Love Can Bloom

Excuse me the language. I'm just frustrated, and I don't feel like I can elaborate on this differently to emphasize this game's issues. I also expanded on this review after sinking in dozens more hours at the weekend.

There aren't enough ways to improve accuracy (attack and vitality) in comparison to defences (defense chance to miss). 1% hit chance enemies (the second boss, for example, It's absurd. There should be a BARE MINIMUM HIT CHANCE of at least like 33%. Not dropping low to 1% ridicolousness like this. 140 Defense SaS2 enemies flashbacks, but at least in there options to mitigate that were available, here it doesn't matter, special skill or spell.) But again, 1% hit chance. Is this serious?!

Killing a boss should always result in a level up. PERIOD.

Even when their stats aren't invested in strength, enemies hit like trucks, and they only have one weapon, which isn't even enchanted. For real?

Too many layers of defense: If an attack doesn't fail (again, accuracy is hard to come by), then the enemies either parry, dodge, or block it, which makes the whole hit chance system unintuitive and even worse than it already is.

It takes a miracle to activate the battle trance effect. It stays at 99/100 for the player character on purpose from the developer and refuses to activate even after the enemy has been hit three times in a row (I literally feel like the game is cheating on me and not letting me enter it). On the other hand, enemies can obtain it easily after merely four hits, which leads to the belief that we're not equal only in terms of what's visible (stats), but also in terms of what's experienced during gameplay itself.

Not to mention all the enemies who always end up miraculously surviving with a range of 1 to 10 points of armor left instead of having it done with, as opposed to easily devastating your entire worth of it. This connects to the point above.

Also, again: I miss the old SaS, where armor actually did matter as a stat and couldn't be bypassed left and right, but perhaps once a year.

Losing equipment with 0 armor also removes the bonuses that the equipment was providing. This is critical, because stripping your character of items during a fight basically strips you of your character's defining stats and skills.

The third boss prevents your character from doing anything for three turns. Real? 3 turns? That's way too much early game. I'd suggest 1 turn; 2 is already crazy; but 3 is beyond ridiculous.

Co-op boss fights are BS. The enemy boss' ally is stronger than the boss himself. Example: I trashed Mcowicz with my main character, and then the boss' ally basically soloed both my main character and my ally, because he's been hitting for 200+, was parry-spamming when hit with a 66% hit chance normal attack (again, too many defensive layers, as I said), and was healing himself on top. Perfect example, demonstrating that even if you properly build your character, one capable of trashing a x2.5 boss, along comes some random dude who can't even get hit once on a freaking 66% hit chance due to parry spam, hits x3 the total damage that the boss would do, and heals himself three times as much. lol

Anyway, I miss the times when healing options weren't given away for free but were actually luxurious. In this game, I can't even tell how tanky an enemy is in reality if he has a backup of 50 potions. Even if there is one, that should not be the case. For real, healing should be something luxurious, and 90% of enemies the player meets should not even have it, so that the enemy's strength can be evaluated as much as possible simply by looking at the enemy's health, armor, and your hit chance against him. That did in fact work on SaS1, SaS2, and SaS3, and was fantastic. Currently, practically every enemy is a gamble, which is why the game feels dogsh*t.

The inability to enchant items with stats significantly reduces itemization when compared to old-school SaS3. It's either enchanted weapons or weapons with base attributes or skill tree skills. Having to choose between one or the other without the ability to combine is, in my opinion, tedious.
EDIT: I discovered that by enchanting epic and legendary weapons with runes, I could turn them into rare rarities. Unfortunately, it was probably unintentional. If it were me, I'd leave it that way and also let the player enchant uncommon as well as rare items too, and fix the rarity reduction bug.

Skills don't go past the 5/5 limit, so items that give you +2 to something that you already have basically yield you nothing, unlike old-school SaS3. This is critical. On top of that, there isn't even a way to make use of this because enemies strip you naked during fights, including said skills. Let alone the price of respec. Truly horrible: Respeccing in this game is way too expensive. Given how full of BS this game is, it should be free.

Dual-wielding mastery can be rolled with two-handed weapons and vice versa. Bows can roll swords mastery, guitars can roll maces mastery etc. which makes no sense.

Holy items show up in shops when your character is Evil and vice-versa. What's the point of this? To waste the player's time and to disappoint them? If I'm evil please make the vendors only sell evil items for me. I don't want to see a legendary-rarity tier item that I can't even buy because it has a different morality than mine. It's CRINGE. I hate this.

