Recent reviews by Abel

It was high time I left a review, after hitting the 1,000 hours mark! Add another thousand spent playing and modding the game (yes, mods are a thing!) on GOG. Time flies as they say! But I don't regret one minute of the time spent enjoying this unique tactical game that is Battle Brothers.

It's a mix between various genres: real-time with pause strategy, turn-based combat, role-playing. The setting is loosely medieval with fantasy elements inspired from German folklore. Hence, while roaming the lands doing mercenary work equipped with whatever protection and weapons bought or looted, you will find creatures such as Wiedergängers, the ever-going undead haunting hollow ruins or Webknechts, gigantic spiders infesting the nearby woods of a settlement, catching their unfortunate preys in intricate webs.

Your mission as a mercenary: to survive and get paid! Does that remind you of something? A carefully crafted set of events with enough backstory to make up a complete book will set the tone of this unforgiving world. For this game is harsh and not only in words!

Let's be brutally honest. This game is hard. At first! Beginner difficulty may prove a challenge even for the most battle-hardened strategists out there. In fact, one of the loading screen tips says: 'losing is fun'. So, be prepared to die a lot and in the most gory, inglorious of ways. By design, the combat mechanics are in part veiled. The player is expected to learn from failure, exploration and research. In that process, your main tool will be the reload and retire buttons. Try again! Discovering all the little complexities this game has to offer is part of the experience and half the fun.

The other half comes from applying all the knowledge acquired after a few hundred hours spent playing and familiarizing yourself with the game. Yes, a few hundred hours is what it takes to start getting a good grasp of it! But what this game demands, it gives back a tenfold. There is nothing like the satisfaction of a hard earned victory. The struggles make it all the sweeter! At this stage, you will probably start using the Battle Brothers wiki to devise increasingly efficient schemes to develop your company.

The strongest point of Battle Brothers, besides its challenging and engrossing combat system is the building of a successful mercenary company. What that means is entirely up to you. It's your story! As the captain, you decide what kind of men should be hired. Will you trust lowlife thieves and known murderers to follow your orders? Will you mischieviously sacrifice disloyal or greedy sellswords when given the chance in the game of chess that is the tactical combat? Will you form a legendary company of noble adventurers slaying dragons and vile beasts for a king's ransom? Will you gather a party of explorers, of raiders, of tomb looters? Your imagination is the limit!

Combat itself takes place in various hex based maps affected by terrain. Movement and actions are limited by action points as well as fatigue (or stamina) accumulated. The game offers a variety of attributes to pick from when leveling up mercenaries in a traditional role-playing way. You can build the swift, dodgy assassin, relying on speed to kill enemies before they have a chance to move. Or you can field men with heavy plated armor, well protected behind a shieldwall while the backline picks up distressed enemies with polearms or bows. Gaining experience, your team members will unlock levels in a tree of perks that can be selected for further customization.

No game is perfect! Fortunately for us, the developers at Overhype Studios are keen on creating new content for a game they love dearly and that has been a project since 2015 at least. Things can always be better and with each new update, the game improves.

What it still misses in my opinion is a balance pass and rework in some specific areas, mostly of the combat system. I'm hopeful that the free update coming with the 'Blazing Deserts' DLC will address these issues. They are, quite frankly, more of a concern to the experienced player and will probably not bother in any way newcomers exploring the game for the first time.

So I can only recommend trying this game. If you are willing to spend a bit of time playing it and overcoming the challenge of randomness where used (hit and stat rolls among others) you should not be disappointed.