Epic Manager - Create Your Own Adventuring Agency!

First, let me say that I was really hoping for this game to be amazing. At first, I thought that it had a lot of potential as there were a pretty good amount of features and mechanics introduced, it felt great. I have three main issues with this game. 1. You are penalized, for playing well. If you finish a trimester in first place, be assured that the following turns you will lose a lot of Fame, simply because other agencies dislike you. This is of course, for balancing purpose, however, what devs missed, is that this is NOT FUN. Being penalized for managing and planning stuff well...is simply not the way to go. Dropping the league system would most likely benefit this game. 2. The combat system, holy molly must you be patient because its slow, very slow. Everything has a lot of HPs and you dont hit all that hard. The combat would be more fun if fights would take 50% less time. 3. The price tag. Im sorry but this game is not worth 19.99 $ CDN. Maybe 10$, sure. In the end, even after having refunded the game, I still want to play it, but I know that i'll just get frustrated over point #1. If they ever make significant changes to at least point #1 and #2. I'll probably re-purchase the game. Until then, I would recommend waiting.

After my first (almost) 5 hours in this game, i can say i'm having a lot of fun. The game has a lot to offer in the actual state, enough options and things to do to keep you entertained hours and hours. So, for now, a quick review with quick points (no specific order): -More than a manager, you have a map to discover and combats to do with your adventurers. -It reminds me (somewhat) to Darkest Dungeon. The main difference is that here you manage a guild and have to compete against other guilds in tournaments -Nice cartoon art -Have found no bugs until now -Map has around 338 different localizations, if i'm not wrong, including cities and capitals but also mines, farms, forests, mountains and some more (map is a big hexagon with 30 cells each side) -You compete against 11 other guilds/agencies for your level, running missions with your adventurers to be more famous than the others. I have seen 5 different leagues, so that's a total of 55 guilds to fight with -As the tournament goes on, the agencies that have the least score will be eliminated, so you will need to manage your time and your advantage depending on where are you on the score table and the week you are in -12 external factions which will give you the missions you need to be famous and rich, with a reputation system for each one -A big amount of adventurers and classes to contract (i think 16 classes right now) and you have the possiblity of mixing classes after levelling a bit, so the amount of possible combinations is crazy for you to try -RPG system: your adventurers will gain experience from missions and will level, gaining better stats and atributes and some special skills for you to choose when level -You can equip heroes with items you will find in missions as loot or you can also buy them from a merchant, if you have the gold, ofc -The guild/agency you rule can research improvements for almost all aspects of the game and for the heroes -You can also contract staff to improve your adventurers: accountant to improve gold after missions, combat trainers, priests to give you bonuses (there are 7 main gods in the game and each hero will pray to its own god) -You will recruit and search for missions to do around the world with your scout/s and then you will send your party to the mission location to fight the enemies there (turn combat) -There are random encounters through the world (at each tile different than a city and without mission) that will test you heroes skills and your good sense to choose what to do in each encounter. Those encounters can give you loot, experience, traits to a hero or well, be the doom for some of them -With the Intrigue system, you can steal and sabotage other guilds/agencies, but they also will do the same with you (good morning, you have been stolen! nice!) -Agency/guild licenses (bought) will let you to expand your business while you level up your guild (with fame) to have access to other improvements -You can save anywhere, anytime! (this is not a console game) -Permadeath. It's fun but frustating to lose your heroes so beware what missions you choose. You know, you will have your favorite and 1 day... Fun, polished, with a high amount of content and replayability. If you like RPG and management with a good sense of humour, try this, you will not regret.