As much as I love SaS, it keeps getting more frustrating to try out the new games over the years. I miss the times when it was simple, like, there were no 7 difficulty levels, for example, and the game was perfectly fun as it goes, like Swords and Sandals 2 that is. Today I'm concerned with how to make the game as enjoyable as possible, and I don't really want to waste 10 hours per each difficulty setting just to find the perfect one between not being way too easy and not being too copium.

Also, the 300-days system is a joke. The old-school tournament system was much better, as the player could at least evaluate the current tournament boss difficulty range based on the level of the tournament. Right now I have no idea to begin with. Am I going to fight a level 50, 75, 85, or 100 final boss or what? There are no hints as to how prepared you should be. I wish there was something in the game that would tell you how strong is your character at the given moment compared to the final threat that will be thrown at you.

That all being said, the games used to be more easily intuitive back in the day. Nowadays, I have no idea what my character's accuracy strength is if there are three more defensive RNG rolls (parry, dodge, block) behind a successful hit. You think it's 66%, but it feels more like 15%. Worrying about this one aspect alone makes me not want to even engage with other character stats, not even to try a mage or an archer, which I always wanted to, especially the latter. I miss the days when the Attack stat was something you simply had to have, like 60% of your character's worth, but it wasn't a 90% investment that didn't pay off.

I'm tired of rolling this rigged dice to:
- make my character fall into a pit every time I'm asked to roll it because it's WEIGHTED AF,
- Because it is WEIGHTED again, start fights as second 95% of the time.
- lose two stats from my hard-earned levels as if they were nothing on every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ event, because it's WEIGHTED AF once more.
Can we please get a legitimate coin flip in this game instead of these dumb d10 and d20 dices? Just 50% vs 50%? Is this too much to ask for?

The 10 turn limit to kill unintuitive enemies that parry spam, block spam, and have access to dozens of freaking healing options (potions and skills) is absolute BS. Bosses included. Alt F4 Fiesta: "Pinnacle Gameplay" Not to mention, yet again, all the stupid parry spam and dodge spam. I even made a YouTube video that demonstrates how much a supposedly "three turns end" fight actually ends up being prolonged: https://youtu.be/Hyo0yuQ-g6w

I'd suggest to start the game as an elementalist for zooming adventures & farming fate points & use it as your crafting character(% reduced enchanting costs items) and then make a phlogistoner as your second character for farming gold & get you going through the hardest difficulty levels to earn that juicy 200 fate daily limit & then have fun doing whatever the heck you'd like to do, because you are probably going to be rich as hell that way.

Pros:

• Main story is great to follow.
  
  
• Endgame grinding is okay.
  
  
• Quality of life features in this arpg game are among the best ones available out of all.
  
  
• Catarina as your companion, you'll never feel alone, and there's twice the skill tree, and twice the itemization needed!
  
  
• Loot is fine, gold is always useful, you'll need lots of it. Adventure mode always awards you with guaranteed epic items on top of fate points, or you can loot same places in story for epic items, or go back loot specific content for the first-time ever once you are level 100 char already, to get the specific story-only item scaled up to your character level.
  
  
• Great difficulty system, where you can chose on which one to play and see for yourself if you can afford it, or if it's way too soon.
  
  
• Lots of fun minmaxing builds and seeing how they grow in stregth through being able to hold against next difficulty levels, which happen to be pretty fun & challenging.
  
  
• Respeccing your character is dirt cheap anytime you make a mistake, to prevent the player from an ultimate failure state without solutions.
  
  
• The crafting on early game - combining two equal affixes rares into one stronger(adjusted to your character level) version with the same affixes is great to get kicked into the game with good gear, rather than relying on RNG drops.
  
  
• If you're looking for some specific epic items in the endgame, like for example trophies for the table, it is obviously RNG-based, but you can still, always craft 2 epic items for 1 new epic item, to get another layer of possibility to give your odds another try.
  
  
• Skills are great visually and playing your characters is enjoyable to look at, without too much sh*tload of effects going on. Only the actual effects that need to be seen.
  
  
• Locations size is what you would expect. Not tedious to run past with neither a zoomer or a slower character.

Cons:

• Build variety is pretty bad. Most combinations on a specific character are non-viable for endgame content memes that just don't work. There is only like two combos at best for any character that would make sense in the long run.
  
