Recent reviews by Grogmok

1.story is garbage: You do not rise in any ranks or start from the bottom, you begin your story as a renown deathknight commander of many armies who was slain and rose again. Even though all the heroes in the story have risen from the dead one more time, the game tells you that when someone dies now, they die forever. This is further cannon when you play the second mission and you kill some zombies, your character says "they won't be revived again" what kind of logic is that?
2.aesthetics do not exist: No matter what armor or weapon you equip, it doesn't change your appearance
3.lack of customizations: armor and weapons are limited to 1 slot for armor, 1 for weapon, 1 trinket, I think you get where this is going, it lowers they choices you have to make but also feels like a "cut corners" product.
4.No building: You are offered a castle, which you need to earn resources to "build" and uppgrade, but building is so limited, you don't choose how the building looks, its preset, its limited to hospital, merchant, training, etc. it reminds me of a very cheap adobe browser game or mobile app.
5.TUNNEL STORY: this game is not open world. It doesn't give you multiple choices to approach maps, you walk a short distance with walls on your map preventing you from walking anywhere left or right, you are stuck in a linear movement to a "fight" the only choice you make it where you want to place your character before a battle like most RTS games.
6.Basic battling: walk up to an enemy and swing sword, or if you have +2 IQ, you walk behind enemy, and backstab for %increase damage per attack. enemy has armor? put skill points in armor penetration.

TLDR I wouldn't suggest buying the game, I got it on sale for $13 and asked for a refund, I doubt I'll get one because I set this game aside to play it later and I bought it like 2 months ago.

Starting with the bad;
1-LOADING SCREENS LOADING SCREENS LOADING SCREENS. you might not feel it at first, but I have a very fast high end SSD, 8k speed ram 14k intel cpu and the game does not instant load.
The developers could have made many zones, like every zone in the ship, loadingscreenless.
2-Is this on the newest unreal engine? because I could have swore at some moments I was getting bad lag, jitters, and oh, more loading screens? wait the game forces you to load screen into an area that you need to load screen OUT of this area(like captains quarters) and it does this very frequently?
3-Rolls values are garbage, many times at a 95% chance I have instead of hitting an enemy, veered off to hit an ally. SAVE AFTER EVERYROLL IF YOU WANT TO MIN/MAX.
(side note, i'm ok with some bad rolls, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is the game based on PURE luck, even down to engagements where anyone can go first)
4-Initiative means nothing. you can save before a fight and infinitely reload until you get the characters on your team to start the battle first. Sometimes an enemy or groups of enemys starting first in a fight means the difference between literally winning or not. prepare to waste your time with more loading screens.
5-because of everything stated above, RTS skill means very little, infact with enough bad luck your skill means absolutely nothing, game is a roll for luck to win, waste your time with loading screens.
6-I had to take a break from playing the game because I clicked an area next to a console and my character not only went the opposite way, but also put himself in danger of immediate death and doomed my entire encounter to a loss. because the game is RNG, I should have saved before I moved, obviously. what good game have I ever felt the need to constantly save, to combat really bad RNG? I cant remember the last good game to make me feel like I had to save before every single thought crosses my mind.

TLDR-Ending with the good;
Its like playing every other rts, xcom, divinity original sin, baldurs gate, pillars of eternity etc
Its not all just turn based with classes, there is also a turn based ship battle
You can upgrade your ship as much as you can your own gear
Leveling is not reduced to just 12, classes and abilities have much to choose from.
Story is not so bad, but its difficult to ♥♥♥♥ up a warhammer story as you have so much to choose from
You don't have to buy it for $50, you can wait for a 50% off steam sale and buy it for what its actually worth.
You get to read this review and save yourself the annoying headache of loading screens.

Game released on 9/21/2023, its 9/24/2023 and I still cannot get into a match without some kind of bug. launch day it was just infinite queue, now its match making error.

