It's like Pathfinder or DND 3.5e as an open world sandbox game (or at least that's how it is in Adventure Mode). Most of the mechanics in Low Magic Age are the same as they are in those systems, save for some minor changes like feat functionality and specific class features (Ex: Barbarian eventually gets Damage Reduction equal to their level instead of 1/4 of their level).

Though, you don't *need* to have experience in those tabletop systems to understand how to play the game, there's dozens of in-game handouts that explain the various mechanics. It's just that there is less of a learning curve and time spent reading for anyone already familiar.


There's two gamemodes in Low Magic Age: Arena mode, and Adventure mode.

Arena mode just has you go through waves of creatures to fight, with a team composition of your choosing. I played a round to get a basic grasp of how the combat felt, but switched to Adventure mode immediately afterward.

For the purpose of comparison, Low Magic Age's Adventure Mode has elements very similar to Battle Brothers. In Adventure mode, there's no overarching storyline, but there's always something to do. There are dungeons, wandering monsters, and real estate infested with monsters. Almost every settlement usually has some kind of quest to either do a delivery, escort mission, kill a boss, or clear a dungeon. Instead of doing quests or dungeon crawling for money, you can also buy and sell trade goods throughout the settlements. You can also buy properties that are no longer infested by monsters to access the game's crafting mechanics, but I didn't get too far into that yet. The gameplay stays pretty consistent throughout a playthrough, but it can get pretty addicting.

I'm currently running an all troll/ogre party of purely martial characters, and I rarely get any trouble besides the occasional high-level boss monster or spellcaster that I don't prepare against in advance.

Big thing to note for anyone that buys this game: it starts with Japanese as the default language. That was a little jarring at first, but isn't difficult to change the language (Cog button in the main menu).


TL;DR: It's like Battle Brothers but with Pathfinder/DND 3.5e mechanics. I like it.