Update: Edited to reflect most recent build as of September 2nd 2017

Disclosure

I was originally going to wait until the game was officially launched to write a review in order to be as fair as possible to the dev team, however with persistence going on over a full year now, Early Access extended yet again to the end of 2017 Q1 or 2 of 2018, and the devs still referring to the game as a “pre-alpha stage” in discussions and in the starting screen of the game itself, my patience has worn out.

First off, since I will be discussing the devs and the community they have built around themselves, let me give you a brief history of my participation in that community.

I backed this game on Kickstarter at the Knight Marshall level ($1200) and played the early releases very regularly, as well as following and participating in the official forum community from the start. I have had Dev+ access that whole time, have never been banned (though in the last year as I’ve become more critical I have been threatened with it a few times), and have participated in many discussions and given a lot of feedback, reported bugs, had private chats with moderators and devs, etc.

The deck combat system was implemented around release 8 or 9, despite overwhelmingly negative feedback about the concept, and then overwhelmingly negative feedback about the system after it was implemented. We were told by the devs that if the system wasn't fun, it could easily be changed back to a more traditional hotbar system and a new design worked on. After several releases it became clear that not only was the system not fun, but that the devs had no intention of giving up on it regardless of the feedback and alternatives presented to them. I became tired of the devs not listening to anyone but certain high backers and sold my founder account around release 19 or 20. I had a second base account in order to check in on the game over the following 10 releases or so.

As the releases crept into the high 20's and persistence was looming, I had several friends begin playing the game and enjoying the crafting system and decorating that was in place. I decided I could tolerate the combat as it was (several tweaks had been made allowing mixed hotbars of locked and random cards) in order to play with my guild, and I increased my base account back up to a Knight level ($800). I played from release 30 up through the launch of persistence, the land rush, and through the last year of persistence to the current release 45 as of this writing, and the guild which I started was and remains one of the largest guilds in the game, though I gave up leadership a long time ago.



Clearly, I know what the game was pitched as, I know how it evolved, I've followed it from the start, and I understand exactly what Early Access means in the context of this game. I have participated in several other games of various genres that were crowdfunded on Kickstarter and I had/have alpha access through all of them as well. My guild and I have participated in several games where we had direct lines to the developers as part of their core testing group and in many cases my group or I would be directly responsible for certain mechanics or changes implemented into some of these games. I know how development works, I know how alphas and betas typically work, and I know how Early Access works.


Full review of the game and its features can be found here (google doc)[docs.google.com]