I wish I could give this a "neutral" score. It's an interesting step in understanding Abbey Games' development as a studio.

Renowned Explorers is a roguelike with tactical battles and a strategic layer. Think FTL but instead of real-time with pause battles with a ship you have turn based battles with a three person squad.

The interesting part of Renowned Explorers is that on the strategic layer, you can upgrade the rewards you get on each expedition, creating a snowball effect where, for example, the study tokens you acquire from research nodes are re-invested into research, so that they give more research points.

The problem is, to the extent these upgrades relate back to the expeditions it's usually through a +2 increment to a stat here or there. So they don't feel satisfyingly chunky. It's sort of like a turn-based clicker with a tacked-on tactical battle part.

The battles themselves are simple. There are three styles of fighting - aggressive, devious, and friendly, and there is a certain amount of "rock paper scissors" with tradeoffs between what will be easiest to win the fight, and what will get the most rewards. But for the most part there is not enough of a fundamental difference between the attack types. They all deal damage against a particular type of weakness and apply a change to attack or defence.

I want more about changing enemy states, moving them around, more interesting synergies between different types of attack etc.

The music is also annoying. I almost always play games with their intended music because even ok music works well in the intended context. Renowned Explorers' music is both domineering and uncertain of the kind of emotion it wants to convey. It's not particularly jolly or tense or dramatic. It just feels brash. Which contrasts with the general aesthetics which are nice and pleasant and cohesive.

They clearly had interesting ideas. I believe that with a tactical battle layer that had more diverse enemies and more differentiated attacks could have been an engaging roguelike. And if the investments on the strategic home layer were made more discreet and chunky, rather than an accumulation of very small changes. And perhaps if major random changes through the campaign encouraged the player to reconsider their build rather than spend the entire game focused on one path to maximising their points.

RE:IS is a great archeological site, because of how it contrasts with Reus 2. Reus 2 has more distinct kinds of synergies which gives interesting build variety, and the new unlocks on a planet create exactly the kinds of changes that I mention which encourage changing their strategy part-way through a game. There are more chunky decisions to be had.

So, overall this is a "no" as a game but it would be a "yes" to check out if you are interested in seeing how a studio iterates.