Becoming Saint

I was hoping the full game would have any kind of system for this but no. It does not matter how good you are at tactical battles, it does not matter how your cult handles economics, it does not matter if you send 5 groups of beggars at excellent begging and make a net surplus of food when you go out. In the end, at all difficulties, you will run into severe food shortages. Even if you conquer the best producing cities even if you play everything straight. I got something like 20 runs under my belt and I have come to realise the tenants you choose for your cult do not impact this at all. in the end we all starve. The game seriously expects you to intentionally loose units or do fake attacks and retreats just so you do not have to feed your flock at the feast. The mandatory feast is really the core issue of this game. I do not mean the halfway feast. I mean the victory feast. If you do not intentionally shoot yourself in the leg (which feels awful to do) you are not making it past day 10. And that is awful. There is no way to mitigate this, there is no laws to pick or decisions to make, just a group of 5 follower groups at 3 stars will never be self-sustaining until you have conquered about 15 towns. The game expects you to struggle? I do not struggle I am good at the tactical part of the game. So the game punishes me for not loosing units by forcing me to pay out food. Horrible design. There is no mechanic to gain extra food either, and good luck if you chose Tenants that attract followers that do not beg for you. Instantly down 10 food. And the game acts like you have food to spare all the time "Oh you converted 14 folks of 3 different groups do you want to feed them 14 food?" Reward: 1 Charisma. None of the recources scale off of each other either. If you spend 143 food during a feast or spend 4 food you always gain 2 Charisma. Clown universe. The Relics do ♥♥♥♥ all, there is no city management at all, it's just numbers in the background, there is no-win scenarios, the game expects you to fail and punishes you if you win. Just straight up not a fun experience.

Becoming Saint is a strategy and tactics game based around the premise of starting a new cult in medieval Italy. You play as a would be cult leader. Struck by divine inspiration, the cult leader sets out across Italy, cultivating a flock of followers, converting cities, and becoming a force to be reckoned with as you reshape Catholicism in your own image. There is a lot here that would make for an excellent strategy game, and indeed, it's a style of game that works well in other contexts. One of the elements that makes Crusader Kings III fun as a roleplay game, for instance, is its robust religion system and the ability for a player to craft and spread an absolutely bonkers religion. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3584740049 While Becoming Saint is not, nor does it aspire to be, a 4X like Crusader Kings, its gameplay consists of a combination of strategic play, tactical play, and management. Players choose the precepts of their faith, which then informs which followers they can recruit. These followers then march on a nearby city, engaging in tactical combat, and ultimately either converting the city and harvesting its resources, or returning home to starve. It's this combination of genres that makes Becoming Saint feel almost like a 4X-lite, hinting at a greater management sim, while also reassuring players that this is a lighter game than a traditional 4X. While one consequence of this is a game that is easier to pick up and which requires less investment, a worse consequence is that Becoming Saint feels like it should have more to do than it actually does, and should allow more control than it actually does. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3584740985 One example of this frustrating lack of management ability is in the game's economic mechanics. While the cult leader can accumulate large numbers of followers, these followers come with a maintenance cost in the form of bread. Each follower needs to be fed at the end of each day, and any followers that are used to conquer a nearby town require extra bread. While conquered towns provide some bread as a daily income, this bread isn't enough to cover the needs of the growing flock. Conquest - and therefore, the extra portion of bread for a conquering army - is also a required activity, meaning there is never enough bread for the cult. In a traditional 4X or management sim, this would be solved by investing in towns to increase their bread production, tasking followers with bread creation, or being able in some way to shape the game's economy to better accommodate the needs of the player. However, while the economy can be nominally shaped by the decisions the player makes when crafting their faith, in practice, the passive income is never enough to fund the ongoing revolution. This creates a system where decisions about where to conquer is based not on what's most strategically advantageous or what will win the game, but on what the least expensive option is so as not to run out of bread and lose half of the accumulated resources and followers. Needing to balance growth and income is reasonable and provides an interesting challenge. Needing to balance both while requiring scaling without mitigating the effects of scaling is frustrating. More problematic, however, is the tactics mechanics in what is ostensibly a tactical game. Once followers arrive in a city to convert its residents, players play through a tactical battle. Which followers arrive in a city is dependent on its defenders, with different defenders having different weaknesses, and different followers having different strengths. All of this should lead to interesting tactical gameplay. Decisions about positioning and which troops to send, balancing strengths and weaknesses, and minimising the number of troops sent in the first place to minimise bread consumption are all excellent decisions to have to make in a tactical game. However, all of it is undermined by the sheer clunkiness of the actual tactical battles. Trying to command units to attack any given unit is an exercise in frustration, with units sometimes moving, sometimes not, sometimes getting themselves stuck, and having some of the worst AI I've seen in a tactical game. One option the game offers is to remove the tactical element entirely by using an autobattler. That the game offers this option is telling in and of itself, as it feels like a cheeky admission that the manual mode is awful and unplayable. While the autobattler does make the battles less frustrating, it doesn't necessarily improve them. The awful AI is still there in the autobattler, with units still wandering towards the enemies they're weak against, getting stuck, and dying. The battles are a miserable experience, and with no way to skip or improve them, just make the game an awful slog. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3584741655 The lack of management ability and the awful tactics might be tolerable if the rest of the game was compelling or interesting, but it isn't. While the game has a mechanic for choosing tenets of the cult, these are basic and don't fundamentally alter the gameplay loop. Religious tenets are primarily used to filter which followers are available to be recruited, but with the caveat that it's not clear which tenets unlock which followers. Choosing tenets that are out of line with previously chosen tenets also drives away previously-recruited tenets, creating a disincentive to change. The religion crafting mechanic, then, is less of a mechanic, and more of a rote personality test, affecting nothing and being the rare spark of humour in an otherwise bland and tedious game. Blending genres to create a religious simulator has been done well before. Though I may dislike it, Cult of the Lamb's success is a testament to how much people want a game that does exactly what Becoming Saint is trying to be. However, Becoming Saint's blending of genres creates a game that's frustrating in its simplicity, annoying in its combat mechanics, baffling in its lack of management ability, and ultimately, just boring. [quote] If you enjoyed this review, check out [url=https://www.jannekeparrish.com/game/] my other reviews [/url] and [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44626948-Loons/] my curator page. [/url] Thanks for reading! [/quote]

