Zombasite - Orc Schism DLC

Worth it

Great expansion for a great game. A must have for arpgs fans.

Great expansion! It's worth getting it adds a lot more content and allows you to recruit monsters. Pretty neat game :)

Really enjoying the game so far, i feel like this adds a bit of depth. Only real complaint i have is finding answers to questions which are close to impossible as not enough people are talking about or playing the game. If you feel like some diablo 2 (but without playing diablo 2.. its old.... feels clunky) and want some high micro systems for clans, this is the game for you!

On the plus side, this DLC does offer a new class called the Bard, which is alright although I still prefer summoner/archer mixes. It is also bug-free. The rest of the content is more of an inconvenience than an enhancement and throws the game way out of balance. The towns you start in are now randomly sized. So if you've got your clan members set up a certain way to be in homes and so on, when you end that game and kick off a new world half of your clan members are outside the walls. So either you have to spend time messing with their positions, or more likely you won't realize they have moved until the first monster invasion kills some or all of them. A couple of the new clans are OP in my opinion. But the worst part is the orcs. They completely take over the game. A randomly placed orc raid using a dimension gate can be far stronger than anything an opposing clan might throw at you. They'll send raids of 25 orcs which are 10 levels higher than your clan. It's hopeless when this happens. There are these orc scouts, which are summoners. Each summons can bring in around 5-7 orc berzerkers, which are strong, fast melee units. There can be many orc scouts on a single level, so you can start to get a picture of how this ends up going. Orc scouts can make an area absolutely impassable - new orcs can be summoned as fast as you can kill them, so either you wind up dead if you get surrounded, or there are simply so many orcs that you can't physically kill them all. Orcs, basically generic monsters, in this DLC are not only are capable of wiping out clans, but they often kill everything on the level that isn't an orc. So if you get a quest for say, dread warrior skulls and they share a level with orcs, you might have to redo the level several times because the orcs will wipe out the dread warriors before you can reach them. Even if you don't have a quest like that, the game often becomes a grind where you're mowing down thousands of orcs. I love the base game, but this DLC takes more than it gives.

Zombasite is a roguelike action RPG with a large degree of randomization. The Orc Schism DLC expansion adds a new class with 3 subclass skill trees, includes necessary refinement for the town management aspect, and adds a chunk of content into the randomization deck for the game to draw from. These are all points that are good additions to this game. The challenge of writing an effective review further than the above is that it will take significant play time to experience most of the new content through the randomization system. The only fair statement I can make is that I like what I have seen so far. As a bonus, most of the existing Quality of Life mods on the Soldak forums work with the DLC, no updates required. My biggest disappointment is that only three new monster types were added. I grant that these are 'species' with multiple subtypes under their header. However, there are quite a few monsters from prior Soldak fantasy games that are not in Zombasite - their development is complete in this engine from previous titles, from lore they are a part of the same world, and several of them are conceivably 'ready to go' for easy addition to this game here because they would not need zombie versions to be created. Yet, they were not added. This seems like a missed opportunity to me. Overall, if you enjoy the base game, this DLC is still a must buy. The price is very reasonable and Soldak was kind enough to intially offer a discount for the first week after releasing it, which happens to overlap with the holidays.