Picked this up. Played about 270 turns as She Who Will Feast.
It's a cute game....but I found myself often going "Well, what now?"
I just kept expecting to have more options. Which seems weird given how many you're offered with your agents. But so many of them seemed pointless, or loaded behind so many other requirements that they weren't worth pursuing. The only consistent thing I found myself doing with my time is making money and laying low.
And once the AI dialed in on me, the cities I was targeting would just throw up Wards every time they could. So my guys spent a lot of their time knocking down Wards just to have them come right back up.
I get the game, at least for that God, is basically stalling as long as you can. But it made for a lot of turns where I just didn't feel like I was doing anything. Magic is cool, I guess....but again, there's so many front-loaded requirements on doing anything with it. First you need an arcane source. Then you need to study it. Then you need to study the magic. Then you need more arcane sources. To do more studying. So you can use a spell, that maybe requires something else or does something mildly useful....
Even the God Powers were pretty underwhelming. There was exactly one that came in useful often to speed things up. But the rest were passingly useful.
I might get more out of a second playthrough. It's not a bad game. There's just a lack of variety in a lot of places. From gear to minions to just options that feel useful. There was some mildly amusing narrative playing out but most only came to fruition in the latter half of the game once the crusades were declared, but for all the heredity and bloodline and getting mad you killed so and so...so little of it actually seemed to matter beyond it being flavorful.
It took me almost all 200 turns to finally Enshadow a Capitol City, but at that point I had no agent slots left to recruit the Monarch, so GG Dark Empire. Not that it would have mattered, once the Alliance was formed they threw like 600 HP worth of armies at the Enshadowed Nation. Even with the Chosen One slain there wasn't much to do but just watch them roll in and start wiping out cities.
That was the point at which I was like "What exactly should I do now?" The game implies there's all these ways to slow down or inhibit your foes but none of them really seem to matter. Can't increase unrest without it being crazy high to begin with. Arming Bandits just damages heroes a little before they sort the problem. Devastating the countryside builds menace crazy fast. Villages and cities near Enshadow territory get warded out the wazoo. Your cults get revealed. You can't do shit to an army without an army, or some high level magic. There just didn't seem to be anything proactive to do that would actually slow down the Alliance. Devastation seems like the only thing you can reliably do and it brings the hammer down fast. Plague would have been nice, except it never showed up anywhere near me.
Likewise, influencing the religions of the land is a cool idea....but for how long it takes to build influence, and how fast your changes get counteracted, it also seemed like a lot of options that couldn't amount to much. I got it to the point where nobles started donating to my agents, but not much else.
So yeah. Cute game but after a few hours I suddenly felt like playing Dominions instead. Sitting there for turn after turn waiting for challenges to complete doesn't feel very fun. Especially once you realize that your options are actually pretty limited. That's what I'd point to as what the game needs most: more ways to actually affect the places you infiltrate.
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Topic: Shadows of Forbidden Gods - Grand Apocalyptic Strategy Game (Read 27400 times)