We all have our personal favourite game genres that hold a special place in our hearts and the idea behind this game fits into that category for me. In this medieval fantasy game you lead your small band of followers around the land thwarting evildoers and solving a variety of mysteries while developing your own territory controlled via your castles. The map is a well-drawn 2d top down affair with your group represented by a single icon, reminiscent of early Civilisation games. When combat ensues it cuts to a simple turn based battle system, your ten units along the bottom and the enemies along the top. So far so good, I�"m fairly excited. Graphically it isn�"t brilliant, but it does the job. The portraits of the different characters appear to be actual photographs of people dressed up in costume. Now they�"ve done this very well, but I can�"t help smiling at some of the pictures and feel a sudden sense of foreboding.

Now we get into the meat of actually playing the thing and this is where my hopes are dashed. The game is very text heavy and it seems to be an extremely bad translation of a non-English original, almost to the point of wondering if they just ran a lot of it through GoogleTranslate. I�"d almost describe the game as broken, not in that there are bugs or it crashes, certainly not, it seemed very stable and reasonably well polished. It just feels like every other game design decision just doesn�"t really work. You build up a network of castles and tax local villages to create an income, which is then used to fund your personal mini-army of followers. Sounds great, but in practice you burn through a huge amount of money every time you fight and there is often no way of expanding your empire to fund these battles as the costs start to ramp up. Enemies will simply accost you on the road and once the fight starts you cannot leave except by reloading the game. Simply generating 100 gold is an achievement in itself, but then if a character dies in battle it can cost 100 to 300 gold just to get them revived! To make any forward progress at all you will be saving the game constantly and in fact managing a full set of saves, as you will often need to go quite far back to completely change your strategy if it proves to be financially unsupportable.

You�"ll also often find yourself needing a large band of followers to defeat a particular enemy, yet be completely unable to pay their wages. The instant you cannot pay them they refuse to fight so you�"ll need to make sure you can hire them and get to the battle quickly before they demand payment. One trick recommended in the sparse manual is to offload your army into any castle you own, after which they stop asking for money for some unknown reason. Then you can just hit the skip time button and harvest cash from your villages until you have enough money to both pay the army�"s wages and also stock up on potions to try and keep them alive. This seems like a lot of hard work to fix what is surely a problem with game balance and difficulty.

Although it features a robust yet expensive set of magical items and spells, none of them can actually be used in battle, only outside of battle on the main map. The spells usually last until after the next combat, but then how do you manage them when enemies are going to run out of the bushes and jump you? The fact you don�"t know beforehand who is going to take damage implies you�"ll be using one heal potion per soldier on the off chance they take a hit, very expensive.

It is possible to level your followers up in theory, but there don�"t seem to be any “easy” fights, one or two people nearly always die or get severely injured requiring money to fix. Plus you cannot stay in one area and repeatedly fight a re-spawning enemy to “buff” your forces, once a foe is slain you usually have to move on. On the odd occasion the battle is easy, you get no money from it and little character advancement.

Certain key characters relate bits of story to you as you meet them, but when they have nothing to say they will still stop you as you walk past to remind you they have nothing to say. In the game there is a concept of the passage of time, which means you only get an income at specific intervals, specifically midnight. So be prepared to sit around clicking the “advance 4 hours” button quite regularly. If you pick up items they just go in the backpack. Nobody uses them even if they have no weapons or armour at all; you have to go into each character and put them on manually. Collecting taxes literally means just that, you have to traipse round yourself to pick it all up! Oh, and remember not to take your army with you or they�"ll bankrupt you before you get to the first village.

One of the most upsetting incidents involved a local lord tasking me with finding someone; I agreed and was rewarded with an additional helper in my party. Off I went across the map and was soon intercepted by a single man in rags, a beggar demanding money I didn�"t have. I couldn�"t outrun him or pay him so he attacked me and then mysteriously killed 75% of my forces. Grumbling to myself I soldiered on and managed to survive another battle. At this point my so called helper informed me he wasn�"t there to assist me in fights unrelated to the mission and left. I returned to the lord�"s castle to investigate what was happening and was informed I had betrayed the lord and was immediately attacked by an overwhelmingly powerful force. On my own and with no more access to the lord�"s castle that game was over and I had to start again making sure I refused that mission next time. Oh dear.


Graphics
It gets the job done in an inoffensive enough manner, but nothing to write home about. The character portraits appear to be photos of people dressed in period costume, which although well done struck me as a little odd.

Sound
Medieval style music is quite reasonable but I soon tired of it.

Gameplay
This is an extremely tough game that doesn�"t seem to work in quite a few places.

Value
It feels like a student project that received a fairly professional graphical makeover and as such would be better as a free game or very cheap. At $20 I just can�"t recommend it. The game�"s website is a single page, there is no forum of players and no real help or guidance.

Concept
I get the impression the developer was trying to marry a Civilisation type experience with more involved Final Fantasy-esque turn based combat. A great idea and it�"s a real shame they haven�"t pulled it off.

Fun
Way too hard and in some ways almost broken game play means it is very hard to enjoy.

Overall
A great idea, but problems in the implementation leave it wanting. Hopefully a sequel will remedy the situation, as it�"s a concept I love.