Info about The Iron Oath: Official game description: Join our Discord ================ About the Game ============== Command, endure, and prosper in The Iron Oath, a turn-based tactical RPG where the fate of your mercenary company rests on your decisions. As the leader of a band of soldiers-for-hire in the harsh realm of Caelum, you’ll need to hire and customize recruits, manage your operations wisely, and embark on perilous missions in order to survive, thrive, and build your company's renown. Over the course of an overarching tale that spans years of Caelum’s history, the world evolves dynamically—as cities fall, allegiances change…and perilous, profitable new opportunities arise. What fortunes await your company? * High-stakes tactical combat --------------------------- Proper planning and execution is vital to your success. Deadly foes, traps, and destructible objects mean one misstep could be your party’s undoing. * A gritty saga for the ages -------------------------- Embark on a campaign across Caelum and experience a bloodstained fantasy tale that spans decades. Grow the renown of your company, uncover the realm’s secrets, and shape the fates of factions through strife and conflict. * An ever-evolving overworld -------------------------- Caelum is a sprawling, always changing realm. Cities fall and rise again as the Noble Houses vie for power, leading to new opportunities and unexpected perils. * Control your company’s destiny ------------------------------ Manage your guild’s roster, finances, and political relationships. Earn wealth and renown by completing contracts for Caelum’s vying factions, and invest in upgrading your organization. * Forge your team --------------- An iron chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Assemble a well-rounded crew of warriors, rogues, and spellcasters. Build up their power, customize and complement their abilities, and become a force to be reckoned with. * Lead wisely, die foolishly -------------------------- You’ll face difficult decisions, and the path you follow won't always be popular. Your choices bear consequences that will alter the fates of your mercs, your company, and all of Caelum. Release date: 2 Nov, 2023 Categories: Turn-based RPG, Tactical RPG, Management Simulation, Character Customization, Character Progression, Dungeon Crawler, Single-player Story, Resource Management - Hardware Profile: No data Feature extractions: - Community Price: No data - Playtime Metrics: No data - Time-to-fun: No data - Player Archetypes: No data Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category. Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews. What players like: - Beautiful Pixel Art & Animations (weight 1): The game is highly praised for its charming and well-executed pixel art style, detailed sprites, and expressive animations. Reviewers noted the care put into the visuals, creating an immersive and aesthetically pleasing experience. - Active Developer Support & Roadmap (weight 0.98): Developers are highly praised for their active engagement with the community, regular patching, and quick issue resolution. A clear roadmap for future updates indicates strong potential and a commitment to improving the game. - Engaging Tactical RPG Gameplay (weight 0.93): The game offers a highly enjoyable and engaging turn-based tactical RPG experience, praised for its compelling combat, satisfying progression, and overall fun gameplay loop. It's considered a solid entry in the genre, appealing to fans of strategic team-building. - Quality Music & Sound Design (weight 0.88): The game features a high-quality soundtrack that fits the game's atmosphere and excellent sound effects. Reviewers found the audio design to be well-composed and immersive. - Fun Dungeon Exploration (weight 0.86): Dungeon exploration is highlighted as a fun and engaging core activity, often described as the 'real meat' of the game. Dungeons remain interesting to explore even after many hours of gameplay. - Strong Story & World (weight 0.2): Reviewers found the game's story, world-building, and characters to be well-written, engaging, and captivating, often exceeding expectations for the genre. The narrative provides sufficient depth and interest to keep players invested. - Strategic Depth & Custom Difficulty (weight 0.19): The game offers significant strategic depth and complexity, requiring thoughtful planning, especially on higher difficulties. It also provides extensive difficulty customization options, making it accessible for both casual players and those seeking a challenging experience. - Battle Brothers/Darkest Dungeon Blend (weight 0.17): The game is frequently compared to Battle Brothers and Darkest Dungeon, successfully blending elements from these popular titles. It offers a familiar yet fresh experience, often described as a magic/fantasy version of Battle Brothers with Darkest Dungeon-style dungeon crawling. - Compelling Mercenary Management (weight 0.12): The game successfully implements a compelling mercenary company management system, which is a core strategic element. This layer, combined with tactical battles, provides an engaging and well-executed experience for players. - Diverse Classes & Customization (weight 0.09): The game features a good variety of well-designed and original classes for companions, offering diverse build choices and significant customization options through skills and traits. This adds to replayability and strategic depth. - Abundant Quests & Characters (weight 0.07): The game offers a large number of quests and characters, providing plenty of content and activities for