Legends of Ellaria Reviews

Idea: 10/10. Like Skyrim: Hearthfire, if Hearthfire was the game and Skyrim the DLC. Clever combination of a city-builder and an RPG, top-notch gameplay! Execution: 5/10. Needs more optimisation, less creepy-looking faces, and a king needs a place to store his belongings that will end up flooding his inventory before you even get out of the first cave. Early access is early access, so I'm giving them credit for what they've done, but more work is strongly necessary.

Let me start by saying what so many other reviewers said, this game looks promising and the idea behind it is even more promising. But, five minutes into the game I realized how shallow it currently is. From the pictures and videos you get the false idea that even in its current form of the game you can at least spend some time just fighting stuff and exploring. But the 3rd person combat system (in its current implementation) is too simple and boring, you left click to attack and right click to defend. And after I realized that, I went through the positive reviews this game has and I noticed that 90% of the people who left a positive review have spent less than 10 hours actually playing this game. They are all praising it for what it could be in the future they are reviewing what they hope to see in the game and are giving the devs too much slack. And this is bad both for the devs, that will sit back, relax and continue developing a game that lacks any depth, and for the gamers, that will get their hopes up too high and will surely be let down in the future. So I won't be doing that. In its current form the game has nothing for me to enjoy and I won't leave a positive review for what it could become. If the developers read this I would highly recommend that you go in depth to one of the elements already in the game, such as combat, story missions and city management before adding more elements.

Intriguing: 12 hours to complete all existing quests and build up village to current max. I like the idea and see the potential of what the dev's are trying to accomplish. A playable framework that is entertaining and captures your attention enough to feel disappointed when you realize there's nothing left to do until the next update. Looking forward to seeing how well this game evolves.

Jesus, here we go. [h1]INVENTORY[/h1] No inventory sort function. You can't pick up money if your inventory is full, despite the fact money is not stored in an inventory space. When selling items to a shop, it adds equipped items of the same kind as those in your inventory to the amount sold. Leaving you without armour or weapons. Some bags use the belt slot. Amulets use the shoulder armour slot. [h1]USER INTERFACE[/h1] When you pick up an item that gives you xp, the message is not spelled: "experience" it is spelled: "expirience" Item tooltips can appear off the screen if the item is on the right side of your inventory, leaving them unreadable. When your inventory is full and you attempt to pick up an item, it says: "inventories is full" Some item tooltips have text overlapping the sale price of the item. Items in the shop are missing their proper names and are left with names such as 'ALC_Bulb_C' and 'ALC_Big_retort' A location was labelled as a tavern, the building at the location was labelled as a house, the inside was a mage shop. The design of the experience bar on the HUD makes it difficult to see how much experience you actually have at glance. Some chests are labelled "Game Object" The barracks "traines" Soldiers Build Fountain, is misspelled "Fontain" On the compass the marker for ruins is a gem, but has a black square behind it. It's the only compass marker with a black square behind it, and looks like they forgot to make the backround invisible. "windmill", "granary" and "warehouse" all unlocked before the associated research had been started. Random events take place during the game, such as "your men become lions" i assume this is a morale boost, but it doesn't actually say on the notification what the events do. When you're inside a cave, the exit doors still say "Enter cave" When selecting an army on the overworld, Military Strength is misspelled "Military Strenght" [h1]COMBAT[/h1] Enemies sometimes disappear into the floor. Enemies inside terrain can still shoot you. Enemies Sometimes get stuck on terrain. Enemies sometimes refuse to shoot back at you. Enemies are often just standing in a group in the middle of a room, or all stuck together on the terrain. Visiting a farm placed me inside the floor. Projectiles Sometimes pass through enemies without hurting them in first person. [h1]GAMEPLAY[/h1] There are sometimes invisible obstacles inside buildings (the Library) Interactive objects such as woodcutting, mining and cooking points suddenly stop working. (this happened to me after using one cooking fire, and at first i assumed i needed to find an axe and pickaxe to use the other points, until i tried a fire again and realised they had all broken) Overlapping rug textures in buildings leave them flickering constantly. The Interactive marker to enter a cave (you press E on it) was not in the entrance to the cave, and i needed to took around to find it. Some caves are so poorly designed that you get stuck on terrain, then get caught on the ceiling and float around. Objects continue to sparkle after they have been looted. 3 Hours played and it's clear that the game has a memory leak. The game has slowly increased in ram usage and is now scraping 8GB, Trees in front of doors, preventing access. Tanning Racks give xp (why?) While in first person, you can see your clothes clipping. There are multiple objects inside dungeons that look interactive, but are purely cosmetic. Giant glowing gems, Glowing bowls, etc. Items that look like they are collectable, but literally do nothing.

