This game is something special. Really enjoyed the story and the gameplay mechanics don't outstay their welcome.

Make sure to collect and watch the movies.

Bleh, the best parts of this game are done better by Battle Brothers.

Professions seem neat, but it's not a deep system. Quests are not very interesting. You get penalized for growing your party because the game scales in more opponents so the fights are pointlessly longer.

When you get attacked while moving across the map, you can just cancel out of the attack dialogue, and walk away.

You can't even walk through a town in this game, you have to walk around the town, wtf?

I really want to like this game, but the developers haven't learned anything from the last game. The caravan mechanic is awful and there is a lot of time wasted for something that isn't fun to interact with. There are a lot of icons everywhere and they do not make it easy to see what each icon means without going to the glossary.

The hero stories are all the same and feel like filler. It feels like an awful investment when you sit through the uneventful long caravan rides, boring hero stories that make you go through some scripted event with limited interaction, and then your team gets wiped from some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ because you can't hit some vine that's all the way in the back rank every turn

I like this game, but player agency is just limited enough (for example, the lack of an additional resource that allows guaranteed hits / rerolls when you really need them) that it feels frustrating to play. On ironman mode, you have no opportunity to optimize your band wargear so you're going to go into battles unprepared/suboptimally. You can certainly equip gear that handle the majority of battles, but you're still going to lose people against the bad matchups and you'll be forced to grind up a new person.

In the end, it feels like this game doesn't respect your time.

The game is difficult and requires you to carefully consider your actions. I am enjoying it and looking forward to what the developers come up with.

The save system may not be to your liking, but it is what it is. Whether a technical decision or by design, I don't understand the gaming community's need to criticize developer ability in regard to things like this, it's honestly demoralizing to code for hundreds/thousands of hours only for people to tell you you're ♥♥♥♥ because they didn't get a feature they liked in a $20 game.

HARDCORE

I had to uninstall this game because it repeatedly ate days of my life away every time I reinstalled it.

I highly recommend the Combat Extended mod, it adds a level of complexity and threat that makes combat extremely exciting.

RNG heavily skewed. The UI is not fun to interact with. I have to press tab constantly to swap between inventory/map. Seriously? No options to speed up turn based action. The new DLC content isn't obvious to a new player and the difficulty is not represented correctly. It's pretty clear this developer doesn't respect your time.