players. Quests are generally found to be fun and interesting, with new content added over time. Common complaints: - Repetitive & Shallow Combat (weight 0.41): Combat encounters lack variety in enemies, maps, and tactical depth, quickly becoming tedious and unchallenging. Many battles feel generic and require minimal strategic thinking. - Lacks Content & Localization (weight 0.33): The game is perceived as barebones, lacking sufficient content, depth in systems, and meaningful choices. Additionally, the absence of multiple language options creates a significant barrier for non-English speakers. - Repetitive Dungeons & Quests (weight 0.31): Dungeons and quests are highly repetitive, uninspiring, and often unrewarding, with similar layouts and objectives. This contributes significantly to the overall feeling of monotony in the game. - Limited Class & Enemy Variety (weight 0.25): There is a notable lack of diversity in playable classes, enemy types, and weapon options, which restricts strategic possibilities and makes combat feel less dynamic. Classes also often feel too similar or unbalanced. - Poor Game Balance (weight 0.17): The game suffers from significant balance issues, including nerfed abilities, unnoticeable damage differences, and unbalanced classes. This leads to frustrating or overly easy combat experiences and a lack of meaningful player choices. - Inferior to Similar Games (weight 0.14): Many reviewers compare the game unfavorably to titles like Battle Brothers and Darkest Dungeon, stating that it lacks the depth, challenge, narrative, and overall polish of its inspirations. - Tedious Character Management (weight 0.11): Systems like morale management and mercenary recruitment are poorly implemented, often feeling tedious or frustrating. Negative traits on recruits and ineffective morale mechanics detract from the player experience. - Unpolished & Uneven Difficulty (weight 0.1): The game feels rushed and unpolished, exhibiting 'Early Access' qualities. The difficulty curve is inconsistent, being either frustratingly hard or too easy once core mechanics are understood. - Poor User Interface (UI) (weight 0.1): The user interface is widely criticized for being clunky, unintuitive, and getting in the way of gameplay. Issues include difficulty viewing party abilities and a frustrating inventory system. - Shallow Campaign & Characters (weight 0.09): The main campaign is short with few impactful characters, and character development is barebones. This leads to a lack of emotional investment in the mercenary group and a feeling of limited narrative depth. - Frustrating Gear & Durability (weight 0.09): The item durability system is seen as a constant nuisance, with gear breaking frequently and no repair system. This makes gear acquisition and progression feel unrewarding and tedious. - Uninteresting Progression System (weight 0.09): The overall progression system, including leveling up and skill improvements, is described as unexciting and offering minimal impact. This contributes to the feeling of a lack of meaningful advancement. - Rudimentary Graphics & Simplicity (weight 0.08): The game's visuals are described as rudimentary pixel art, which can make enemies indistinguishable. The overall design is perceived as simplistic, contributing to a less engaging experience. Gameplay feedback: - Repetitive Dungeon Crawl (weight 0.29): Dungeon exploration involves moving cell-by-cell with events and a time-based system, but the overall experience and quest types become repetitive and stale after a few hours. This leads to a grindy 'go here, do dungeon, come back' loop. - Turn-based Hex Combat (weight 0.26): The game features a core turn-based tactical combat system played on a hexagonal grid, where players control mercenary movement and actions, making optimal use of limited skills. It is often compared to Battle Brothers in its dark fantasy, mercenary management style. - Diverse Character Classes (weight 0.21): The game offers several distinct character classes, each with multiple abilities and unique traits, allowing for varied builds and roles. Players can equip a limited number of abilities at a time, unlocking more as characters level up. - Customizable Difficulty Options (weight 0.17): The game offers extensive difficulty customization, allowing players to adjust financial, battle, and strategic parameters, including an optional Iron Man mode and permadeath. Even on easier settings, the game can present challenging moments. - Battle Brothers/Darkest Dungeon Mix (weight 0.15): The game is frequently described as a creative blend of Battle Brothers and Darkest Dungeon, combining mercenary management with challenging, randomized dungeon exploration and high combat difficulty. This comparison helps set player expectations for the game's overall feel. - Dungeon Time & Skill Limits (weight 0.14): Dungeon exploration incorporates a time counter that ticks with every action, leading to negative handicaps if exhausted. Additionally, special abilities have a set amount of charges per dungeon, forcing strategic resource management. - Mercenary Company Management (weight 0.13): Players manage a mercenary company at a macro level, overseeing funds, time, hiring, training, and overall strategic decisions. This involves guiding the company through a story of revenge and rebuilding. - Varied Enemy Design (weight 0.12): Enemies possess varied abilities, immunities, and resistances, requiring players to understand their mechanics. However, there is a perceived lack of overall enemy types, and enemies often have higher power, accuracy, or initiative than