Recent reviews by cowboyana

This game is astonishingly good. It's NOT a clone of Kingdom - there's good ideas taken from Kingdom but it's much more a strategy game. It's NOT a mindless tower defense upgrade clicker - all choices feel weighty and have consequences. Plays perfectly on Steam Deck. Tons of variety, systems, replayability. The difficulty options are exciting to experiment with and make the game genuinely challenging without ever feeling frustrating. Easily worth full price; this is something special and an unqualified success that makes me want to play all the developer's games.

Terrific! Hews pretty close to StS in terms of the fundamentals, but has very intentional, refined mechanical changes that make for a very refreshing experience. Great game.

Tough, unique roguelike, in the old sense of the word. You have no melee attack, only spells from a large, beautifully-varied spellbook. There is no metaprogression to gatekeep content - the only dopamine drip you're getting is improvement in your skill, and the game gives you all the information you need. This game will break a lot of bad habits you've built up in more forgiving roguelikes. Everything you can do besides movement has a permanent cost in some way, so get used to accepting strategic costs in exchange for tactical gains!

Wow this is real good. The base, freeware game is good enough to play for several hours straight if you enjoy finding synergies. There's currently a single $5 expansion with more creatures - when you play the free version you only play against other people with the free version, and vice versa.

The first part of this review will be directed at players unfamiliar with Conquest of Elysium and Dominions, and the second part will be directed at experienced players who want to know what's new in broad terms.

Illwinter Games is a very small studio that makes two idiosyncratic, sprawling series, CoE and Dominions. Dominions is a military- and magic-focused 4x/grand strategy game with an astonishing variety of playable nations (83 or so in vanilla Dom5) that is tuned mostly for multiplayer games. Conquest of Elysium shares a lot of mechanics and flavor with Dom5 but is a turn-based strategy-rpg game designed primarily for single-player featuring many, many different units, mechanics and playstyles.

There are some strict rules in this game that are likely to frustrate new players and which may ruin the game for some. Battles resolve without player input - the only preparations you can make to improve your odds of winning are army composition (you can't change formations but units have a generally-acceptable idea of where to stand based on their role) and tailoring the spells that mages can choose from (which can be very important, but rarely are you presented with many options here, unlike in Dominions). Battles continue until one side is wiped out, so each battle is strictly winner-takes-all. This means that this game is extremely swingy, and you will end up resigning a LOT. Wandering deer and brigands can wander right onto your home base, and capture it if it's undefended, potentially costing you the game. If your doomstack mega-army (which can't swim) is standing on a frozen lake in late winter, you can kiss it goodbye.

However, each run is absolutely alive with possibilities. Maybe your hobbit army will discover a portal to Hades and end up ruling the underworld. Maybe your witch will charm a dragon and fly around, making hit-and-run raids. Single units can wipe out armies, if you know what you're doing with them. Unexpected opportunities are everywhere, but it takes exploration and experience to learn about them.

The modding scene for this game has always been strong, but the release of CoE5 (which has workshop support) has set off a minor rennaissance among modders. Commissar Jon ♥♥♥♥♥♥'s new class overhaul mods add a lot of flexibility and rebalancing to the game, the crafting guardian mod helps the early game move faster and result in less random deaths for all players, and there are many mods that add entirely new classes.

For CoE3/4 owners who are balking at paying for a whole new installment that looks the same, I'll say that the changes particularly to planes and planar accessibility add a ton to the game. The sky and agartha are now of interest, and accessible, to every class, to some degree. Flying armies are now much more interesting and effective for their ability to travel across the sky and drop down wherever they like. The other planes are much more readily accessible as well, although it can be difficult to return from them. In CoE4 I rarely found myself exploring more than one other plane in a run; now I find that in a typical run I visit the sky, agartha, and at least two or three others, no matter what class I play. A lot of exciting exploration happens in this that never happened for me in 4.

Shockingly deep and creative. There are so many fun decisions in every battle. Great variety in characters and playstyles, great variety in enemies, great resource management, great UI. Even the little casino minigames you encounter occasionally in towns are lively and interesting. If you like the turn-optimizing aspects of slay the spire and the RPG aspects of dicey dungeons, check this out, it's real good.

This game rules. The wargame / 4x hybrid works so well. The UI is clunky, there are plenty of textual errors and there are some graphics glitches, but the game is so interesting and enjoyable - the 4x format makes the wargame details much more compelling. Highly recommend if it looks and sounds remotely interesting.

Original, fun gameplay mechanics, lots of polish, lots of content already in the game, and some truly breathtaking 16-bit art design - I love the gorgeous character art!

Really fun core mechanics set this apart from the rest of the Spire-spawn. The skills and equipment mechanics are genius, and give the relatively small card selection tremendous depth. You're able to fully reconfigure your loadout of cards, skills and equipment at any time except in battle, so you are free to experiment with your deck as you go, and the intricate combat and difficult enemies make this level of control worthwhile. There's definitely major rebalancing to be done with some of the cards and events, but the game is fun as is, and the skeleton of it is fantastic. It's half the price of a lot of similar but less interesting games.

Great design.