Oh man, I've been considering making a thread about it and writing a proto-review in my head for the past 4 days.
So
( but that's more like a pile of random thoughts than a review, in fact
)
It does feel a lots like HOMM.
You start out by selecting your crew, who have class (soldier,doctor,scholar,scout,hunter) and traits (pious,racist,open minded, altruist....). That will come into play as reactions to your decisions throuhg the game (e.g. straight attack : coureageous followers gain morale, cautions followers lose morale; set an ambush instead : the other way around. Or take in indigenous followers: open minded gain morale, racist lose morale.etc) .
You then arrive on a island that will serve as a big,big tutorial and set to do various quests for the local governor (then you'll later move on to the mainland)
The follower system is nice, little things happens to them, they keep giving you their opinions and advices or telling you the terrible secrets that got them to emigrate and so on.
It's not completely dynamic I think but I suppose various followers can fit in various scripted roles provided they got the right traits. Dialogues are very well written.
The survival aspect plays rather well in te beginning, despite the relatively simple system and the only two ressources to manage survival-wise(food and medecines; then there's "valuables" i.e. gold, a generic "equipment" spending points of upgrade your followers stuff along preset lines (eg: start with knife, +3 points of equipment: get cutlass, plus four more points : get longsword).
Switching your medical attention between your doctor so he'll get better and can start healing too and your worst wounded followers so they don't deteriorate too much, all the while looking around for herbs you can turn into medecine can make for some pretty tense moments.
Difficulty is completely off-balance. I struggled a lot in the first few hours, and that was nice, but the game became kind of easy as I started to get a grasp of the gameplay mechanisms and accumulate ressources. Still it'll occasionnally throw at you almost unwinnable fights and you're never safe from your own servants (who are sadly completely abstracted) stealing ridiculous amounts (like half a particular ressources, with a pronounced taste for your last 20 medecines when half the team's sick or wounded) in the middle of nowhere because you didn't put enough people on guard duty at night.
The quest are ok, and they really shine as they follow your succes or failure : you can lose a critical fight and the quest line will naturally fall back onto a "plan B" and the game fluidly go along. I dind't played that much but was pleasantly surprised to see a basic quest (bandits harrassing town) take into account my two big failures :p and the story devellop according to them (wait, make it three failures, I forgot one).
That's particularly enjoyable since there's an ironman mode and the quest have apparently been written with a no-reload policy in mind.
That does a lot for replayability I guess, I already wished I had tried different options on some quests. Regarding replayability again, I don't think it's dynamic but there's really a lot of options to approach (or ignore) many situations.
But then, I wouldn't take the responsability to recommand it to anyone for 20$. It's a nice game, but ultimately I'm a bit disappointed; it really feel like they, for whatever reason, didn't take the time they should have to finish it.
the world map is really not enjoyable to navigate, you can't understand where you're going, you can't have a proper overview, the jungle trees and props are nice but they tend to obfuscate the view ; which is somehow a fitting simulation of the difficulty it must be to move around in an unknown jungle
, but sadly it's probably unvoluntary and don't play well at all.
The "economic" system is really simplified, 4 ressources is too little and the economic system doesn't make sense (the more things you buy, the more expensive they become, because the more money the merchant got, the less he values money ?), the map is a bit bland the only non-quest interactable things are pigs for meat, plants for medicinal herbs, coffers for valuables, and crates for ropes/wood/metal/stuff the only use of is to make various kind of traps to use in battle).
At 5 or 10 bucks I'd recommend it without a second thought, but at 20$ the main reason would be so they can make a sequel and make it better.
It's not a bad game, far from it. but it feels unfinished.
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Topic: Conquistador- does anyone know if it's any good? (Read 3373 times)