Warlike

Extremely poor balancing. RNG is the entire game. There's little to no skill involved. It's like getting a root canal. Honestly, it feels like they set the balance of damage, resources, and all that, and just went with their first set. There was no play testing of any kind.

Like the Dominions series, but lighter... way, way lighter.

Let me start off by saying I like Warlike. It reminds me of old, simplistic Flash strategy games, and at least for me that is a huge positive and the reason I bought the game to try it. There is much room for improvement though. But rather than talk about the ways Warlike could be expanded, I think there are actually 2 critical quality-of-life issues and one really bad gameplay mechanic that should be addressed before anything else. Both of the first issues have to do with fielding your troops. #1: There is no indicator that shows you where you are about to place a group of units. The fielding is laid out in a grid and a group is placed in a cell by clicking it. But because there is no indication of either where the cells are exactly or of which one you currently are hovering over, it is extremely easy to accidentally place groups in the wrong cell, especially the first group you place. #2 is that there is no way to recall your troops and rearrange them before you start the battle. Combined with the above issue and the fact that you can't retreat from a battle after the encounter begins means that it is way too easy to make a simple fielding mistake and doom your army before they …

I like this concept and I like the gameplay. However, I have never ever made it to the 3rd map because the game crashes EVERY TIME at some point. If you start upgrading your units, then it crashes on next fight 80% of time. I didn't mind buying it to support the developer, but this game is not a game, it is a demo of 1-2 levels before CRASH. Act accordingly. UPDATE: My first 2 hours were spent with the first hero ONLY. I have been playing tonight with the other 2 champs, and no crash for an hour, but died b4 end of 2nd map every game. I'll keep ya'll posted, but already I am happy with it minus the crashes. Update 2 - Played about 5 more hours using different heroes and no problem all the way to a win. Switched back to the first champ and AGAIN got 1-5 hexes from 3rd Town and CRASH. I repeated it 2 more times. DEFN A CRASH BUG, but that is the time it happens.

This is a delightful little indie game. It's focused and simple, but works in what it wants to accomplish. I bought because I'm old as the mountains and it made me remember playing the ancient Brotherbund Sun Tzu's Art of War. It did scratch that itch and added some other elements from old school gaming that I really liked. The reviews saying it's unbalanced are kind of wrong and also not getting the point. Differently good leader picks is how you set the difficulty, but since this is organic and not spelled out a lot of gamers seem to miss what it actually does. The units are not terribly imbalanced either. Skeleton archer do a lot of damage, but you can deal with them if you've made proper strategic choices. Nor is this an RNG fest (I hate those kind of games, see my review of The Darkest Dungeon if you want to see me being salty about such nonsense). It is stately and predictable, you weighs risk vs reward and get to think a little bit about your next few moves. Old school indeed. Again, it's a small game, but within it there is a learning curve, some tactical variation, simple resource management and tactical map movement. It is well worth its price. The one downside is t…

The game has no volume options, or options of any sort. Unit balancing is horrible, and you are punished severely for deviating from the dotted line you're told to follow. Visually the game looks nice, but in its current state it is not worth playing. It should be quite telling that the most playtime any review has at the time of my posting this is less than two hours.