  
• Endgame crafting requires quite a bit of affixes knowledge(basically understanding set item pieces) and grinding for specific epic & set items that would reduce enchantment costs & then lots of gold in overall.
  
  
• Main story act Bosses are disappointing, as well as the endgame bosses, the challenges rather come from big stacked groups of Champion creatures rather than bosses.
  
  
• Daily fate points income ain't that much once you complete most of the endgame achivments.
  
  
• Very few, but annoying details, such as that you need to level up from 99 to level 100 on adventure mode only, to actually get an achivment you'd be awarded for with fate points, as it won't count if you do that on story mode as comparison, resulting in a waste of time, and the need, to remake such character one more time.
  
  
• Glitches, such as roll back in time & lose progression, to avoid it, simply don't become a hoarder, and make a regular use of items that you collect(that's what everything is for in this game), either combine-craft them into new ones, hopefully upgrades for your character, or sell them for gold. There is no reason to actually hoard anything. After 1200+ total hours on this game(also outside of Steam), I'm still only using one page of space in my character shared stash, as from an experienced player point of view I'd say hoarding anything in this game is pretty useless, except for just temporarily stash some items, until you'll find another stat-wise similar copy of a such, to use it in your crafting window for combine & use on your char.
  
  
• If you don't have a friend to play it together with, forget trying to find a game online, most people play under password, if not, they'll kick you out of their room. If they are from a very far away region from your location, the game will be unplayable, will lag, will freeze, and you get kicked from such a lobby due to disconnection.
  
  
• Very few main story quests that award you with skill points or attribute points, but failing those may result in losing these skill or attributes semi-permanently for the given character, and the only way to solve it, would be to repeat succesfully the given quest on multiplayer session of someone else with that character, it's the only way to have a second-go if you fail them. You might find it annoying to deal with, if you are a skill points & attribute points min-max type of person.

The pace of the game may vary depending on the class you are playing with, and the difficulty level you play on. Specific classes struggle more than others, some are awful early & shine greatly in the endgame, some shine early, but are mediocre in the endgame, other are specific, and you need to like that unique gameplay with them(mainly protector & umbralist).

If you got any further questions about the game let me know. I might add new points whenever I feel like doing so, or if I recall anything else worth a mention.

I played this on version 1.0.5C so some of the bugs or rng stuff(I know Oliver - [game maker] must have add some of these) or locked features the game had to offer are no more. Just giving it a note.

SaS Crusader Redux - I never though any of the future Oliver's games could beat my all-time favourite SaS2ER classic, but this one did it! It's greatest SaS game to me so far, and I can't wait to play every other game mode it has to offer in the future!

This game solves all the frustating problems the original Crusader had. One really good thing to say about this game to compare it to the original Crusader, Pirates, and maybe some other SaS games is that it's totally not RNG(randomness) based, it truly feels like a strategy game to me, or just a game where simply human skill matters and is on top, not your luck, a good example to show that, is that I managed to win at #1st place all the knights tournaments in a row that I had during the campaign mode. This is fantastic!
I don't renember how much different this one is compared to the original Crusader, or whether it is the same, or updated in a little. In comparison, when I played SaS:Pirates I used to just "out of nowhere" - due to a d20 dice game, which if failed to roll nicely - die, and also lose entire army and resources over which I've invested so far, and that totally doesn't feel nice, and just stopped me from playing it quite quickly. It used to happen in all of my games there, be it 20 days or 50 days, so I gave up.

About this game flaws and suggestions to Oliver: Campaign AI doesn't pose a threat. I think you can win all the games in here, and that's just going to be a matter of time. I can tell so by just seeing how the AI fails to siege my no-upgrades-investment Castle correctly, and loses all of it's troops alongside colossus, due to a barrage from the wall catapult's. I managed to win the "One man army" HeChaos mission this way on first attempt.
Moreover, the AI leaves units garrisoned in the everywhere, which is totally useless thing to do in this game. I have never ever garrisoned a single unit anywhere else except for full army in my Capital City, so that I could run around taking territories, and upgrade them without tax penalty from army. I was truly taking an army on my hero when I could no longer keep a 1-territory distance from enemy leaders, or when I wished to attack their lands. By the time I had enough heavy infantry at disposal. This is the only unit you need to win every single game in here. I used to deal 380 damage to enemy 4/4 upgrades and best catapults towns with them, cutting like through butter, as well as instantly massacring level 45+ leaders, Colossus, as well as the Shi-Tzu Rantula on Antares's Chapter. Unfortunately I had no occassion to fight Platos on it's event during my campaign adventure. He disappeared way too quickly.

