Our Adventurer Guild

Fun encounter and class design. Looking forward to what the dev releases next.

Another game that seems great in theory, but fails in practice. It kept me mildly entertained until probably about mid-game, and my enjoyment plummeted pretty steeply even as I was unlocking more features. The concept where you are running a guild of adventurers that you can level up and train in various ways, gear up, team up, and send on quests... yeah, that sounds awesome. Which is why I bought this game. You have your "stable" of adventurers, you get a list of quests or other tasks you can assign your adventurers to, there are story beats occasionally, rinse and repeat. The problem is that it doesn't do any one mechanic great. It does them all well enough. The best part was the actual training of the adventurers, giving them different skills and unlocking better classes based on their attributes. I really enjoyed that. I wish that the various traits that an adventurer could earn from their level or completed quests had more variety, and there were more unique events that would help flesh out the adventurers in ways that made each one feel special. But this aspect of the game was.... not a huge part of the overall game. I would have loved to see a quest mechanic that was more similar to the mechanic in the game Dispatch. The best part of Dispatch could have been the core gameplay here. Instead we get generic quest maps, generic battle maps, generic enemies, and generic objectives. And the battle mechanics are one of the weakest aspects of this game, but it's what the game really hinges on. There are certainly optimal strategies here, and the one that jumps out at me is really just to avoid melee altogether. In fact, I find it hard to find a better team than one stacked with mages and potions. The melee component of combat will punish you, with your tank characters being surrounded and then targeted by enemies including their ranged units. And if you have two tank characters, the AI will target and try to kill a single one instead of splitting the aggro. You really have to be careful with use of taunt and block abilities, and sometimes decline counter attacks (as the enemy can counter your counter, resulting in even more damage to your character). When I took a defender into combat, it was mostly about him standing here so the mage can blast the enemy from behind with impunity, and that got old. So, yeah, the game has mediocre mechanics everywhere. Crafting was bland and mediocre. The NPCs that flesh out your guild are all common fantasy trope characters. The story is boring and generic. And the quests became a chore. Someone needs to make roughly the same game, but really allow you to design your own character (the guild master) with actual guild master traits and the ability to level up. And then allow you to run your guild and adventurers using mechanics similar to the ones in Dispatch. No combat, just you, as the guild master, picking the best team for the job based on their attributes and abilities, and then living with the consequences. If this looks good to you, it will probably entertain you for a while, and based on that might be worth the buy, but it ultimately becomes tedious, dull, and boring, not to mention frustrating, and you'll likely end up like me: disappointed.