Recent reviews by Balzaphon

QOL improvements will make it a nice experience to newcomers

"I can't believe they made dragons dogma 2 just like dragons dogma 1"
Performance could use improvements but everything else is fine so far
mtx is pointless, you see this if you just keep playing
when your number one complaint is the nigh-harmless mtx, you are delegitimizing rest of the stuff
game isn't perfect (when is it ever) there some sillies in there but I would have to set in a more through review
which I will try to do after I delve deeper and adjust my review
I can't tell you if its a "buy or wait" it entirely depends on how disposable your income is (performance issues wont affect you as much as someone running a 7 year old rig)

edit 1: story everywhere in general feels unfinished, check the following thread for spoiler details
https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bu1j9u/why_is_nadinia_on_the_boxart/

Its an experimental build upon the first Soulash, promising procedural generation sandbox rpg

Best visual novel I've ever played, the way it jives with me a little too much is almost scary
Fantastic job to everyone involved!!

Gorgeous results for a small dev team, excellent bug report system, excellent art direction, excellent suggestion system, excellent content support! By no means, its not the perfect game, but its a kind of game that will get even better with more people playing it.

I do not condone this content to price ratio

The Changeling suffers from choice paralysis, and some of them aren't even of much use. For example, grand scheme for the empire causing 'elector counts descent into civil war', lets say you rush this, how many elector counts will be left standing? Lets say two, maybe three to be generous, is that of any use to a Tzeentch player? a faction that can force war and peace between factions in first place? The easy way is to simply go for Badlands, after all you are a faction with magical attacks galore and you will face savage orks and simplistic demons there and coincidentally holds some of the best rewards. But to cut to the chase you are unbeatable by AI and its such an undertaking of a campaign in first place it absolutely kills replayability. Also why are marauders still tier 2? why would you recruit them when Tzaangors are same tier, lower the building tier to 1 already

Yuan-Bo completely outshines base grand cathay subfactions, and the fact that he holds two starting positions on top of that means you wont bother to play others again

Mother Ostankya... who?

I rate this 2/10, I guess you could buy for units, but they made a manticore copy again so

Things you should know before you buy, you are not buying a faction with 3 unique and interesting legendary lords
You are buying a faction with 3 starting positions, mechanic differences are far too insignificant so much so even the starting armies play a bigger role.

Resources diverge out in the middle and require you to juggle them for first 20 turns but this is of no positive either as on subsequent campaigns it feels like an unnecessary chore
you acquire both labour and gold by doing the same actions, which happen to be exact same actions every other faction always does
You don't have to do anything different like vassalizing factions to harness labour from them, making deals with factions like dark elves or skaven or anything else
You just fight, raid and send caravans

If you took away things like the seats and compass on campaign map Cathay and Chaos Dwarfs would have next to no difference in terms of gameplay, both have unnecessary juggling one of resources and the other of harmony
And of course there is powercreep, if you know what you are doing you will reach that 20 turn peak in single digit turns which often involves razing settlements for raw resource boost and rushing buildings (did I mention chorfs can build their buildings instantly if they got labour they can spend?)

What would I recommend as improvements is to
- reduce or remove gold from equation as it makes no sense for them to care about gold and sticks out like a sore thumb as a resource with 'nothing to do'
- change the way you acquire labour to aforementioned ways and remove or drastically reduce simply capturing people in battles
- add significant enough differences between legendary lords like Zhatan being able to simply capture labour from battles fought or Astragoth having extra inventory slots that he can utilize in customizing his mecha walker, just differences that stand out or slightly change how you play
- make it so rebellions matter, not just them being more powerful and taking away some labour with them but also make the act of crushing a rebellion rewarding and meaningful as it is of big significance their story
- vassalizing should play a role because the only gameplay part where you feel the diminishing numbers of dawizharr as a race is when you are buying caps +1 at a time (which also sucks)
- Laborers units and hobgoblins should be tied to labour resource
- stop making manticore copies


for me this scores a 4/10 for its price, a shallow product with a mask of depth

Pretty neat idler, lets you get grinding satisfaction without actively having to grind
Don't really have anything constructive to praise that other reviewers haven't, so I just give my seal of approval.

If you like the sound of "colony survival + tower defense" you may love this game

Nice addition to the first total war game that decided to be more than just humans fighting humans with human weapons