I would like to give Become Saint higher praise for its charm but the game's mechanics are too obtuse for me to give it a recommendation. As I played this on the Steam deck (which the game is 'verified' for) I also felt the game needed more polish with how the UI controls on a controller, which added to my frustration with the game. Though I technically won my first playthrough I really had to stumble around until things began to click for me and I wouldn't say that experience was particularly fun. The game does give you pop-ups to explain the very basics of what the game loop is and how battles technically work but I felt like it doesn't do enough. This game really needs a "Hands-on tutorial" where the game presents an optional tutorial scenario and gives you a step-by-step explanation of what is happening with pauses between each action. Even after playing 3 different runs I still don't feel like i grasp all the mechanics. For example: - Why did one enemy unit lose energy when none of my units dealt that damage? - How do criticals work in combat? - After 3 runs I have never got the food production above "bad." Comments left on the steam forum say it's based on decisions but no decision I ever made changed it. - There is a relationship mechanic for the emperor and pope. For the pope I clearly saw events (crusades, gifted towns) where the pope rewards or punishes you based on your relationship to them.... what does the emperor do? After three runs I saw no events or flavor for a bad/good relationship with the emperor at all. Even when I was the "pro-emperor" personality! - Different units consume different amounts of food on a march... how does that work and why am I only learning this now after my third run??? And a really big one, what is the WIN condition? The game indicates a lot throughout your run that you're looking to get x amount of cardinals out of 20-25 throughout Italy. You would think then the game ends or something happens when you reach that threshold but no. Instead the game trots on without explanation of what to do now. You actually have to look up on the Steam forum, from developer comments on user questions, that you need to also capture Rome to win the game. Why is that not made more clear when you select towns to convert on the map or explain it in snippets talking about the cardinals? You would hope that once you get over the uphill learning curve of the game it would be fun or rewarding... but unfortunately it isn't worth it. Don't get me wrong, the game does have its moments where you feel proud at capturing a big town for the first time or make some silly decisions. However the game gets stale quickly. Fundamentally combat in this game is an auto-battler and you only get to make a few blessing/curse decisions against enemies or your side. Yes there is a 'tactician' mode (and you can individually force units into this mode as well) but it's pretty miserable mode to be in (I'll leave the discussion about combat to a seperate section.) Once you get enough towns and make enough decisions you can get a consistent team of well-fed followers to come to your marches and defeat any town in the game. Basically at a certain point the game becomes uninteresting with the only meaningful decisions or combat happening at the beginning point of your campaign when you're still trying to build up your steam-roller. The game just becomes a slog; you pick a decision that barely matter anymore, you select the same team of followers, you curse your opponents in combat, repeat. It doesn't feel rewarding or fun after a certain point. Speaking of tactics, I don't know if it's a steam deck issue but if you try to pause combat to make tactical decisions using the left bumper it stops combat, lets you quickly select bless/curse and you can't hover over the combat field to view individual units. To truly get a proper "pause" of combat you have to move the cursor (this for me is on the steam deck btw) over the pause button and click it. But it gets worse, after you select an action in "pause" the game unpauses. You can only do one action at a time and need to hover the cursor again over the pause button to do another action while the game is moving on. By the time you do the next action something you didn't want to happen... happened. Generally frustrating and gives you a false sense of control even if the game is primarily designed as auto-battler. After my third run with this game I think I am done playing it. That isn't bad for a 15 dollar game on sale but half of it was more frustrating than it needed to be. I would highly recommend the developers of this game implement a better tutorial system so that frustration I felt doesn't offput future players. I wish them the best of luck at improving this game.