A+ for the concept..... B- for their UI C+ for the managment options (depth of classes etc.) D for the combat (slower than sluggish compounded further by the next item) F for the optimization (losing mouse clicks, ai freezes on their turn, bugs etc. etc. etc.) 5/10

Though this game has some good and bad aspects, overall it feels to be an average game. I do recommend that you pick this up but just know what you're going to get before hand. One of the biggest things that sets this RPG game apart from others is that you're supposed to recruit and then negotiate your adventurer's contract before they will join your party. Which sounds fun until you actually go and do it. Adventurers are a dime and dozen and there's not much that separates them apart from one another besides level and traits and class. Once you do settle on one, negotiating their contract is nothing more than a slider which yields a % of success, rejection and failure. For me I thought the adventurers would be more exclusive and that you would need to bump into them or search for them so you can hire them. Even if there was a "flyer" that was LFM.. then people wouldn't just show up like a shopping list. There isn't any personality given to the negotiating process either. It either succeeds or rejected and you have to try again or fails. However even if it does fails - who cares?? because adventurers are a dime a dozen and you can get another person the next turn at the worst. Easy to learn game that isn't complicated. The tutorial does a pretty good job walking you through the key points. The UI is fairly clunky when you're trying to equip items and look for party members. Don't forget that you can't do any of this without being at a spot in which you have a home teleport to (which aren't too many). The nicest thing about this game is the multi-classing leveling up feature. Every 5 levels you can choose a new class for the adventurer and still retain your old skills/spells with their old augmentations. Building up your adventurer is fun and trying to unlock a secret legendary class is even more so. Though the world and quests are randomly generated, It doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on how you play the game. Since this game is essentially a race for how much fame you can achieve - it is best to repeatedly look for quests every single turn and make it to where the quests are as close to your current position as possible. Turn based combat with action points works really well. Finally a system that has more to do than just "fight, special skill, item and flee". Certainly you still do those actions but now you can strategically wait and focus more action points for your next action and possibly gain 3 attacks in 2 turns. https://youtu.be/OFKeZeF7jcU Though overall an average "alright" game - this is still a fun enough game to pickup at this price point and comfortably play.

For $5 more you can buy Darkest Dungeon, and I think that's a better value. If this goes on sale for 4.99, give it a whirl if you like offering contract deals and/or telling greedy heroes what hole they can find their raise in. For a game with Manager in the title, you do very little management. Management is centered around your heroes, herefor referred to in my own experiences as the Badasses of the Happy Snack Cake Adventurer Agency. Recruit your badasses, send them on quests for gold and fame. All good, the combat isn't silly or hard, smack him, heal him. Some classes and skills are just useless though, why have a priest heal one person when a shaman heals everyone. A rogue's special attack, Arrow Volley, costs 6ap, regular attack 3AP, and does, wait for it, twice the damage. Why would I wait to build up 6AP? But my mage's ice dagger was doing 5x the damage of a regular attack for the same AP costs as Arrow Volley, why would I use a regular attack? If you end up in the bottom rankings for guilds the game ends. Here's my biggest issue with that. The quests are randomly placed around a map, sometimes taking as much as six turns to reach one. Each turn I lose gold to pay my badasses. So I spent 600 gold to get to a quest, made 800 gold from the quest, and then spent 400 gold to get to the next quest... I just lost gold doing the only thing available to do. Do harder quests and get more gold, seems reasonable, and then my badasses meet bigger badasses and they die because I can't run from a fight like a coward so those badasses I spent gold and time developing into steroided killing machines are dead, I have to spent more gold to recruit new ones and they have to do the poorer quests because they're weak because I SPENT ALL MY DAMN GOLD MARCHING IDIOTS TO THEIR DEATH... Quests need to be worth more gold, I want to swim in that crap early on like Scrooge McDuck. Let me finance two parties easily, let me get the low level upgrades for guilds without paying 13000 gold when a quest pays 1000, but my heroes cost 150 a turn. Let me blackmail heroes into working for free because I'm a capitalist willing to do anything to make Happy Snack Cake Adventure Agency the best damn Agency around! It's not terrible, but it does need some balancing. I liked my characters, I didn't want them to die, but after the first six went down, I saw their replacements are disposable meat bags just there to finish the job and get me paid, and if they died, hey at least I didn't have to give them part of that gold.