Im at this point right now where I want to quit and smash keyboards, there is a very serious and annoying bug in the first act where if you piss off mol he tells the guards and normally I dont care if I have to pass a check, but im so far deep in the act that my only source of a merchant is at the grove, im overweight so I have a disadvantage on checks, i somehow passed the check with a guard before making it to the merchant and it ASKED ME TO DO ANOTHER CHECK BECAUSE OF MOL I SWEAR, UNTIL THIS IS FIXED FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF YOU ARE READING THIS RIGHT NOW PLEASE MURDER MOL FOR ME. HES IN EMERALD GROVE IN A PLACE CALLED THE DRAGONS LAIR, WHERE THE TIEF CHILDREN HIDE, JUST MURDER HIS LITTLE FACEHOLE OVER AND OVER, PLEASE, FOR ME.

Current state of the game
You only have 4 points of attack(and a kick), up-down-left-right(one is stab, other overhead)
Every single day, people log on and go fight in pvp to claim a castle(territory) late game you can solo cap any castle in the game, npcs have no adaptive AI behavior so you can kite them all and they don't reset HP if they break aggro. you destroy a couple of wooden gates(or doors) to access the castle, then you break 1 door to a generic fort that you see all over the map, walk 2 flights of stairs and access a flag to cap.
sometimes some low lvl npcs will guard the doors but its usually nothing to a lvl 100 geared player.
Siege consists of ram to get the doors down faster and catapult to aoe groups holding a door or to destroy ballista. you only see 1-2 ballistas occaisionally, it takes resources to uppgrade castles and that gives a few ballistas, also a few low lvl guards. you can break an outside wall but the HP is too great and it just means you need to repair the wall after cap which is such a hassle that nobody does it.
The hitboxes have been bugged for a long time, sometimes your weapon phases through the body, sometimes arrows do the same or the arrows hit invisible walls and you wonder why you shot 30 arrows but hit nothing. hitboxes like trees, tents, etc all have invisable corners that arrows get stuck on. you can't lob arrows over shoulders or walls and arrows(power attack) deal around 1/8th the damage of a standard swing of a 2h axe.(non heavy attack) armor is useless other than either increase damage slightly or survive a couple more hits.
Its nothing like bannerlord, kingdom come, chivalry. It has its only unique trash combat system that wasnt ever flushed out. the graphics are as good as bannerlord 2.
I didn't play for 557hours, the game has afk activities so you can go fishing for 24hours, come back and you will still be fishing. more than half of my "played"hours was really just leaving the pc on every day to afk farm.
Apparently the game USED to be full loot pvp, but now thats reduced to a pt system where you can collect 1 t5 equip and only in the middle of the map. everyone fights AROUND the middle map because those zones are pvp-non loot. I guess casuals just wanna log on and fight in some trash combat system doing the same repetitive kill 2 doors, cap a flag. pve is trash, no special mechanics to learn, no big guild raids, just a zerg of over 5 players attacking a mildly larger npc that has the same hit mechanic/aggro, and enlarged HP.

took me almost 24 hours to beat everything. There is still much more to do, lots of secret achievements, hidden objects, harder difficulties and better "grades" meaning completing a level in full with no hiccups all side objectives. it calls for a lot of strategy and thinking.
If you are into mods there's a fix for that here aswell.
You just blow pixels up with different tools, like minecraft but way more indepth and better graphics. The only building involved is when you are using planks or moving objects in the world in order to reach specific things/areas. As a man 10/10 satisfying to blow a hole in a wall of a building, collapse everything, attach 20 rockets to a vehicle(like a van or bulldozer) and then drive it at 200mph straight through a wall of a mall, in an attempt to break the sound barrier and break through every wall in my way.

Hard game, great fps to play with friends. Won't play it solo because of realism and how its just not fun alone.
There isn't anything specific to work towards(yet?)right now it's got zero rpg elements, no unlocks, you get access to every gun and attachment right from the start. The fun comes from watching friends die to traps, or AI pulling knives out of their ass to kill you.
recommend playing it with friends while drunk(drink responsibly) 10/10

Only downside is the "power" creep, which plagues all card games respectively.
As of right now, you can still get by totally free, and each "season" you can gain the new released cards free, its a grind though.
I love the game, I think I have owned it since like 2012? back then it was alpha, so few cards that there was only 1 meta, now there is probably over a hundred cards.
In case you don't know what the game is about, you have a hero and a "deck". decks are made up of a few cards, like 8 cards(I don't even remember the exact amount) and each card has a cost to summon, like hearthstone, except the monster summoned starts walking towards the enemy hero. if he encounters enemy players mob, he might attack it, or go straight for hero, depends on the card and cost. some cards cost less but counter higher cost cards, that is where stradegy comes into play. hero's offer passive bonuses, and sometimes hero exclusive cards that counter cards.
There is a team battle version aswell, even ranked co op! 2v2.
I would rate the game 10/10, I have been playing it off and on for a very long time.
I just want to be able to play it on my phone, without having to create a new account and start over with new cards.

