Heretic Operative

Excellent game if you play it properly. Originally, at release, I played it the wrong way by rushing things which made it feel like each games was over way too quickly. Now that I revisited it years later, I realized that you're meant to play it slowly by taking out the cultists rather than trying to beat them to victory. This makes for a vastly different, and much more interesting game. If you rush, it feels like only a few things are worth actions and many seem pointless, but in the slow game the usefulness of certain actions changes completely. Still, only a few of the "stories" seem long enough to feel like a "proper" game to me. Most are over way too quickly even with my new playstyle and could use a few more phases. Really interesting spin on a fantasy setting, I especially like the "flesh abomination" story. The variety of mechanics, especially spells, keeps the game very fresh even when replaying the same story, and the different cults change the context of each game to a surprisingly high degree. Same goes for the main operatives. Still, each time I played the game intensively for a while, it amounted to some 9 hours per "season" before I felt I'm done for a while. …

I recall playing this ages ago and the experience wasn't too good. +Some player choice -RNG felt the main issue -UX/UI - looks and feels amateurish -Aesthetics - looks amateurish = Neutralish review, although my experience was towards a disappointment as such.

This game is an amateur simulationist boardgame, which means you should expect a bloated, unrefined gameloop where half the actions seem superfluous. We have all that alright,but that's par for the course and boardgame-fans generally have enough patience for this, unfortunately the game falls a little bit too short on every aspect. It is not particularly well written or illustrated. The idea of using a huge map where all the scenarios happens is nice, but it's a bit messy and the story itself is very generic (bad guys open evil portals, yawn). The locations are not particularly memorable, for example the magnificent 'Elven Library' offers such thrilling events as "you fall from a tree", or "nothing happens'", or "recruit a merchant for +2 influence", etc... Every town offers a choice of half a dozen actions, listed through some minuscule eye-straining icons that you have to hover the mouse over to read and realize most of them are uninteresting [+X ressource] actions. It's not really helping when the game only gives you two (2) action points per turn, that you share between all your units. Just moving from one location to another takes two actions in average. Attacking or doing an…

Wanted to play this game because i remember it was quite fun. When I tried to play it I got stuck in the map without being able to press anything.

Pretty fun SP boardgame. NB: Managing RNG is very important.

Very fun. It's not always clear what you should be doing, but I think learning how the game works is part of the game anyways. Beautiful art.