WARNING! MUCHO TEXTO AHEAD!
This campaign is truly an unpolished gem. Despite bleeding from multiple wounds, it manages to remain entertaining up until the last chapter. With an unorthodox gold gaining system, the rock-paper-scissors counter system it rises above the average WC3 campaign, held back by a multitude of flaws. "It has potential", would say the generic reviewer.
--- Visual design ---
It's split between the excellent unit models and the rather bland-looking environments, with various degrees in both areas.
Let's start with the unit models: they're phenomenal! The black overalls on the mercenaries look stylish and menacing, and the humanization of non-human characters is successful for the most part. The light cav and spear-men are the most successful in this regard. The rebel units also look convincing, with brown being their main sub-color they are successful in reflecting their rag-tag origins. This excellency extends to the main cast as well, One Eye especially with his cool wizard hat. Some other models are less successful in that regard, like the Archer feels like he's cross-dressing and the grunts, raiders and warlocks, to a lesser extend look weird with their orcish teeth intact.
The map design, however, starts out average, then progressively goes down the drain. The first 3 missions look adequate, the regent's mansion or whatever look like a series of featureless corridors, then the rest just look bland with a few highlights. Those highlights are the forest and the mine-rushing mission, the layout being diverse both texturally and prop-wise. Without the doubt, chapter 8, I think, and the last chapter look the worst, comprised entirely of copy-pasted geometry, with no indication to where to go. When it comes to habited areas, this campaign falls short,best example being the map layout of Roses, as it looks like the houses are just maze walls rather than a place where people live.
--- Story ---
Idk how much of the story is being hard-carried by the source material, or how faithful it is, but if this campaign were to be an advertisement for the books, then I'd say this is a success story.
When it comes to the writing style, the best part about it is that it focuses on the struggles of the Black Company, on the conflicts among them and the conflicts between the other factions, both allied and enemy, using a lot of "slice of life" elements to tell it's story. This helps in multiple ways: it helps establishing the characters, it helps in empathising with the company and its struggles, it makes the story way more engaging and it helps to make the fantasy elements more unique. The dialog writing also follows suit: characters do away with the heroic epic style speech, like rumorspeak and ancient-talks, giving more space to their feelings and thoughts to flourish that fuel the bleak outlook of the company's fate. One natural consequence of this style is that the amount of text present in the campaign becomes too much, where blocks of texts take up a good 10% of the screen. The problem is exacerbated by the mix of Croaker's diary entries mixed with character dialogs, as sometimes things Croaker just loves to ramble on things that aren't too important, like describing how hard did Raven embrace Darling at one point. His tendency to simp for the Lady also cause light irritation, or unintentional comedy. The worst thing about the verbosity becomes when the player realises that cutscenes past chapter 3 are unskippable, hindering the replayability of the campaign. Worse still is that Interludes tend to be made up of 3 or more maps, and despite the flavourful text and story, the texts just go on and on, and become very tiring by the end of it, so it is advised to play this campaign in short intervals.
Texts also suffer from a multitude of grammatical, semantic and other mistakes. Some dialogs use the incorrect tense, a lot of screw ups with the "they, their and they're" words, incorrect expressions like "illuminate me" instead of "enlighten me", or Silent's title as a "mystery" instead of a "mystic" and so on and on. English purists really need to strap their pants on if they intend to play through.
Oh, and the story is unfinished.
--- Gameplay ---
The game features an unorthodox economy system, an AoE2 style counter system, and even unique missions within this conundrum.
Let's start with the build and destroy missions: they can go either way. The player either steamrolls the enemy with plenty of change to spare for new units, or he struggles to keep up a meager army to defend themselves. The economy works this way: the player receives a hypothetical 2500 gold every 2 minutes, out of which some is spent on the food used on by the player, which is subsidised by the veteran bonus, which is received by basic units once they level up their veteran levels. To help further subsidise the food cost, every kill grants gold, and most melee units have the pillage ability. This way the campaign sets up a precedence: if you want to have a big army, you need to use it immediately, lose as few as possible. In the early parts of the game, this won't be an issue, as the player will have plenty of time to build up his forces, and the enemies are weak enough to secure the veteran funds early. After the siege of deal chapter, this economy system embarks on a downward spiral, as the enemies get tougher. A 101 problem will emerge after the mentioned chapter: the player's units won't be strong enough to even take down small outposts, and if the player decides to accumulate funds, then an unexpected attack can easily cause a game-over within seconds. Upgrades will also leave the coffers empty, but they feel mandatory in order not to be left behind in the arms race. So which is it: twiddle the thumbs in the early game to get a few on-par units out, or go all in, effortlessly lose your entire brigade, then have no reserves to make back-up units. And forget about raiding parties: the enemy density is too high to take down small outposts, thus the extra gold is denied. This economy is especially not geared towards fast development, evidenced by the Amazon mission, where the player has to race a timer to stop the gold-mining operations of the rebels, while being bombarded by numerous attack waves. A large help would be if any of the following changes would be implemented: a) have an internal unit value that decreases the income rather than the food used, that way the unit will only hurt the income once it's trained rather than when it's queued; b) reduce the timer to 1 and a half minutes; c) double the base gold and the food tax, that way more gold remains in hands.
Another eco related problem is wood gathering: it is affected by the upkeep rate. So even if the player a lot of gold in the reserve, wood will remain a problem, although this effect will only be noticed in the penultimate build mission.
And what can you train out of your limited economy? Well, quite a lot of good units, actually. The units don't just look good, but they're also satisfying to use, mostly. The mages, for one, are exceptionally well handled, where they have a mana pool of 600 or more, have generally useful abilities, like curse, faerie fire, bloodlust, dispel magic, in exchange they they take up extra food supply. The heavy units like the soldiers and the varangian knights are also effective and fun to use, due to their survivability and decent damage output. In general, the only underpowered units are the archers and wolfriders, due to their low damage and low durability.
The gameplay implementation of the rebels, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired, mostly due to their high HP and excessively high amount of armor (the basic footman can have up to points of 15 armor). Some other frustrating units to face are the rebel mages and their love of using Finger of Pain, and the Rebel Knights that have Bash. Due to these factors, the player is further encouraged to make that fabled variety army, however the efficiency of some of the units is heavily dependent on their attack types. Long story short: piercing attacks deal next to no damage, unless they're up against what they're supposed to counter.
The usefulness of your standard units does not extend to the heroes you control. In fact, apart from Croaker, every hero fields sub-par abilities, be it either conceptually weak (sleep, illusion, hex, fake demon, poison spiders) or lacking in potency (fan of knives does basically no damage, disease cloud ridden zombies, assassination costing too much.) Elmo suffers the most of this uselessness, as he has only passives in his repertuar, his ultimate being rather underwhelming. Croaker's presence makes or breaks a level, simply because when he is around, the player doesn't have to waste his gold on buying healing salves in the shops. Yeah, an army that relies on the survival of its members, has no secure sources of healing.
No build segments are a bit more fun, for the most part, as they are very micro-intensive. The player has to constantly reposition himself to remove injured units from combat and use a lot of clutch-heals on them. The main and only downside of these segments is that random attack waves tend to catch the player off guard, which may result to losing a few units. As for the boss fights: they're alright, mostly the boss moves from A to B, spamming some boss like abilities, such as illusions, blinks, you get the drift. THey're really just nothing burgers: decently implemented but by no means memorable.
The TL: DR is: campaign flawed, but good.
Approved
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