Some interesting concepts here, but between the outdated UI, mediocre graphics straight out of a 1995 RTS game, and generally poor gameplay, this is not a game I can really recommend to anyone.
In a cross between RPG and tactical strategy, you command a troop of "Immortals", basically hero units of various types, with powers, equipment, and stats of different kinds. The better part of the gameplay is spent in regional maps, ordering these units around (sometimes with allies, or summoned units if your Immortals can create those), fighting enemies as well as looting chests.
Moving around the map feels awkward and clunky ; it's reminiscent of Age of Empires (the first one) in terms of responsiveness and efficiency... which is to say, it sucks a**. The controls are easy enough to grasp, though I often found myself giving out orders by mistake - this is an isometric game, but the game's recognition of where your cursor is actually located is doubtful at best, and my units would regularly move to a square I did not want. This is especially problematic because the command to "attack" an enemy unit is the same as the one to "move" - so, too many times to count, I [i]thought[/i] I'd asked my ranged unit to attack an enemy, only for them to move up right next to its face like an idiot.
There is a "CTRL-click" functionality to prevent misclicks like this, but this is quite awkward to use, because you also need to shift-click to select several units, and the recognition of where your mouse is is [i]just[/i] functional enough to discourage you from needing to CTRL-click most of the time. Either way, one wonders why the developers couldn't have simply programmed a better way of moving about and attacking enemies, rather than requiring a clunky workaround to prevent misclicks.
Speaking of shift-click and unit selection, that's another real chore. If you have a unit selected and you shift-click on other units, it will [i]keep your unit selected and put it in the same group of selected units[/i], which is such an asinine and unusual way of doing strategy unit selection. I've never played a strategy game where there was no way of deselecting a unit apart from selecting another one. It's, again, really awkward and clunky - left-clicking on the ground does absolutely nothing, so you wonder why that couldn't have just been a way of deselecting units (which, I might add, is very common in RTS games). I often forgot I had a unit selected, and shift-clicked a group of other units, realizing too late that I ordered that first unit to move to a very impractical location that I didn't intend to.
Also, because of the 90's-era graphics, units often bunch up together graphically, and it becomes quite difficult to keep track of which unit is at any given spot in clumps of units, let alone select any specific one. The imprecise and often counter-productive shift-click to select multiple units doesn't help, of course. It's often just easier to select a bunch of units and move them all together, even though, from a strategy standpoint, it'd be better to control them individually given their varied skills.
Unit movement fares little better: the game has a sort of "action points" system going on, dictating how much you can do in a given turn. Issue is - units stop automatically when their actions run out, [b][i]even if there are absolutely no enemies left on the map.[/i][/b] This leads to "stuttering" armies that are as responsive as snails caught in the throes of senile dementia, stopping every few seconds to wait for your next (gonna be a tad sarcastic here) very very surprising and unpredictable order to... move to that same location you clicked on a few seconds ago. You'd think so-called Immortals would have mastered the art of moving from point A to point B without some overseer needing to refresh their memory when they shut down like high-maintenance roombas, but eh, that's 90's gameplay for you.
The rest of the UI is no better - the map view feels claustrophobic and obsolete, with an inability to zoom out or rotate the battlefield. The menus feel dated and ugly. The graphics, as mentioned, are mediocre. They resemble what would happen if someone looked at the first Age of Empire and said: "hey, I want to create this, but worse".
There are a few positive points, of course - as I mentioned, some interesting ideas are here. I like the character progression for the Immortals, and all the Immortal units feel varied and interesting. The character design themselves are not ugly, and although overall the graphics aren't great, there is a sort of rustic charm to them (kind of like revisiting the original AoE II in 2021). The inventory system feels nostalgic, in a good way. The sound design is fine; the voice acting is better than expected (though with a couple amateurish voices here and there - the two dudes at the beginning come to mind), and the music is pretty good.
Overall though, not an experience I would recommend. One rage-inducing misclick to go explore the other side of a distant forest instead of shooting at the evil cyclops is one too many.
