Wildermyth Review - Page 4
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While you're doing that, you'll be dealing with a couple of timers - one for calamities and another for invasions. The former from time to time make your enemies stronger, though you can spend some Legacy Points to counteract these effects, while the latter send a wave of enemies to rampage through your territories.
At the end of the day, this whole layer feels like a bit of an afterthought and doesn't really do anything to improve the overall experience. All the threats it brings to the table are negligible, and all the benefits you get from upgrading your areas boil down to some resources you can spend on crafting new pieces of gear. And as we've established, the game's itemization isn't deep enough to justify all the busy work.
So my advice there is to keep the overworld difficulty fairly low, not bother about it much, and just focus on the story events and the turn-based battles. You know, the good stuff.
Finally, once you manage to complete a campaign, you'll get a chance to promote some of your characters to legendary heroes and add them to your Legacy pool. This will let you preserve their gear and some of their skills, and later recruit an alternate-world version of those heroes for your subsequent campaigns.
Technical Information
The game works and runs well, and I've not encountered anything resembling a bug during my time with it. With how text-driven the whole thing is, there were some typos here and there, but they were few and far between.
The "papercraft" visuals are unique and fit the game well, while its soundtrack at times reminded me of Arcanum, which as far as I'm concerned, is a great thing.
The options menu is a bit weird in that the first thing you check, resolution options, is very limited, but then apart from that, you have a lot of possible customization, including resizing the UI and adjusting animation speed for your characters, enemies, and even purely for ability animations.
The game also has built-in mod support and a multiplayer mode where you can assign certain characters to different players and play the game that way.
There's also no voice acting of any sort, which I found refreshing in this age where even indie developers often feel compelled to fully voice their projects, thus limiting their creativity when it comes to elaborate conversations and branching dialogues.
And if there's one thing to complain about, it's the fact that the game's combat log is very vague, and as a result, it can be hard to know exactly how or why you're hitting or missing. You just get shown the chance for an attack to land, and then the log marks the damage it dealt if it hits without detailing why it did or didn't.
Conclusion
After spending quite a bit of time with Wildermyth, I can safely say that as an experiment in the realm of procedural storytelling, the game is a resounding success. When picking it up, I didn't expect much but ended up being pleasantly surprised.
You add an enjoyable combat system with very unique spellcasting on top of that, and you've got yourself a game. With how well that stuff works, the stuff that doesn't, namely itemization and overworld exploration, fails to sour the overall experience.
If you'd like to play a unique RPG in this age where it feels like everything that could be done has already been done, you can't go wrong with Wildermyth.
