Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

Reminds me of King's Bounty, The Legend, another Russian RPG game. But 2d. Insanely difficult, but a fun challenge. The game is almost like Heroes of Might and Magic 2, but with more a focus on castles and territories, treasures. The action is OK, you have a strategy hex map on which combat takes place. Luckily there is an option to quickly resolve the combat or to speed up combat turns quickly. You can play as a warrior, a wizard, a scout or as a commander. You spend most of your time searching for gold and treasure, which can be exciting as you never know how much you are going to get. There's many unique events that prompt you to make decisions regarding the management of your empire.

The technology tree / buildings tree is really immense, so you can improve your weapons, your armor, your gold, your population, their happiness, if you build the right improvements. That is probably the most difficult part of the game, deciding how to spend your gold - which takes hard work to collect, because you have to fight a lot of enemies.

There is not enough flexibility in terms of combat, that is probably the biggest let down in the game. You cannot really execute well planned tactical moves. Two forces meet and they slog it out face to face until there is a winner. So you constantly just win a battle or lose it - so you end up loading / saving hundreds of times. It needs an f5 quick save / f7 quick load function. The combat is 2d - so it is not in the class of King's Bounty, The Legend or King's Bounty: Armoured Princess, not even close. The developer tries to make up for that by introducing interesting, often surprising side events and quests, decisions that have to be made.

Movement on the campaign map needs to be much faster and is too slow - a "quick move function" for your units.

I would suggest they change the game to start off with the option to select 2 characters or heroes instead of just one.