Act 3 has a bug in the ivory sanctum where even though your lockpicking skill is at 100%, the door won't unlock, and its a required door to progress with the story. So you get stuck in act 3 and have 2 options, reload previous saves before you made it to ivory sanctum and redo hours of strategic turn by turn based battles which doesn't garuntee a fix. or option 2, restart the entire game on a new save file which takes even more time and effort, and also does not garuntee a fix.
either way this kind of game breaking crap shouldn't exist in any game.
I never finished kingmaker, the game is not as polished as larians divinity sin games, you can't take advantage of mechanics like height, oil, water, etc, combat is just, look this game I can't recommend this or any of this companies games to anyone. I got this game at 50% off and I look at my save files, it says 2days and 22hours on one file and i'm only on act 3. The game doesn't have 3days worth of content, its a few hours at best but they slow you down but creating mechanics that cause you to wait, like traveling a map, encountering enemies randomly, all the small talk that you try to click on in case you might unlock some secret or hidden quest because you have to answer specifically and to top it off, what really sucks all your time is how difficult you put in your settings.
I know nothing about the lore, I don't care to read every single "book" I come across, I never pay any attention to choices in dialogue and in most cases it doesn't effect any story or quests, in some rare cases it effects EVERYthing in such a massive way that you need to literally google "azata path" and follow instructions strictly just to unlock specific paths.

Before you read on, I bought this game 5 times during alpha access for me and friends.
Only going to highlight the issues with this game so you all know what to expect.
Randomly, every time you load into a "raid/match" you will have a chance to lose something of value, and its crazy how many times for a month now, that I lost everything my character had equipped as soon as we start the match. sometimes, i'll load into a match and a high value item that I brought with me disappears, like blowtorches. other times you put something in your bag and it disappears. for some of my friends, they lost half their gear to crashes, because even after lowering the graphics their game randomly crashes in error and when you load the game back up, you lose all your gear.
Funny thing is, to prevent "duplication" the developers made it so that when you crash or alt-f4, your body and its contents are gone. so now when you are about to die, you can alt-f4 and deny players loot, you also don't have the opportunity for teammates to grab your loot and bring it back to you.
Sometimes, you run the best gear in the game and still get 1 shotted even with 90% or higher health. Now either they are hacking or the damage values are way messed up. because I have ran the worst gear in the game and somehow managed to survive many shots from .45 and higher grade ammo.
Let me be clear, the game could be fun, but unfortunately, the developers cared more about fixing a duplication glitch than fixing bugs that literally make items and full containers disappear from your stash when you log in. to them, losing gear randomly is just part of the game, but god forbid if theres a dup glitch, and you could get all that back naw. To make matters worse, even if you had infinite money, you can't buy anything of value because you have to progress with trader levels, to do that you have to finish "contracts" you only get like 5 of them every 24hours, so no matter what it will take a month to be able to buy anything of "value" so now ask yourself if the developers actually care about the playerbase. They released a game in such a terrible state, right as soon as overwatch 2 came out and just before mw2 dmz comes out, its almost like they are desperate to make money. they don't have a shop to buy skins, the only money they make to upkeep servers is for new players to pay the small price the game cost.
They really call this game early access, its alpha at best still, and I played the alpha alpha way back when the only way you could get in was invite from discord.
Its unplayable from a solo persons standpoint, its too easy to get overwelmed by players and the damage values are all over the place. there is no insurance, you don't get gear back in any manner except what friends give you, and if you all die your ship is gone. If your teamate flys your ship to extract, it becomes his ship, so even tho you are all in a grp together, you had to disband grp, join his just to use the same ship, how is that quality of life? how annoying must the developers make this game? the developers should have kept the duplication glitch in the game upon release, I play this nonstop despite all the bugs with friends I either bought the game for or told to get the game. Now, I refuse to tell people to buy the game until ever issue is dealt with.