player units. - Unfinished Main Story (weight 0.11): The game features a basic but engaging main story with named characters, but it is currently unfinished in its Early Access state. The existing campaign content provides several hours of gameplay. - Dynamic Character Traits (weight 0.1): Playable characters are randomly assigned unique traits that can both help and hinder them, adding variety. Characters also age, retire, and can be permanently lost during playthroughs, adding a layer of long-term management. - Essential Town Hubs (weight 0.1): Towns serve as crucial hubs where players can recruit new mercenaries, heal injured characters, buy and sell gear, repair equipment, and accept new contracts or quests. This forms a key part of the game's loop. - Dynamic Battle Encounters (weight 0.08): Battles are generally straightforward and quick, with random elements affecting map layouts and enemy placement, making each fight feel somewhat different. Players should expect to take hits in combat. - Party Fatigue System (weight 0.07): The game implements a fatigue system where characters become exhausted or injured after battles and dungeons, preventing players from relying on a single core team and encouraging the management of multiple mercenary groups. - Random Events & Systems (weight 0.07): The game includes various systems such as random reinforcements, weapon deterioration, and choices/dialogue that affect loyalty, adding layers of unpredictability and management to the experience. - Equipment Repair System (weight 0.07): The game features a system for repairing equipment using various resources, which was added or clarified during development. This is a key part of resource management and maintaining the mercenary company. Performance notes: - Stable, few minor bugs (weight 0.03): Players generally report that the game runs stably with very few, mostly minor, bugs encountered. This indicates a polished technical experience, contributing positively to gameplay. - Specific soft-lock bug (weight 0.02): A specific and critical bug was reported where players experienced a soft-lock in a particular dungeon. This issue occurred around 10 hours into gameplay and can halt progress. Recommendations: - Genre-specific recommendation, caveats (weight 0.45): The game is highly recommended for fans of tactical RPGs, turn-based strategy, and party management sims, especially those who enjoy games like Darkest Dungeon or Battle Brothers. However, many reviewers note it's not for everyone and often comes with caveats regarding its current state or complexity. - Buy on sale (weight 0.39): A recurring recommendation is to purchase the game when it is on sale. This suggests that while the game has merit, its current price point might be a barrier for some, or its value proposition is stronger at a reduced cost. - Appeals to difficulty seekers (weight 0.38): The game offers a challenging experience that appeals to players who enjoy high difficulty levels and tactical depth. Reviewers note that the game's potential for fun and extended lifespan increases for those who embrace its punishing aspects. - Future updates crucial (weight 0.29): Many players express hope for future updates, patches, and DLC to improve the game's content, mechanics, and overall polish. Some recommend waiting for these updates before purchasing, indicating the game feels unfinished or has significant room for growth. - Language localization needed (weight 0.04): Some reviewers highlight a language barrier, specifically mentioning the need for Korean and Chinese localization. This indicates that the current language options limit accessibility for a segment of the player base. - Limited player choices (weight 0.03): A few reviewers noted that despite a compelling story, player choices felt limited or predetermined. This suggests a desire for more impactful decision-making and agency within the narrative. Other player notes: - Strong future potential (weight 0.12): Reviewers are excited about the game's future, noting a clear roadmap for 2024 and ongoing improvements. The game has a solid base, with new classes, systems, mechanics, environments, story, quests, and gear expected, indicating significant growth potential. - Active, responsive developers (weight 0.08): The small, two-person development team is highly praised for being active, responsive on forums, fixing bugs, adding features, and providing quick support. Their dedication is seen as a 'labor of love,' fostering a positive community relationship. - Lively, engaging world (weight 0.07): The world building is highly praised, with many events happening that make the game world feel alive and engaging. Reviewers love the immersive and dynamic environment. - Improve town interactions (weight 0.03): A specific suggestion for improvement is to enhance town interactions, such as adding more options to talk to mayors or leaders, to deepen the world's immersion and player agency. - Add summoner class/pets (weight 0.03): Reviewers suggest introducing pets or summonables, potentially as a new summoner class, to expand gameplay options and character builds. - Minor, non-game-breaking bugs (weight 0.03): The game has small bugs and quirks, but they are generally not game-breaking and do not significantly impact the overall player experience, indicating a relatively stable build. - Unique tactical RPG (weight 0.03): The game is compared to other tactical RPGs, noted as not being XCOM but closer to an indie Divinity than FFT/Tactics Ogre, helping to set player expectations for its unique style. - Classic class system (weight 0.02): A