The combat system is not well explained, but not because the tutorial is not good but because there is no combat system, in fact the moment you enter the combat stage the game suggest to activate the auto battle mode. Apart from the combat phase there is no game, you press a couple of button and that's it. This is not a game, there is nothing as such

[h1]Simple, but effective[/h1] While reading this, keep in mind: I bought this game and played for about 6 hours straight on 3 consecutive days, before I managed to put it aside to write this review - I love it! But let's be honest: The choices do not change a whole lot on the surface and the gameplay is repetitive and not the créme de la créme of RTS or economy simulation games, but it has enough of both to be immensely entertaining, especially if you're educated enough to get the social commentary. EDIT (over 30 hours in): It's [b]far more complex[/b] behind the scenes than it seems at first glance! If you're educated about the medieval society, especially the mechanics between religion and other castes, you will absolutely [b]love all the puns and sidejabs and references![/b] If you have an eye for details, you will love all the little, mostly superficial, but charming changes your choices have. If you like RTSs, but prefer something lighthearted (even want it to switch to autobattle)... If you like rougelites, but prefer something lighthearted... If you like adorable, gorgeous, simplified comic-style graphics... [h3]... then this game is for you![/h3]

I love the concept, but the execution is lacking. It doesn't feel satisfying, neither in combat nor through the game mechanics. I wish it was reworked somehow, but at this point I doubt it is on the table.

The game still needs work, pathing is terrible and unit movement is clunky. At certain points I lost battles due to units not taking in the order and standing still while being shot at. I'm also not certain if I'm using the artifacts wrong but their impact is almost negligible, which to me doesn't make much sense, tehre should be a greater impact, considering you don't exactly get showered by it. The critical hits system is... lacking, for lack of a better word. Losing a full unit on a random roll kind of seems unintuitive to me and like something that should be better designed, why not just deal x3 damage or something of the sort? Certainly makes more sense than having a unit disappear on the last random roll of a conversion. Another frustrating thing is having to pick "tactical" or auto battler each and every battle, there should be an option to disable those popups, after the 15th conversion you mostly have an idea of how you want to play the game, it should be a less intrusive toggle and not a popup each fight. Overall the idea of shaping a religion is fun, although I'd like to see some more effects rather than ±units, the gameplay loop seems a bit simple, I was hoping for a few more events to respond to, I got to the point where I'm just converting places until the map is all converted, the only challenge being, pathing and the random critical hits. On the positive side, the graphics are really nice, the units are hillarious and the music is pleasant, though I'd also enjoy a bit more variety in that area as well, maybe weave the religion ethics into the audio theme somehow! I do hope things take an upturn because I mostly had fun!

这明显垃圾游戏吧。 发展无聊，战斗无聊。 能玩的东西也太少太少了。这也算游戏吗

+ The game is original and nice. Wonderful presentation, art and music. + I really love the battle system, it is very interesting wih lots of combos, and the RNG necessary to make it fresh every time. + The politics system is on the spot, also! My major issue with the game, since i really want to spend hours on it, is that: The EASY mode is too easy, with no challenge at all, and boring, I could not lose in any way! The NORMAL mode, is always a defeat in about 7-8 turns in the game, from hunger, since the math do not add up!!! Something is wrong here! Can there be a in between solution? Please!!!

Just alright. A fun little game with a shallow amount of viable strategy and not much replay value, instead leaning more towards what simply works and with minimal deviation. Also no way to stop mid-run, which is annoying.