies. Use one type of troop, run past all of the buildings and enemies straight to the portal (enemy base), and destroy it without actually taking on the base. Or, when that wasn't feasible, use a long range TNT cannon to snipe the portal from afar, without ever going inside the base. Due to the lack of commanding, the lack of troop design, the lack of proper enemy AI, there was very little strategy in a strategy game.
You can tell there was a lot of love poured into this game, so it is unfortunate that it was mired with bad design decisions. The game became tedious and stale after a while, maybe not even the 10 hour mark, so I cannot recommend this game. If it's on sale, maybe, but it would have to be almost 75% off ($10) to be worth it to check out and see if you enjoy it.
