Ja sam igrao s frendom koji je to Kickstartao, ali nisam igrao Super Dungeon Explore. U pocetku sam bio super-hyped, ali iskreno, igra me razocarala. Evo tu reviewa sto sam napisao za jedno drugo mjesto, jest malo wall-of-text ali ako nekog zanima, potrudite se procitati
I've had a chance to play Kingdom: Death. First of all, aesthetics : I'm not a fan. But I knew that going into the game. The post-apocaliptic, animeish world doesn't really do much for me. But I was very excited about the settlement management, event management and the storytelling aspects. And especially excited about the tactical combat.
I joined in not quite from start, but early on and played for about 10 Lantern years (game turns). Each Lantern year consists out of Settlement phase where events happen, you can choose to build new equipment and upgrade the settlement, and the Hunt phase which has a few events of its own followed by combat with the monster (this takes most of the game time). The aesthetics are both anime and very desperate/depressing oriented, which was doing nothing for me, but I knew that going in. The mechanics of the game seemed to try and make you care about the characters (you have to name them, control them, reproduce them, have events happen to them). Yet so much events boil down to "roll a die, oh look, that guy you named and played is dead". My friend suggested that idea is to care about the settlement rather than individual characters, but frankly, game mechanics do not support this at all from my point of view. The settlement itself is named, but I never got any real feeling of a community or settlement as a character by itself. It was just there.
Next, the tactical combat. While there is tactics, and quite a bit of it, the monsters in my opinion are so hard and have so many simply nasty moves it was just horrendous. Again, you try and build characters, just to see them mauled without much effort. And I get this was so that the game feels hard and unforgiving, but it ends up just being annoying. Not to mention that against slightly stronger monsters, you usually have very little chance to affect those moves. So many of them have ways to make you hurt - period.
If I understood the intention of the game design, both combat and out-of-combat events were meant to be deadly and nasty, but frankly, it just feels random and sadistic in the most boring way possible. Problem is that the amount of death, injuries and traumas received by characters is such that if you are detached from characters, it's annoying because they become useless almost immediately, and you can't properly attach to them because of the amount. As they often say, moderation is the key, but Kingdom Death only seems to know excess. If it were a 2 to 3 hour game, it would be fine, but playing session after session - no. Too random, too few ways to influence it. As for the settlement perspective, it is somewhat similar. Given the game progression, your choice of characters to send on Hunts will be divided between the crippled and the inexperienced. And in my experience, settlement will be barely keeping hold, since due to the inability to really upgrade your characters - only their equipment - you'll have to rely mostly on luck to kill the monsters - which is the only reliable way to get resources to advance in the game (some events can give resources, but most simply do more damage to characters and/or settlement).
Honestly, we were cheating a bit (a reroll here or there) and we still weren't doing particularly well with our settlement. Admittedly, for a long time we were deliberately going into things without checking them out in advance (such as going to hunt a new monster without checking what kind of cards it had), but I don't think that part was particularly notable. Most of the time, the damage output and the special abilities were so annoying and deadly it was hard even with the good equipment we amassed and the knowledge we gained from earlier encounters. Had we not fudged occasionally, we'd have much less survivors and equipment, and the downgrade would've made everything significantly harder.
