Ive got about 8 hours in(5 offline). It sucks to give it a non buy because its so well polished, it really is, and I looked forward to it. Many games even AAA dont get this kind of clean AI that this team built and going forward hopefully they take that skillset in to their next game BUT and this is about as big a BUT u can have while gaming, its simply not that much fun and for $30, some even paid $40, its not even close. This is a great looking Phone Game IMO.

It feels like your just playing an interactive book, choices in the way you go about the maps are largley inconsequential. You do not really control combat, which could be fine but it just feels like its a phone game that looks too good so it was made for PC. The Economy is super slow, the heros are where the game coulda been saved but there skills and upgrades are few and boring.

Its a good team of devs, they do care, but this game in the end simply isnt fun and thats the number 1 thing you have to hit.

Just crazy how well polished this game is from UI to the Audio but the formula was such a miss.

Visually, SoS is a triumph. It looks like The Banner Saga but 4x, with auto-battler elements.

But the game is a shallow mess. The "strategy" in this "turn-based strategy" game is so paper thin that you never really need to make any interesting or difficult decisions. Units have no upkeep or experience, so you just spam them over and over again. City management has very little depth. You can only have one army in a city at any time, which leads to various annoyances - since there is no concept of friendly territory in this game, your units have to be in a friendly town with a certain upgrade to heal, unless their hero heals them in the field ... so you'll be constantly shuttling your armies back to town just so they heal. And the auto-resolved battles aren't even truly auto-resolved, since you have to spam overpowered combat cards into them every time their cool-down timer ends, removing what is arguably the whole point of being an "auto-battler."

The campaign is totally on rails, with a vague and tedious plot that you will tune out immediately if you value your sanity. It also incorporates a predictably awful stealth mechanic in which you can move half as much every turn and hide in forests to not be seen, and spend resources to cast spells so you can see hidden armies. There's really nothing interesting about it, and it's just something you have to suffer through. If you make a mistake, you basically have to reload. And the enemy AI is, of course, completely brain-dead. It will, for example, lay siege to your cities with a single hero unit that gets immediately annihilated when you sally forth.

Don't get me started on the "cards." All of the actions in the game are represented by cards, but they could just as easily have been buttons. There is no deck in the game, or any purpose to your actions being represented by cards, or any deck-building, or really anything else that one would typically associate with something being represented by a card.

It's a shame that SoS is all looks and no substance. This was clearly a work of love, and the developers deserve credit for pulling off some incredible production design. I also appreciate that they were trying to innovate in the 4x genre, which has become fat and complacent, and adopted too many tedious mechanics simply because they were in Civilization at some point. The problem is that SoS strips out a lot of those tedious mechanics, but doesn't replace them with anything interesting.

Because Songs of Silence presents itself as more than your average auto-battler, you expect deeper, more tactical decisions, but sadly, it misses the mark in establishing any sort of cause-effect game loop indicative of the genre, boiling down instead to mindless troop-mustering and troop-mashing.

The art, sound design, and environments--all top-notch. Where it falters is in its lack of strategy. Your best chance at completing each mission is to pick on the little guy, to snowball one location at a time until you're able to sweep the map. There's really no reason to deviate from this strategy, and in fact, you're punished if you do. Taking risks--just for the sake of spicing things up--often results in lost troops, lost special units, and lost time, with nothing to show but frustration.

Worse still--in some missions, you aren't even offered the opportunity of choices. You're ordered to move your hero from one area to the next, reading lines of dialogue as you travel, and if you deviate from the path, you lose. The game plays itself in many ways, but in these moments, the charade becomes painfully obvious.

In the end, your decisions feel inconsequential and your time wasted. Can't recommend the game as is.