Recent reviews by Indrid

Interesting mechanics but performance is horrific. Wait for fixes.

Magnificent RPG! One of my favourite all time games.

Extremely lush presentation, from visuals to sound design. Fully voice acted, and voice acted well. Well balance and paced combat systems, and the multi-classing gives a lot of possbilities to character builds.

Has some performance issues, to me it seemed to be linked to quick loading often. A restart fixes it, but quite annoying.

I would have preferred the game kept a party of six like in PoE1, because I love creating and building characters.

Companion narratives are apparently poor, but I generally prefer to use custom parties in games like this.

Doesn't do enough to justify playing over other 4X games.

It's relatively expensive full price and has a low amount of content. Visuals are very poor. Gameplay rewards an excruciatingly slow pace as bold exploration often gets your stuff murdered. Can't get away from some 4X mechanics just feeling a bit weird in a 40k setting, and they didn't try much new to get around that. Played it very safe. Lacks basic options (like control mapping) and seems to break at higher resolutions. UI is the worst I can remember seeing in a 4X with seemingly no mind paid to usability at all.

Mechanics are solid, and balance seems okay. Sounds are good for the most part although disappointingly lacks any voice work in game.

The game needs more content and a load more polish to recommend at full price, might be worth looking at in a sale.

An excellent RPG.

+ A tight story with good tension and choices, compared to the very slow burner of something like Pillars of Eternity
+ Combo skills are awesome
+ The companions are good and interesting
+ Magic creation system is cool
+ Great visuals and effects
+ Good worldbuilding and lore

- A bit short. Short isn't necessarily bad, but the game has enough mechanics and things to consider that it could easily fit into a larger game. You get gear so fast that you barely have time to use it. One of my companions - used through the entire game - literally only got her last tier talent in time for the final fight. Things like this make it feel too compressed.
- Enemy variety is poor
- It is very easy on Normal if you've played other cRPGs
- Not enough companions

Amazing RPG platformer with strings attached to Dark Souls. Awesome in co-op.

Sadly I can't recommend this amongst the other fantasy RPGs available on PC, turn based or not.

It is very obviously a port of a mobile game, and suffers for it at every turn. The interface is horrible, both in aesthetic and usability. Simply levelling up your attributes presents you with a scrollable list of massive text - something that could easily be on one screen. It's full of this kind of thing. The entire levelling process could be on one screen, but it's split into three for touch screens.

Animation is basic to say the least, and the art style looks amatuerish as harsh as that sounds. Environments are blurry when zoomed in.

Barely any usability options that are expected of a PC game, including custom hotkeys that don't seem to support Shift key modifiers. No gamepad support.

You are limited to four premade characters with what looked like a small amount of talents (not sure if more unlock later).

There is a massive lack of feedback for the player. You've no idea if your characters are buffed for example without diving into their character status (which of course takes up the whole screen), and even then it won't list what buffs are on them -- just the affects of the buffs. Maybe I am wrong about this -- I hope I just missed it. There is no combat log, so you're just left to guess what is going on unless you want to inspect and memorise each enemy's stats and yours and do the math in your head. There is not even a basic % hit chance indicator when mousing over things. Abilities that have a ranged component give no indication of that range that I could see, leaving you to constantly count tiles. This lack of feedback and polish is everywhere.

It might be good as a mobile game, but there is just nothing compelling about it in the PC space. Combine that with the poor usability and you get a dud IMO.

Their follow up game, Templar Battleforce, is FAR better. Some of the usability concerns remain, but it's generally much slicker and has a much more unique theme and structure which carried it through for me. The theme in Heroes of Steel seems as generic as it gets.

Note - I only played 90 minutes or so, just couldn't stand the shortfalls any longer to play more. I hope the devs focus on PC sensibilities a lot more for their next PC release.

The best RPG I've played.

Cool little tactical RPG type thing.

+ Well designed combat system with dice rolls
+ Engaging character development with meaningful choices
+ Fleshed out lore that you can absorb at your leisure; not dumped on you
+ Good amount of missions
+ New Game+ available after completion
+ The game has a very low price

- Forced to take certain Templars on certain missions; I hate games that restrict you like this
- Environment graphics not as crisp as the characters'
- Lack of animation variety; an alternate melee animation would have been welcome for kills
- Dice rolls and attribute interactions are all hidden in combat; a big oversight IMO for a dice game

A competant and fun 4X game that doesn't really excel at anything and lacks replayability. Worth the new low price, especially on sale.

