I bought this game, but it has ads in it for other games.

There is little respect for the player's time in this game. No way to speed up game speed, and many objectives are busy work to just wait on timers to finish. If you take too long, things just appear inside your base despite all the walls and protection the game tries to make you excited about. 4/10 there is the potential here for a great game if only one of the devs actually tried playing this.

difficulty cliff is a bit of an understatement.

So, I was utterly in love with this game until I hit the undead campaign missions. Even rolling it back to the lowest difficulty setting... It's awful. There's a pretty clear way they want you playing, but it's just stressful. I don't tolerate this kind of stress unless I'm getting paid for it. This game was clearly made by people who enjoy suffering.

Its hard but I love it. Beware though, you may look up and realize its been 4 hours

The Easiest difficulty after 6 maps it is intense, and as soon as you fall behind there is little hope with more waves coming. I am glad i did not pay full price and waited for the sale

👎 is Not an Option

Great fun game like Stronghold. Campaign can be a bit tough.

Maybe I am just not good, but as someone addicted to sharp learning curves, even this has me beat. I have lost 20+ times on the second mission, on the easiest difficulty. The first couple of waves make you think this might just be the easiest game ever, followed by a massive swarm from all sides with nowhere near enough time to prepare. If you like to punish yourself with hard games... you found the holy grail.

I thought I would enjoy this game. From a glance I thought it would be something akin to Age of Empires. In a lot of ways I was right, but not for the reasons that I anticipated. Some things, such as the tech tree design, the collection of food, wood, and stone. The need to build houses, farms, and even fisheries felt all akin to Age of Empires. After that, the resemblances were only to the discredit of this game.

The "management" system is both opaque and unfulfilling. Managing food is basically shooting a target of food production versus population. The system isn't thrilling and is often little more than building another berry picking hut (at least in the first three missions I played). I'm sure there is more depth, but the game insists on these levels that are both long and boring as all get out.

Which is really my biggest issue with the game. No aspect of it is fun because it is all as frustrating as possible. I want to design my fort, but because I lack enough people I cannot place my future lumber yard. No matter. I'll micro-manage hell and turn down my working population on my current lumber yards to trick the game into allowing me to build another lumber yard. Except now I don't have the wood to lay the foundation for this plan, so I'll have to wait for more to appear. Only I can't select my workers so I have no idea how much wood they are producing, or how long it will take for more to appear.

Then there is combat. Like Age of Empires, it is much more fruitful to click next to the enemy then let the AI do the work, as they will otherwise pull off super intelligent feats like focusing fire on buildings while enemies attack. Expect soldiers to get left behind as some will be outside of aggro range and would much rather stare at the sky then shift over enough to attack the next enemy. Traits are buried in sub-menus that don't make it immediately obvious as to what the strength of my unit is, or the rebellious lot that I am fighting.

I'm not nearly done with the construction system. Outside of the already horrendous resource management required to plan buildings, the menus are clogged with buildings I cannot have because I haven't reached that level of the tech tree. Age of Empires 2 does not have that problem, as back in 1999 some 25 years ago those programming wizards figured out how to hide unavailable buildings that had not been researched yet. Why Diplomacy Is Not An Option hasn't figured that out is truly embarrassing. It results in a clunky interface where I spend half my time flipping through pages looking at buildings I don't need.

As an aside, having to bury corpses is such a stupid concept. I do it in Rimworld because my pawns have meaning, and my foes can conveniently be chucked into incinerators. I have no such attachment to archer 12 who died a pathetic death of not knowing to turn around. It places such a heavy cost on combat when I am already not that psyched for what is little more than rushing hastily built units at shoddy attackers.

The campaign failed to catch my attention, as the main cast is both forgettable and the story is mediocre. The king, both so useless that nobility falls at the drop of the hat and yet so omnipresent that he anticipates our rebellion is terrible writing.

I bought the game on sale for half off, and now I am refunding it. It is the type of game that is so flawed from concept to execution that I would not play it if it was free. As other reviews note, there are better examples of every aspect offered of this game.

Life changing RTS game