Despite hearing some negative things about this game, I was still hoping I'd enjoy the game, as I enjoyed the games The Behemoth released prior to releasing Pit People, and a friend of mine really enjoyed this game. Unfortunately, my experience with this game was pretty mixed. While I did ultimately decide to recommend it, it's only the story that barely pushed it to a recommendation for me, and the gameplay left a lot to be desired.
The story in this game is by far the best thing about it. It has the same goofy humour that The Behemoth is known for, even if it falls a little bit short of the story content of previous games (the narration and overall tone of the game can be a little bit overbearing and negative at times). It's still quite enjoyable though, with memorable characters and some fantastic humour. The story content was often the only thing compelling me to keep playing when the gameplay turned into a slog.
And become a slog it did. This game features turn-based combat, and unlike previous games from The Behemoth, it seems to be going for a greater emphasis on strategy and planning. Unfortunately, this approach fell short for me for a few reasons. First of all, the game really doesn't display information very well, especially for a game that's so heavily based on strategy, and there were many cases where I longed for more information to be displayed, especially during battles. Even a small tooltip to show some basic stats and info when hovering over a fighter would have gone a long way.
Secondly, the gameplay felt far to random and tedious. The game has a variety of different types of creatures which all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it encourages you to experiment with them. Unfortunately, battles are spread over a large map that's often visually obscured and filled with enemies and obstacles, and there's no indication of what enemies you will fight or what the win condition of a fight will be before you start it. Thus, there isn't really a way to build your team around a particular threat without playing the fight first. If you lose the fight or choose to back out, you'll have to navigate all the way back to the city to change your party and then all the way back to the fight (if it's even still there, as the location of the city randomly moves). Thus, it feels like the game either forces you to use the same party and pray you don't run into something that they can't fight well, which relies heavily on luck, or to constantly run back and forth to changing your party composition, which is extremely tiresome.
There were a number of other minor things that frustrated me as well.
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[*] Some creatures' attacks relied almost entirely on luck to do anything, which made them feel useless to use, but frustrating to fight.
[*] Saving is only possible when you return to the city, which felt extremely unnecessary.
[*] Multiplayer just made combat worse, as the number of fighters on either side doubled, which made fights take way longer to finish and made combat drag out.
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There were some times when I enjoyed combat, when the fights felt fair, and it felt like my positioning and strategy actually made a difference, but most of the game felt unfair and tedious, which I did not enjoy.
The game looks great, and has the charming animated art style that The Behemoth is known for. It also ran well, and I don't recall running into any bugs.
[b]TL;DR[/b] This grid-based turn-based fighting game has a great art style and story, and runs very well, but does a poor job of communicating important information, relies too much on luck, and often feels very tedious. If you really enjoy The Behemoth's style of humour, or really like turn-based combat, you may enjoy this game, but others will probably want to avoid it.
