>>718678915
It's such a bad take though.
The 'meta-progression' is horrible. You are weaker and less prepared at the beginning due to lacking skills/hero upgrades/items. Which is fine in itself. But, you either beat your head against Mountain Bosses with weak teams and complete the game with half of the catalogue still locked. Or, you go into runs taking sub-optimal routes to get the Shrines/Candles finished. And then once you DO actually get everything unlocked you either have already beaten the game, or Candles/Shrines become utterly useless locations/resources.
The relationships incentivize you to drown your team in liquor at every inn and spend 90% of your resources on making sure they don't hate each other. This makes every other inn-item less valuable. You're never prioritizing 5% dodge chance items for one region over guaranteeing my Jester doesn't fucking backstab my Leper whenever he swings his sword.
Bosses are dogshit. It's either a cake walk, or a 100% loss, completely determined by team comp. The difficulty from the game only comes from knowing which teams can handle which enemies. Every run ends up being the exact same because 90% of what determines success is team comp and ability choice, which are all done at the beginning of a run.
Most importantly the game just utterly lacks the sense of loss, pyrrhic victories, moments of triumph and heroic stories that made the first game so emotionally investing. Have a shit fight at the beginning of a run? You might as well just exit to main menu. Hero dies? Oh well, they'll be back next run. Just barely scraped out of a big fight with major team losses? Well the inn is the next stop and we can keep going with a fresh new team.
The game looks fucking fantastic, but somehow the atmosphere is worse.
Basically Red Hook completely blew it by trying to reinvent the wheel like a bunch of retards instead of just delivering a visually updated sequel.
And yes i'm still mad. Kingdoms sucks.
