This game is interesting in concept, but the delivery is flawed. Many of the mechanics just don't fit together well and other things lack polish. The graphics are nice, the FPS is smooth and the bugs aren't very noticeable, but its partly because the game is very simple. It isn't bad. I'd give this game a 7 if I could. But it isn't the best it could be, or better than this war of mine which it seems to be a 3D clone of.
1) The character status systems feels very inconsistent. The average human can live healthily on 8 hours of sleep. I've had times where a character comes back very tired, I put them to sleep until they're well rested and send them to cook a meal or feed chickens for the last weaning day hours and suddenly they're tired again and can't walk. Sleeping in a bed overnight barely does anything for healing wounds or sickness even when they're bandaged or on drugs.
2) The characters are very indistinct functionally. Only a few have any traits you would notice. Having more of them is a big drain on your food, which is a problem because you can only send 1 scavenger out at a time and they in turn can only carry so much. I felt really ♥♥♥♥ after getting a new character for the 'keep' since they took away the small surplus I used to send meals to the troops. There wasn't much for the character to do anyways, since you have to refine wood scavenged from last night into planks or tools before making anything else. Crafting is vertical, so there isn't any need for more than one or two people to craft everything you scavenged last night.
3) The game's menus are really barebones. There is only one graphics quality option and a resolution dropdown, there are no options to mute game in the background or other options. You can't save except at dawn, so if you quit you lose both the day's and the night's progress. There isn't an option to save, even when day turns to night. Its hard to control the characters with the current UI. There are no hotkeys for survivors so you have to click them, which is annoying if there are a few in one crafting area since the UI overlaps. Another thing about the time, deliveries and the like can't be carried out at night. They just get interrupted which is really annoying. It would be safest and easiest to deliver things at night, but noooo only 1 person can get out of bed.
4) This is a personal gripe but the castle isn't a castle or even a keep. A castle is a fortified residence, while the keep is the highest and most protected tower or section of a castle where the lord usually lives. The area you live is is in no way a keep, the heart of most castles. It has low walls, no real residence (you have to make your own beds after all) and is filled with resource storage barns and chicken coops. It's a secondary storage bailey, not a keep. Its in the right place, but functionally and structurally it doesn't qualify. If it was the real keep, it would be getting sieged every other day. The city's layout and map are beautiful, but one has to wonder how it fell in the first place if its defenses are visually stunning even within the internal divisions of the city.
5) Un-blockable damage. If your people work outside and its raining, they get sick. That's fine. The only thing is everything is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ outside except the beds. EVERYTHING. You can't even build a tent or a shack over your stuff, so you either get everyone sick or lose a whole day of crafting. There are no oilcloth raincoats either. You can't even eat your meals inside. I haven't seen anything to collect rainwater either. It's kinda like the arrow rain from the siege days. The game gives you an indicator when falling rocks are about to hit, but not arrows. They hit randomly everywhere on the screen a few times every siege and will wound on hit. They provide no arrows to pick up and give to the defenders, despite being like 30 arrows per volley and landing everywhere. They also set your stuff on fire, which is annoying. These is nothing you can do about either of these, just luck and prayers to rNGesus.
6) The game lacks good combat unlike the decent stuff in TWOM. You can sneak around and get the date of the next enemy attack, which is worthless because you know they come every 3-4 days. It's like sneaking into a weather station to learn it will rain tomorrow after seeing clouds on the horizon. You can't guerilla warfare. Taking out the one man patrols in the city would be a huge boon since there are literally only 37 odd attackers. Yet, the combat is kinda trady since you can't equip bows, crossbows or slings and have to engage in melee with the enemy patrols. You also can't send more than one person out each night to go fight, which is a very arbitrary holdover from TWOM. It made sense in the 2D game about civilians, but in medieval times most soldiers were conscripts and in 3D you'd expect to bring some of those new characters you recruit on to the city at night. Top-down 3D is the best format for controlling multiple characters, the first isometric games were all party based adventure or RTS after all. It isn't like their patrols are strong, except for the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "you have been spotted" which occurs when the sun comes up even if you are 3 inches from the extract point and nobody is around.
7) The other castle part I. This game is called siege survival, but you aren't even the ones under siege. The action's all going down in a DIFFERENT castle. You aren't delivering ammo to soldiers pinned in a tower under fire, dropping stones through murderholes and knocking down enemy ladders with a wall fork. You can't even see the battle. It's just a bar with some numbers at the top of the screen and some attacks landing in your courtyard. Your survivors aren't really under immediate threat that you can do anything about and the player can feel it. It isn't personal like burglers broke into your house at night, more like a few stray mortar rounds hit the neighborhood. When a castle is divided into sections, it is usually so the enemy has to go through more sections to hit the keep or the two sections can provide flanking fire for each other. Nope, can't provide flanking fire at attackers, the secondary bailey isn't under attack at all. You could be in a coastal village 10 miles from the fight and the game would play the same.
8) the other castle part II. You also have to supply the defenders, a core feature of the game. They need food, ammo, repairs, and materials. It's cool. It's also kinda an afterthought. The game is balanced just like TWOM, around your tiny motley group of survivors trying to scrape by. There is barely any provisions left to send to the bastion if you get 3 or more characters to feed. Bandages are a ridiculous 5 cloth, meaning a whole stack of cloth makes a grand total of 3 bandages, assuming you could even find that much and not use it crafting other things. Medicine on the other hand isn't worth much despite most deaths in medieval wars being disease. Relying solely on the loot of a single person, its slow progression each day. The amount of stuff you can find and send to the bastion just isn't too much of a concern. On a good day you can feed the chickens, build one workbench and maybe get some firewood for some meals leftover. For the first week, all you are doing is building workbenches, the garrison isn't even a part of life. You can choose to never send any food or water and the bar sits at zero but as long as they have arrows, armor and weapons they seem fine. In the prologue, it isn't possible to lose the siege but I imagine it doesn't hit you that hard given the fact the whole ordeal happens off screen.
For all of its rich setting and art, the game does nothing particularly special with it. It's core gameplay is just a clone of TWOM, with a siege thing tacked on the side and in beautiful 3D. If the trailer got you hyped up for some action packed siege defenses and holding off the enemy's hero from breaching the gates, this game isn't it.