I thought you can upgrade units few times, just like the catapult. :( Or maybe that's locked for campaign mode to upgrade only one time max, not sure. Still, this option is great! Nowhere close to what it was like in Pirates - 2000 gold? for +1atk +1def?! After all upgrades army is still nowhere close in fights against Boss Monsters, or the "Leviathan", and "Kraken" type of creatures are such a joke... fully upgraded ship can't even survive 2 hits from the beast! Compared to that, upgrading units in this game is very well worth it, and for a reasonable price!

Introducing leaders to fight just like regular troops is really cool feature. I felt their power in the later stages of the campaign mode. I must say that they are no joke. A solo leader used to still be challenging. I feel that without them, the AI wouldn't pose that much of a threat.

The first time I meet with a 100/100 army: (24/25/25/24+Leader+Colossus) a 2man army consisting only of an enemy leader and wizard I won this fight with only my leader and Colossus alive. Lmfao. It was funniest thing in this game. That's not a bad thing of course. I love it. I'm perfectly fine with Wizards, althrough there is one huge issue with them, that I have witnessed:
I bought a Wizard service to aid me in battle, specifically for an enemy castle siege. The thing is that, the Wizard appeared during the siege(where you aim at the walls with whatever you've got) - I could not use him there at all, and then, after I destroyed the walls and got inside the enemy castle, the Wizard was no more. Just a quick tutorial on how to waste 3 golden sandals for absolutely no reason. I hope it get's fixed!
I actually hate the way Wizard's work. Why do I have to play around the game in such a "tricky" way, to make the wizard do what I want. I'd like a "button" feature, where I can decide whether I want to pick a wizard for a specific fight or not. Wizard vs Leader-only army is also just too much of a waste.
As much as I like this mechanic, when the AI uses it, myself I think it's totally pointless to make use of due to how it works.
A huge plus from me, for balancing out the "give me gold" vs "give me army". When I first saw it, I thought it's going to be the same as SaS2ER Redux, where, after defeating an arena champion you can decide between rewards: the campion's helmet(worth 25k gold to sell), vs weapon(worth 20k gold to sell), vs gold(10k). I think I don't need to further explain how big of a joke that is. Fortunately in this game, the army you get from a Wizard, will never be worth as much, as gold you can get from him, which makes it an extremely viable option. Of course, firstly, you need to have enough gold in your bank already, and if not, then you can use this feature as a trick, to get some viable gold no matter what. Even when you're poor af.
"I wish for nothing" should not waste a player's turn!
"Find me new lands" I'm not sure if this one works correctly at all. I used it like 2 times in total, and both times I got nothing from it.
~I think that a player should be awarded with a golden sandal for defeating an enemy army, that had a Colossus, or for killing him. Same as AI, or whether the AI should "cheat" their own golden sandals. It could've made the fights with it way more interesting and challenging.

I think that's all for now. 8/10. This game is definately worth it's price. I consider the sale an extra. If it wasn't on sale, I would've get it anyways for it's regular price, because it's well worth it to support Oliver's franchise. Have a nice day!

PS: I wish there was an option to replay the chosen missions from the whole of campaign, once you have completed it. Just for fun! Some of them were pretty cool!

Swietna gra, tylko żeby tam coś zdziałać to trzeba miesiąca! (minimum!) Ci co tam wybrzydzają ponizej i powyżej to pewnie grali max z tydzień, no niestety w tydzień nie da się, nawet płacąc ogarnąć 1/1000 tej gry.

Poza tym pay to win? Zgadza się, jednakże ubolewam aby ktokolwiek wydał na gierkę równo te 6000-7000 U$D co kosztuje pełna zawartość najlepszych rzeczy w grze(które można zebrać w około rok...). Prawda taka że jedyną różnicą między wydawaniem kasy a wstrzymaniem się z jej wydawaniem jest czas poświęcony grze.

Ja tam zapłaciłem tylko za DLC, i to z szacunku do twórców i chęci ich wsparcia, jak już doszedłem do sukcesu(posiadania wszystkich tych bajerów) nic za nie nie płacąc i moge kazdego payersa brać w te i we wte jak mi się tylko podoba. ;)