suggestion for future development is to consider incorporating D&D or classic class archetypes, potentially offering more familiar or traditional character progression options. - Rich narrative text (weight 0.02): The game features a substantial density of text in its narration and dialogues, indicating a rich lore or story for players who enjoy reading and deep narrative engagement. - Satisfying critical hits (weight 0.02): Players find the experience of landing a critical hit in the game to be particularly satisfying, highlighting a positive feedback loop in combat mechanics. - Hope for better graphics (weight 0.02): One reviewer expressed a hope for the development team to implement better graphics in future projects, suggesting a desire for a visual upgrade beyond the current pixel art style. Emotions: - Disappointment (weight 0.26): Players express disappointment due to the game's perceived unfinished state, significant lack of content, and repetitive gameplay loop. This is often compounded by unfulfilled potential, poorly implemented mechanics, and a feeling that the game is inferior to similar titles, alongside issues like balance problems and sluggish animations. - Satisfaction (weight 0.22): Players feel satisfied due to the game's overall high quality, enjoyable gameplay, and well-designed mechanics, particularly in combat and strategic party management. The appealing art style, engaging story, challenging yet rewarding progression, and developer responsiveness also contribute significantly to positive experiences. - Frustration (weight 0.15): Frustration stems from technical issues like bugs, crashes, and a lack of polish, alongside poor UI/UX design. Players also experience frustration due to repetitive and tedious gameplay, unbalanced mechanics, and an over-reliance on RNG, which collectively limit tactical depth and make combat feel unrewarding. - Enjoyment (weight 0.11): Players find enjoyment in the game's fun and addictive gameplay, particularly its engaging combat and strategic elements. The well-implemented mechanics, satisfying character progression, and appealing art style, music, and storytelling also contribute significantly to a positive overall experience. - Boredom (weight 0.06): Boredom arises primarily from the game's repetitive gameplay loop, including repetitive dungeons, missions, and combat encounters. This is exacerbated by a perceived lack of content, depth, and meaningful progression, leading to a grindy and tedious experience over time. - Excitement (weight 0.06): Players feel excitement due to the game's engaging gameplay, particularly its combat and strategic depth, which contributes to a high overall quality. This excitement is often amplified by the anticipation of future content, updates, and the game's promising potential, driven by visible developer activity. - Optimism (weight 0.03): Optimism is driven by the game's promising future potential, often linked to anticipated future updates and the developers' responsiveness to feedback. This suggests a belief that the game will continue to improve and expand. - Appreciation (weight 0.01): Players express appreciation for the game's overall quality, specific quality-of-life features, and the developers' evident effort and understanding of the genre. The successful blend of art style with modern gameplay also contributes to this positive sentiment. - Admiration (weight 0.01): Admiration is primarily directed towards the game's distinctive art style and animations, which are often highlighted for their quality. This also extends to the game's overall quality and its unique approach within the genre. - Desire (weight 0.01): Players express a desire for more game content, including additional classes and features, along with faster updates. This also includes specific requests like the ability to own a town, indicating a wish for deeper simulation or management elements. - Hope (weight 0.01): Hope is centered on the game's potential for future updates and overall improvement, with players expressing a belief that the developers will learn from the current state and enhance the game. - Neutrality (weight 0.01): Neutrality arises when the game is perceived as "not bad" and adequately fulfills a specific niche or personal preference, such as art style or customization options, without eliciting strong positive or negative feelings. - Love (weight 0.01): Love is expressed as an overwhelming positive sentiment stemming from a deep overall enjoyment of the game experience. - Joy (weight 0.01): Joy is a positive emotion derived from the enjoyment of various specific elements within the game. - Anticipation (weight 0.01): Anticipation is driven by the expectation of future updates, ongoing development, and the game's perceived potential for growth and improvement. - Stress (weight 0): Stress is caused by the game's micromanagement systems, indicating they are perceived as burdensome or overwhelming rather than engaging. - Annoyance (weight 0): Annoyance is specifically linked to encountering certain enemy types, suggesting issues with their design, mechanics, or frequency. - Cynicism (weight 0): Cynicism arises from the perception that certain game systems are predetermined, potentially limiting player agency or meaningful choices. - Indifference (weight 0): Indifference reflects a lack of strong emotional response, indicating the overall game experience was neither particularly good nor bad. - Mild annoyance (weight 0): Mild annoyance is caused by the game's repetitiveness, suggesting that while not severely frustrating, the lack of variety becomes noticeable.}