This is another game that has been sitting unplayed in my library for way too long even though I was quite enthusiastic about it when it was first released. It’s just a matter of it being known for being a very difficult game that would require considerable investment and too many titles competing for my time. The difficult part is certainly right. A couple of days after starting to play, my band of mercenaries was wiped out to the last man. I had to experiment with a few more restarts at lowered difficulty levels in order to understand how it works before committing to it for real at normal difficulty.

Born as a Kickstarter project, this touts itself as a turn-based tactical RPG. I don’t really think of it as an RPG as you only really interact with the world through combat and there’s no real conversations to be had in here. Instead it’s a pure tactical combat game in which you grow your band of mercenaries by taking on contracts. These can include acting as a guard for a trade caravan, or tracking down a band of thieves to recover a stolen item, or killing a marauding band of orcs and so on, but everything eventually involves combat. Winning gives your mercenaries experience and levels, earns you gold to spend on better gear or recruiting more guys and higher renown which gives you access to better contracts. There are no out-of-combat skills and no real out-of-combat decisions to make other than which contract you want to accept next. The world, the contracts, items and so on are all procedurally generated and there is no main quest line to follow. Instead there are end-game crises featuring powerful enemies which you may or may want to get involved with and at some point the game just asks you if you want to retire or just go on.

The meat of the game is of course the tactical combat itself and this really is very well designed. It has all the basics like surrounding an enemy makes it easier for guys to hit it and standing on a higher elevation confers an advantage and standing in the firing paths of your own archers is a bad idea. But there’s also so much more even if the game is really bad at teaching new players. Each weapon behaves differently and while there are no classes for your mercenaries, the gear you give them effectively defines their role. Spears for example do little damage but are very easy to use and can be used to deny area to enemies by poking them and pushing them back whenever they try to step next to your spearman. Flails have stats that don’t look too impressive but can be used to attack around shields, negating the defensive bonus they confer. Armor acts sort of like bonus hit points and naturally weapons differ in how well they degrade armor. Morale is also very important as your guys and most types of enemies will break and attempt to flee before they are killed.

Combine that with the stats that your mercenaries have and how you can build them as they level, and you can quickly see how much complexity there is in the system. Being able to extract every advantage that you can matters because the game is tuned to be difficult enough to pose a serious challenge even to powerful mercenary bands. Some fights really are unwinnable and you are supposed to refuse the contracts or flee. Even when you can win, avoiding any deaths or permanent injuries on your guys can be tough. This leads to one of my gripes about this game: it feels very grindy. It takes many, many battles and a long, long time to build your guys and you can easily lose one of them when a few enemy archers decide to focus fire on one. You need money to recruit new guys and buy better gear but you also need to pay upkeep. Daily wages for your mercenaries, buying food, tools to repair damaged equipment, medical supplies eat up your cash. You probably don’t want to enter into new fights while your best guys are injured and still a few days to recover or your gear is all banged up. Time resting or spent travelling between cities is time not working.

The beginning of the game is particularly brutal as you’re stuck with the guys who can be readily recruited and the contracts that are available. Once you build up some decent guys with better equipment and a cushion of savings so that you afford to move between the cities to find contracts that are at the appropriate difficulty level, it gets much easier. Even so the game always feels grindy as the battles feel so repetitive. Once you have some experience, you can better judge which mercenaries are worth keeping around for the long term. You almost always want people talented in either melee or missile offense because otherwise they’ll have a tough simply hitting things. But it takes a lot of effort to shop through the candidates at every city to find the appropriate guys. Late in the game when you have the money, you want to shop around for the best gear as well including the randomly spawned named items. But again, it’s random so you’re stuck spending a lot of time doing contracts and revisiting the same cities every once in a while to see if something you want to buy appears in stock.

The game is really good about having a lot of flavor text everywhere even in the background profiles of the mercenaries you recruit. But it’s just that, flavor text with no mechanical impact on the game. Such is the repetitive nature of the gameplay loop, choose a contract, fulfill it, return, hop to next town to repeat and so on, that you quickly train yourself to ignore the flavor text. I understand that with the DLCs, there are more places to explore, tough monsters to fight and so on, but I can’t really be bothered to do so much grinding to get my band into the right shape to face those high tier challenges. It can be quite shocking when the game overwhelms you with a large number of enemies, or ridiculously tough ones, and exhilarating when you manage to eke out a win nonetheless. Even so, fighting through a tactical turn-based battle that involves over 40 combatants is quite arduous and not something I feel like doing over and over again.

This game does have its fans who have each put hundreds or even thousands of hours into it, to get the perfect band of mercenaries and the theoretically optimum set of gear. But it is too dry for me to warrant this level of dedication. I concede that on paper it is just about the perfect fantasy tactical combat game, even if it is a little lacking in polish and has some niggling user interface issues. In practice however I would like it to have a little more flash, some actual questlines, some ways in which to engage with the world that doesn’t involve combat and some non-combat ways ways to improve the company. I suppose it is great at what it does but it’s a game that only does that one thing and 50 hours of it is plenty for me.