Expeditions: Samurai

IN GAME TEXT WAY TOO SMALL, NO GAME OPTIONS TO CHANGE IN-GAME TEXT SIZE!! What is with devs these days, everyone plays at different resolutions and on different monitors / screens the sheer number of games that release without an in-game text size or ui size slider blows my mind. REFUNDED,

A lot of people seem to have issues with "historical accuracy". May I remind you all that, if that game was 100% accurate, the first samurai you encounter will just lop your head off. I enjoyed my time with this short prologue (I don't think it deserves the title of Act I. Too short, nothing much to do). This is not the best game I ever played but I tend to judge games by whether I had fun or not. Is it worth the price for what it is now? No. But if yout are optimistic that, when finished, it will be, then grab it at a major discount. My only wish is that there was a little more depth to things. From combat (ranged is overtuned) to the companions. I think the priest is, by far, the weirdest one and not in a good way. Also the way the UX handled is quite clunky. Having to select your attack to use it is... a weird choice for a game in 2026, and makes stealth in particular more difficult for no good reason. EDIT: I see a lot of negative comments about the art style. I think the game looks great - from the character models and portraits to the animations of movement and combat. I guess to each their own!

I have played every expeditions game and this is the worst, even though I know it's EA. - PLEASE GOD do not use this character art style. i can still remember what the memorable characters looked like from vikings, rome, etc. and these cartoon fuccers are horrible - controls def need refined, i use controller and cannot figure out why some things are confirmed with 'x' and others with 'square' this needs fixed. - the tooltip for the skills blocks the entire screen. i didnt love this on rome either but its even worse here. would be way better to have it appear on the side so i can see if the skill fits the situation i am in. - please dont make stealth a big part of it, people that play turn based games dont give an F about stealth. especially when now the dumb ass partners who are ai controlled can trigger enemy view. this is so annoying and i quit at first stealth part becasue it is not fun at all - you have a large fan base and these are amazing games, please dont flush this down the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥....

Tldr the only reason to buy this right now is if you like the previous games and want to support the devs. There just isn't enough content available right now to justify $20. Before I begin my actual review, let me say I have no idea why everyone is so mad about there being female characters in the game. There were women being Vikings and Praetorians in their previous games, so I'm not sure why everyone is so up in arms about it in this one. Who wants a party based rpg with only dudes in the party? Certainly not me (except for you FF 15 my beloved), even if it is not necessarily historically accurate. Now on the the actual review, if you can even call it that. It's more feedback I should be giving them in their discord, but whatever. I can copy paste it over there. I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has played Rome and Vikings multiple times but never tried Conquistador. So I can't give any perspective on how this compares to Conquistador if you're wondering why I mention Rome and Vikings a bunch but not Conquistador. It's lacking a lot of polish, which is to be expected from EA. I encountered many different bugs in my time. Most of them were minor, but one of them is so bad it makes the game nigh unplayable on higher difficulty. You can't move to a hex next to an enemy where another enemy has died without looting the dead one. This results in you taking an attack of opportunity, which often means death, or at the least tons of damage, and your health does not regenerate in between fights on the same map. Why they felt the need to let you loot in combat I have no idea. Maybe because of the new stealth system they added. Speaking of the stealth system, if you like Skyrim stealth archer this is the game for you. One character with a bow and high sneak attack stat cleared most of the encounters for me without even starting a fight. The enemy AI is not diligent enough about searching for you once alerted or smart enough to actually find you if you just run away. You can just sneak up, shoot someone directly in front of another enemy, then sneak away and repeat. I think this could be a cool addition if balanced better, but as of right now it's just overpowered. In fact, ranged attacks in general seemed overpowered. All of them bypassing guard mean tanky enemies just die when shot with a couple arrows that would take your melee units twice as long to kill. I just ran with a tank and 3 ranged units and most encounters were pretty easy. And going hand in hand with stealth are my complaints about the control scheme. It it janky, weird, and completely different than the one in Viking and Rome. I was constantly doing things I wasn't trying to do because of the controls and having to reload. Beware this game does not autosave constantly like Rome did. You will need to make lots of manual saves to avoid losing time when you inevitably ♥♥♥♥ something up because of the controls. Also the game does not pause when you hit escape. I found this the hard way when an npc I was doing a mission with charged off into the next combat of the area and died while I was in the settings. Npcs then reacted like I had murdered this character myself and were mad at me. It's a strange choice to make the npc autonomous and able to just run off and start fights by himself instead of making them a temporary party member, especially if he can just die from doing so. It makes it so you can't take the time to reset or loot in between encounters. You just have to charge to the next fight. I guess they didn't want you to be able to stealth these encounters as the npc says he won't participate in stealth killing. On the topic of combat, if you played Rome you will know exactly what to expect. It felt almost exactly the same but nerfed. You now have two action points, with actions costing either one or two points to execute. Killing classless enemies now only regenerates 1 action point, and since nearly all attacks cost 2 actions points you aren't running around pulling off 5 kills in a turn like you could in Rome. Usually you are just able to use that 1 extra action point to cast a buff of some type. The use of consumables is also heavily nerfed from Rome, where consumables were quite powerful and essential. Here I found none other than healing items, and the ones of the map weren't all that consequential like a rock or a spear. Now, you may notice I said a tank and 3 ranged. Yes, the party size is now 4 from the 6 it was in Rome and Vikings. It makes sense given the scale of the fights is much smaller but I missed having the flexibility and strategic depth more party members gave me. Again, another reason the combat felt nerfed. Thankfully the forced fights with your generic party members from Rome are gone, as the generic party members are nowhere to be found. I will say building your party members is great. Character builds are now like Vikings with the skills from equipment like Rome. I like this a lot. The flexibility is awesome and they fused the two quite well. It seems the overworld army management from Rome is gone. Or maybe it's just not available yet. Either way I missed it. The roadmap does mention managing your own town, so I guess they are going back to the settlement management from Viking. Finally, the art is an interesting choice. Moving to a more stylized art style vs the realistic look of the previous games was jarring at first, but I soon was fine with it. What I did not enjoy was the character portraits are now zoomed in models of the characters in game vs the old hand drawn static portraits from previous entries. It makes it very apparent that every character model uses pretty much the same face just with different skin tone and hair. I really didn't like looking at every npc and seeing they have the same face. I assume this was the same in their previous games, but you never saw the in game models up close so you never noticed. To wrap it up, I think the bones of the game are good, but they definitely need to fix a lot of things before release. Only buy this if you want to support the devs, or like the previous games enough that you know you will want to play it on full release and can save some money by buying now.

I refunded. Hopefully I will revisit it after some things have be tweaked, added and made more stable. It crashed every few minutes. I'd suggest waiting a while.

Sadly not like Rome, feels more like a downgrade then a next expeditions. Perhaps it´ll improve after EA.

Dont bother it is a cash grab, It is little more than a demo at this point you get the first few quests then it ends with the road map of what they might do

Bought this for support game development cause loved earlier Expedtions Rome and tought five hour gameplay is enough - was wrong, this has launched too early even to early access. Graphics are disturbing bad style - not many games prevent enjoying game like this cause graphics, maybe cause playability was bad and experience in first tutorial mission wasnt really even close satisfying. Hoping graphic style back to Rome and even copying game system to similar, if writing new stories and making new maps. Maybe after year this will be close to ready and willing to buy full price if good reviews.