2/10 Minimalist Medieval Total War
TLDR: most likely some student's attempt at Medieval Total War. Aside from the confusing tutorial, my main complaint is the bug in army movement(?). Unplayable(?)
Good:
+ free
+ I have to say that it takes balls to try to make a Medieval Total War-like game alone. Judging from the trailer, there are even 3D battles here, with troops and walls, wow
So-so:
+/- the tutorial is there. Yet it's obviously not playtested and thus hard to follow. Messages come as raw strings, without a background, so they are hard to read. Also, they switch by themselves, and it's easy to miss e.g. the 2nd instruction that you need to drag the middle mouse button to rotate the camera.. Btw why middle mouse button? Rather I'd make it the right button for camera and the left clicks to both select and give orders. Also, need some keys to rotate camera as well, like, maybe QERF, and Shift for fast camera movement
+/- well, the 3D gfx are low-poly models with very simple animations. I mean, what can one expect from a single student(?) developer... But then maybe this game shouldn't have been 3D in the first place? At least the strategic layer? It's a tile-based TBS in the strategic layer anyway, so simple nice-looking 2D tiles would be easier to make and would just look better. One still has to appreciate the highly detailed trees on the strategic map. Still, overall, the looks are just ugly. It's both the bland colors, the tile-like geometry and the lack of (varied) environmental props
+/- the UI has some nice historical paintings but those are stretched! Cmon, at least the image scaling should be the easy part. Even the marketing images on Steam are stretched... It's like the dev didn't care at all if this game gets any downloads. I wonder how it even got 8 reviews...
+/- maybe the name of the enemy faction(s) shouldn't be just "Muslims"? Like, "Turks" or whatever countries/peoples were there at the time would be more accurate? I bet, some of those peoples weren't even Muslim (like, Jews I dunno). One would have to look that up in Wikipedia or in Medieval Total War since they must have done their research
Bad:
- bugs! When you start the single-player game you can't order the army to move by right-clicking. This is a show-stopper. Also, in the tutorial there were quite a few glitches - though this doesn't even matter cuz the tutorial would need to be fully re-designed anyway
Like often happens with nerdy devs that like strategy genre, there is a monstrous gap between what the dev thinks is "good enough" looks/controls/onboarding and what the average player expects (even from a free game). I mean, TBS players are probably the most forgiving of all. But still, it's a huge gap in this case. This is not v1.0. Not even alpha. Not even pre-alpha. Prototype at best, and a failed one, since 3D is obviously a bad choice for the strategic layer, given the dev's "budget". Still, there is a lot of work spent here. It's just that Medieval Total War requires 100x more work to be playable. Or one needs to reduce scale drastically. E.g. 3D->2D.
[table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]