Even though this game has a great concept, the execution was just terrible. It tried to be a mix of everything, action 3rd person, action 1st person, RTS, a nation management game, but not being good at any of them. The Action part has Physics bugs. RTS part Control Scheme is worse than Warcraft 1. Nation Management has unintuitive design. And Loading time is just atrocious. Also, my PC can run Cyberpunk without a hiccup, and yet it has FPS issue with this game. I wish they should have at least solve the FPS issue before getting out of early access. As it is now, this is just a mediocre game of each genre mashed together. It is being more ambitious than it can handle itself. If the developer choose to focus on one aspect and minimize the others, then it might have been a pretty fun game. My recommendation to reference a game design of this genre would be Pathfinder. It focuses on the RPG part, while the Kingdom management was minimized.

If I could theory craft the perfect game, one of my top suggestions would be what this game has the potential to become; a first person RPG, open world sandbox building, real time strategy mass combat game. At this early stage of the alpha, the first elements of all of this is present. You have a character you control, the king/queen of your domain. You build buildings to develop your village and add capacity to it. Ultimately you build soldiers and archers with which to deal with enemy concentrations and villages, and go into battle with them. During all of this your character also has quests/missions to do, dungeons and caves to explore, loot to find. This is not just about building the village, it's about building your character. So far as I write this review, there is not a whole lot of things to do. Most players run out of things to do after ten or twelve hours. For the price though, I've gotten a lot less play out of games I've payed a lot more for, because they did not interest me as much. This game has ENORMOUS potential, and what is in the game so far bodes well. This is not a half assed project. If you like the idea of this sort of game, please consider supporting it's development.

Developer. Listen. Free advice. Take a group and have them walk around asking people if they like video games. If they say yes, ask them if they like this style of game. The ones that say yes, get their info and ask them if they would be willing to play a game and have people taking notes. The ones that say yes to that, you set a day and time that works for them and have them come in. Now, set up some computers, install your game, wait for the people to show. Have one person stand behind each gamer and tell them to keep their mouths shut and take notes. These notes should be, problems the player was having, complaints, likes, dislikes, etc. Then, once they are done gaming for a bit, you sit them down for a Q and A session and get input. Just honest, raw input. You just got people to help you fix the problems with your game at little cost to you. You have to pay a few team members some OT and maybe buy some pizza? You'll spend more time and money implementing the fixes. Now, have some team members scroll through all the bad reviews. Just the bad ones. Pull all the "issues" and fix them. Now, the good reviews. Take note of the "I really like this" from each good review. A few weeks and your game will be playable and get better ratings. Shoot, and it didn't cost that much. For everyone reading this, asking themselves "should I buy this". Do you like handing money to random people on the street? Until the developer fixes this, you are just giving them money for wasted HD space on your rig.

I just do not understand how this is out of Early Access... The game is fundamentally super interesting and really have a great potential. But playing it few hours just was really really frustrating. From limited game option setup, stuttering gameplay with FPS drop or somekind of loading freeze, very bad pathfinding for you troop when exploring cave, villages and forest, no possibility to mine stuff, your troop not reacting to your order, very simple inventory management with no item comparaison, no sorting or filtering option etc... and so on... This is not a finish game. Not at all. I simply cannot recommend it unless you want to support this project and hope they can get rid of those bad bugs all around... It is again a very interesting project and idea all around and I can only relate to what they want to do with this... but it feels it was rushed out of EA too early ...

I liked the concept behind the game, but even though the concept is great it's execution is terrible. Gameplay is really clunky, not bearable even. Fighting is awful, you just mash one button, watch some horrible animations and hope for the best. Most of the assets are taken from somewhere, I actually saw most of them in another game. Strategy gameplay sounds good on paper but in reality it's even worse than tpp. Kingdom management is ok, but it's nothing original, it's very limited and unintuitive. Game also crashes constantly. The only good and original thing about this game is the idea behind it, but that's it. It's just not worth it, to be fair I couldn't recommend it even if it was free.

I am honestly surprised at what the game has become. Early legends of ellaria had quests, this introduction where you ran from a failing kingdom under siege, it explained mechanics, you were able to place buildings and talk to your citizens. You traveled in a open world to different towns. Now the game has become like Evony online, or a 3rd person Risk game. Instead of traveling in an open world, you merely click on a hex and wait 30 seconds to cross half of your starting area. Before if you needed houses, you walked around looking for a good spot and placed down a few, you were actually able to craft how the town looked and the placement of everything. Now the game just does it for you, with the slow choppyness of being in town I am unsure if you can still place buildings but there is also no point when you can use the town management UI to increase your population and production. You also lose the need to raid chests and bandits pretty quick once you obtain a lumber mill because resource locations like farm slots and mining spots easily are built once your wood income is stabilized. What charm Ellaria had is now gone, and I can't recommend anyone play this now. Its a game in early access, there is no morality issue that comes in with most medieval games now, there is hardly any need to actually enter your town other then when the game forces you to when your traveling between locations, even adding soldiers to your party is done outside of town via transfer troop system. The idea to mix this sort of dragon age and a rts wargame was cool but it now has just become a idle game with a risk map style and a browser game style resource collection.