The game never quite feels at ease with what it's trying to do; there is a dissonance in almost every aspect. The serious marketing ("How do you kill a God?") and gloomy premise (bad guy in charge) seems at odds with the almost cartoony visuals and humurous writing.

The economic and city-building aspect of the game is so basic and forgettable that you wonder why it's in the game. It's like Stardock didn't want to fully commit to the nature of the title; building your own stack of doom. The key of enjoying the game then becomes; how do you build the stack of doom? Turns out, it's like most other 4X but stripped down.

The almost literal handful of units you can train from your cities is adequate at best, and boring at worst. "Soldier", "Pikeman". Really? Even when you pick up a named unit with slightly different stats from one of the (well written) quests, they are usually just slightly different versions of these with the same model and animations.

Each Sovereign (your character "class") has access to a unique starting Champion with their retinue, and one or two unique units. These are the only things that have any character, and unfortunately your first Champion's retinue are not often good enough for end game, so you're left with the champions. The Champions are cool, there's just nowhere near enough of them. The ones that are there even share some aspects of their skill trees. This is because the meat of the game, combat, is quite lacking.

You spend a lot of time fighting in Sorcerer King. The battles are decent scale in terms of amount of units you can control, but they take place in tiny arenas. There is no room for manoevre or really move at all. You are right on top of each other. This was obviously done to speed up the battles, but they went a bit too far. You know what other 4X has a lot of focus on army building and combat? Age of Wonders 3, which has flanking, area of influence, range, sight blocking along with a massive selection of units. It does this without the battles feeling any more of a chore than they do in Sorcerer King which lacks most of that nuance.

Sorcerer King makes some strange decisions with regards to balance. Ranged units are able to target enemies wherever they are on the map. This makes them immediate targets all the time since you can't hide from them, and makes for weird battles where the ranged back lines shoot at each other while the melee units try to reach them. Another big dropped ball was the way the game handles initiative. It's turn-based, and turn order is determined by initiative. Fine. The game then screws this up by giving you various ways, including a low level spell, to boost initiative. Which then makes it the go-to thing to boost however you can, since you can often destroy an enemy army without them getting any turns. This could have been solved by simply having initiative be a strictly inate statistic, or improved only very rarely. Sorcerer King: The Search for Initiative.

The premise is cool, it gives you a singular focus; "I need to make an awesome stack for a boss fight at the end". Unfortunately any adventure is drained from the experience as it plays out in typically the same way. There are plenty of quests, but they mostly consist of reading some funny text and then fighting something, typically very easy even if they are labelled as "strong". It's a fantasy world full of magic where not much interesting stuff happens. If I'm building a stack, make that stack amazing. Fill it with characters that you did awesome things with to get there. But you didn't. You read some text and fought some wolves, or you clicked a button and trained a cookie-cutter "Sentinel" (not as cool as it sounds) from your emotionless city. You can even recruit a Champion by simply selecting a skill on your skill tree. Narratively justified? Yes, perhaps, it could be regarded as a reflection of your fame. But they could have tried to make it narratively interesting.

Sorcerer King is a game I wanted to love. A 4X that has me doing something other than running around and destroying enemy cities against poor AI. They just didn't go all out with it, so you end up doing a lot of the same things anyway. There is a crafting system, and it starts of cool but descends into tedium as you try to keep your stack not only equipped but those equipped items also enchanted (why can't I do them at the same time??) with an interface that just can't keep up. Simple things let it down. When you craft an item, you can have it instantly sent to a unit. Cool right? Does it give you a drop-down or grid or list to choose them from? No, you get a singular field that you must click arrows to cycle through.

I am still recommending this game. It is an overall fun if short experience, with more time in the oven it could have been epic. I'm not a fan of the visual style myself, but it's clean and there is enjoyment to be had with building your stack of death. I paid £8-something and got over 15 hours, so that's good value in my book. Are there better fantasy 4X games out there? Yes, but this one is worth a play and could get significantly better if supported with DLC.

Well paced FPS with superb visuals. Builds great tension and atmosphere and has a decent narrative. Gunplay is excellent. Let down by some poor enemy AI.