The best entry in this series, and it is not all that close. The previous games are cult classics, but they always suffered from a lack of polish, bugs that range anywhere from superficial to game-breaking, and from being very grind heavy. This game fixes most of those issues. There are still bugs, but they are only superficial. In my 200 hours of playtime, the game has not crashed or softlocked on me once. The grind is also gone. Not only do you gain levels very quick, but most content was made optional, which allows the player to progres as quickly as they are able. Polish is the least improved when compared to the other two issues. The game still has the patented S&S jank. But the core of the game is really good. It took the visceral feelign combat of the first two games, aesthetic and mechanics of the third game, and combined them with the character customisation and skills of Redux games. Expanding on things that worked and fixing things that did not is good and all, but this game also introduces several new ideas. Overall, I think they work very well. Dungeons are a small distraction from the main game mode and offer some of the best rewards in the game. And since they are not very long (and also optional), even people who don't like dungeon crawling can get through them briskly and painlessly. Observatories are another neat idea, letting the player spend time and resources in advance to make endgame slightly easier. The one new idea I am not fond of is the time limit, but that is not an issue because it has been made completely optional. The difficulty options are great. In most of the past games you either had to choose a very strong build that would make the game incredibly easy, or a different, more enjoyable playstyle that would inevitably prove too weak to actually finish the game. In this game the gap between character archetipes is significantly smaller. Wizards suck, but just about every other class can beat the game on normal difficulty or higher just by playing it well. And speaking of difficulty, the new sliders let you customise the exact experience you want. The easiest difficulty makes enemies near harmless, and the Hellscape option really lives up to its name. I personally find Hard Gladiators/Normal Bosses to be the perfect ballance to experiment with character builds. There is also a permadeath option which I do not like, but it is optional so I can't complain. I guess its nice to have for the three people who enjoy loosing hours of progress to bad luck. I also have to compliment the world building. It is not a big draw for this series, and to be completely frank, it is a complete mess where every game changes the details of the continuity completely. But I always found the world endearing. Between all the different race options, written location descriptions, adventure quests and champion lore, this has to be my favourite depiction of Brandor. One slight nitpick I have with the series at large is that the games celebrate themselves a little bit too much. There are some characters who are present in absolutely every single game to the point it feels like parody. And while this game has some of this, it is heavily overwhelmed with all the great new stuff. I also really like the approach to how the big name characters from Crusaders were included. And do not let me started on Starbound, I absolutely adore the concept behind that guy. There are of course some negatives. The ocassional lack of polish does not bother me that much. I played S&S 5 the other day, so next to that this game looks flawless. But the quirks do exists and I do understand people who are bothered with them. The one in particular that grinds my gears is that certain races can not move the Height slider all the way up. It really doesn't matter, but whyyyy? Similarly, the Stargazer perk is weird. It is very powerful, No matter what you do or what character you want to build, it is always optimal to take it as soon as possible, and it is available from level 1. Why isn't it just a default ability then? As it exists now, it quite literally exists for the one function of punishing new players who don't take it. And the third example is perhaps the most annoying to me. The blueprint forging system is full of imperfections. It costs too much money, but we can reduce the costs with a skill so I actually kinda like this aspect. It makes me choose between spending a limited resource, or using up my entire savings. But I do not like the blueprint selection. Just like gear, the blueprints are leveled. Higher level blueprints have both higher levels of enchantment, and also skills that come later on in the skill tree. This sounds really strong, and it is. Letting you max out a late game skill with one blueprint of a skill tree you didn't invest in is great. But my problem is that if you want early or mid game skills, you never find a maxed level 5 blueprint. You could enchant your sword with two different level 5 blueprints, but if you want to simply enchant it with Sword Mastery, best you can do are level 1 blueprints. Or if I want to get a mid game skill, I have to use lvl 3 blueprints. Either I use one blueprint and the skill will not be maxed out, or I use two blueprints in which case I am wasting resources getting 6 levels in a skill that caps at 5. It would be way better if we just got random skills on blueprints, so that we could get lvl5 blueprints for all skills, early or late. Also there should be blueprints for all skills, because now only certain skills get them and that is just a really annoying limitation that does not need to be there. Also Unique gear can be forged, but not unforged. Another limitation that adds nothing and exists only to annoy me in particular. And my final grievance regarding blueprints is this. They have 2 possible naming schemes. "Blueprint of X" or "X blueprint". The effects of the runes are the same, so they should work the same. But they do not. Blueprint of X can be applied to unique gear, but it can not be applied to gear that has already been forged with X blueprint. X blueprint can be applied to armor with any blueprint in it, but not on any unique armor. I can feel the lines of code struggling and crying. I have no clue why there needed to be two separate naming schemes for them, or why they behave differently. If you find this hard to read, imagine how confusing it was to figure it all out... Despite that rant about blueprints, I really like this game. It takes the best elements of all previous games, improves on their shortcomings, and adds new ideas that are either good or optional. I recommend this game both to people who played the previous games, and also to the newbies. It is easy to get into, while being very (almost unreasonably) hard to 100% complete. It has a little something for everyone.
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