Unity - Abandoned - Lands of Sorcery [v1.17] [Equanimity Studios]

Version reviewed: v3.4

Overall
The dev is still working on this and adding more features. They cut back on the grind a bit in one of the updates but you should still expect some grinding. I enjoy it but if you're only looking for porn you had best just ignore this one.

Visuals
Overall the renders are good but not the highest resolution. There's fully animated cut scenes with voice acting between chapters of the story. The battle UI is not the best but you can get used to it. When you kill an opponent there's a chance to get a decapitation. When there's a maiden to rescue she'll be struggling in the nude in the background of the fight.

Gameplay
It's position-based 4v4 side-by-side combat with 2 critical stats that can defeat anyone: health and morale. If either reaches zero that character will die or run away. I haven't had one of my characters die so i don't know if they're gone for good when that happens. It's fully focused on combat so it's a bit grindy in that you need to level up both the characters and their skills. There are side quests along the way but it's all text and choose-your-own-adventure style. The side quests give nice bonuses though and i'm not sure if you can actually fail them so they're worth suffering through.

Features
As of the latest update you can customize the stats in the csv files to make the game harder or easier in the way you want it to be. You can also add your own music to be played in the background such that you have different music playing for the map and in battle. There's a harem feature which seems to be nothing more than a lame CG viewer, but with that came captured maidens that you can rescue. It's not much but adds a little something random to the adventure. Also, some of the characters have alternate skins, although you can only swap the skins when starting a new campaign.

Summary
I love the sword and sorcery universe so i like this game, but if you aren't into that you're going to hate it.

The only playable content is an endless repetition of the same monotonous shit. It's just absurd how far this concept is stretched. The story looks interesting, but you lose interest very quickly if you notice that you have to do the same thing for hours before progressing. (v1.17)

Combat is really boring, for the first 30 minutes I just kept fighting the same 5 enemies and the progress was painfully slow, this just felt like a scuffed Darkest Dungeon, if this actually had some sort of porn it would be kinda not so bad, but there is nothing.

OK, throwing this review up here, because why not. For version 1.17. I will say I only did about 4 expeditions, which is probably about 1.5 hours of gameplay.

First off the sex content is basically non- existent from what I can tell. There might be some and there is a nudity selection on game start, but I didn't find any in the couple of hours I played. I personally am fine with it just being slightly sexualized, but I know it's not what everyone wants on this site.

Second, the art is good. It definitely fits the Frank Frazetta Conan the Barbarian style.

Lastly, what drags this down so low is the gameplay. The fucking gameplay. I know from the thread the people who like this style will just say "git gud", but no. The overall design choices are shit. Near as I can tell the only difference between the normal and easy mode of the game is on easy you get 2 more "retreats" from battle. No extra stats / reduced enemy stats, more XP, gold or whatever.

The game basically only explains a few basic things, but not some really vital things when you want to actually see them. So every skill your characters have has both a character location and target location, which is fine. Unfortunately some skills make no damn sense with their restrictions. You can only use your mage's healing skill from the back 2 slots. Your tank in the front dies and everyone moves up, now your mage is in slot 2 and is basically useless. Part of this issue is compounded by not being able to see your character's skills before battle when positioning your characters.

Healing skills are worthless. Enemy attacks usually do 10-15 damage and a status effect. Healing is almost always 2-4 hp, and maybe removes 1-2 types of status effects. Basically you can't heal fast enough in the beginning level to come anywhere close to keeping characters alive.

Since enemies can often target any character slot on your side they love to target your bard, the only character with an "effective" healing skill. To be fair you can do the same, but can't usually take advantage of this since enemies generally have too much HP to kill in 1-2 turns for a single target.

You have to finish expeditions to unlock stores / services, but the gold you gain is too little, there's no leaked XP to party members not on the expedition, and they non-active characters don't heal at all.


There's more, but I'm done thinking about this game now. Suffice it to say, if you want an annoyingly to punishingly difficult turn based RPG with a tiny amount of (possible) adult content, this might be for you.