The game is a blast to play and so far has developers extremely interested in feed back and interested in the ideas of players. Have seen developers hanging out in several Twitch streams, including my own for almost 8 hours, asking opinions and having open discussions on the game. So far this is early access handled correctly from the dev side IMO. Game play wise, I have had a blast even with this initial early access release, so I am excited for what this game will become. The fights are not always hard but they are not the sole purpose of the game, overall management is and your ability to place your Adventurer parties in the right place at the right time becomes important deeper into the game. I enjoy long games so the pace doesn't bother me, I actually enjoy it. Dice rolls are hard to resist and a blast to add in extra risk taking. You have a story, variety of enemies, and a boss is not to be taken lightly when you come across one. TL:DR - awesome combo of game styles I was surprised to find works insanely well together, great devs interested in constructive feedback, just a big surprise of a game overall. Excited to play and and more excited for it's future.

Solid thumbs up for me. Failed 2 runs so far, had fun doing it. Working dad with limited time for gaming, this one is pretty great for that. Quick enough progression, where you dont feel you are grinding as a time sink. Deep to where you can plan your strategy while at work for your next run (once wife and kids get to sleep). Combat is fun, graphics are nice on the eyes. Does feel a bit like you are rushed at times, but having read through the forums (with the ridiculously engaged devs answering a majority of the posts) I can see that the rushed feeling was intended. You have to progress, or you lose. Its a nice axe over the head to keep things interesting. There is a learning curve, nothing on dwarf fortress level, but going into my third run, I feel I may have the basics down but probably have quite a bit to see yet. This is good. All in all woth a play, really got my moneys worth.

Epic Manager is a totally okayish game (in a world of decent or better games), with a good basic premise and a lot of things that stop it being engaging. This is a shame, because it's pretty well put together, and cute. The biggest flaw, and why I can't really recommend this game, is that it doesn't really feel like a management game; it feels like an RPG without any characters. For most of the game, you're more or less forced to command each fight, which is slow, repetitive and ultimately tedious. Until you massively outrank the fight, the combat simulation (aka "fight for me" roll) can lose fights, and a loss in a fight can mean outright death for your adventurers. I expect to have the ability to decide on general strategies for a team, not to have to control them completely in an unimaginative combat system. There are no obvious game settings to speed things up or skip animations. Where the game would feel like a management game, it doesn't, because your progression is locked based on your guild's level. Even if you have enough money to do so, you can't field more parties, carry out more scout activities, or even hire more adventurers, so you're constantly battling against your action limits rather than your economy management. It's not a matter of making resourcing decisions, it's just "keep your money flowing until you gain a few levels". Then you start fielding multiple parties, but again you're making all the decisions, so the game progress slows down to match. You have to keep making new contracts to keep your adventurers about, and it's purely a financial decision for both of you. It would be nice to have some type of loyalty factored in, or some reward for keeping your adventurers happy. So it lacks in overall management, but has tons of fiddly micromanagement and inventory management. There are no systems for you to automate portions of it, not many ways to sort your inventory or roster. It doesn't feel like you're building up an agency and making decisions about how it should advance or run, it just feels like you're leveling up in a mostly defined way. One other thing is that success is punished. Doing well makes the other agencies in your League carry out annoying attacks, lowering your fame (XP) or stealing your money. This is something you either have to accept, or spend precious actions and money on rectifying. I'm not sure if you can end a year without advancing, but if so, then the "right" move is probably to spend more time at the lower leagues. Leagues would be much better if they were periodic tournaments or awards ceremonies you opt into, rather than the framing element of the entire game. The end boss fight, while not difficult, introduces new rules without mention or explanation, which seemed like BS! Then the game is over. So it was a 15 hour roguelike? Not something I'm keen to launch another run on! Ultimately, the game is too much of an RPG to be a good management game, not a good RPG, and not a great blend of both, which unfortunately leaves it in the awkward position of being a game I don't feel like I'd recommend to anyone at all.

Cool idea, but the huge punishments for doing well make it not very fun. Would rather see the other teams actually compete for first instead of doing terrible and punishing me for it.

This game had cool potential but was essentially forced out of early access early and abandoned. Don't play it. There is enough potential there to make you wish it was finished, but it's ultimately overall a bad experience due to lack of polish and balancing.