Great game with astounding visual style, authentic music and interesting and unique tactical fights (tho tactical part isn't perfect) based on northern/scandinavian myths.
Even tho I have a very limited knowledge about those myths (thx to newest parts of GoW and Neil Gaiman's American gods) I enjoyed being a part of it.
The game is split in 2 notable parts - that are influencing each other with resource management part.
The Visual Novel part is about your journey, you travel and each day (or once in a while some activity triggers, which leads to a short text-based quests or series of choices, where the outcomes are rather unknown, from gaining more supplies to getting your party members killed. As you travel on foot to some distant places, your men need to be well-rested to be prepare to fight (which grants more willpower, depends on current caravan motivation), and have enough food to travel between towns and other places. The problem is that you don't really know the distance between those (at least for the first playthrough) which means you can face starvation.
Which leads us to the 2nd part of the game - fighting, where you play in some kind of chess on the flat board, without any covers, hights and deeps, lakes or fire, etc. Fighting gets you a currency - renown which you can spend to buy supplies, level up your party or buying items. (beware, characters can wear only items of their level or lower).
Invest renown in leveling up too much - and you will possibly lose clansmen from starvation, which leads to more tough battles, more injuries and more resting, which leads to even more supply spending.
Invest too much renown in supplies and your party would be underleveled, facing tough opponents, meaning more injuries and resting again.
Buying out powerful artifacts too early - leads to underleveled party with low supplies... You should get the point.
tip - some items of 4 and 5 lvl are very powerful, so its better to have at least 1 character of lvl 5 that 4 chars of lvl 3
Pros:
- visual style - while the game has very simple fighting animations and couple of talking ones they are very pleasant to see
- music - both heroic scald songs and music definitely make epic moments even more epic, same goes for tough fights
- interesting battle system (like its LOGICAL that units do much less physical damage if they are on dying breath and less damage if they were recently injured)
- many classes and variations of heroes with different sets of abilities (and even their sizes change) with leads to tactical variety, tho generally you need someone who is good vs hp and someone who is good vs armor
- story - it is great and dialogs are natural, also you can watch all movements on the map, that lore wise is great (and i would like to play an RPG in openworld manner in that world)
Cons:
- some outcomes of events are...frustrating. And some of them can play their part after half of the game...(those who know what i'm talking about - stay silent). Also... people you invested in leveling up can die too, that's upsetting and getting through the campaign even on normal difficulty without knowing all of those could be VERY difficult, and on hard you have little to no room for error (but still the game fights on hard are ok-ish, except for the last fight)
- initiative system in battles, it is absent and it makes battles counterintuitive. If both parties have more than 1 unit, they will play turnbased, almost like in chess but in a given order (that you set for each battle before it starts, and you don't know the enemies order before placing your characters and starting the fight). But the problem is that units in this game have power levels (armor and health). Which means focusing weak enemies will make strong ones FASTER. For example you have 5 grunts with 1 hp left, that deal basically no damage to you, and a unit that oneshots everything it touches. It will act every 6 turns, and wait until all grunts will make their moves. But if you kill them - he will act once per 5, 4, or even 2 turns, until he becomes the last one and the specific mode activates, where all your party acts and then the last enemy (same goes for you btw).
- battlefield is always plain and simple (only once or twice it will have some chokepoints, abysses - but again - you cant even push your enemies into it), no fires, pits, etc. (hope some more complexity will be added in 2 and 3 parts) - making fights falling under the same script over and over again, after you figured out the strategy that works for you
Anyway, this game is great and i definitely recommend it to any audience, its classics at this point.
