Recent reviews by Shadow&Dust

Has enough incongruent logic tree branches and ridiculous railroading to disgust me.

Worth it if you like Medieval Single Player Casual RTS. Insufficiently imperfect for me to have complaints worth stating.

There are many brilliant ideas and much brilliant work in the design of this game. Much 5 star writing and voice acting, in amazing depth and breadth. However, and in great contrast to this product's superior aspects, stand important inferior and sloppy ones.

Some examples of what ruined the experience for me follow. The power-ups system is largely nonsense. Lots of animations that should exist, don't. The character can do lots of obvious trespassing and thieving without the likely negative consequences, which is a very cheap old design feature, very inappropriate here. Sporadic sloppy logic handling and otherwise unrealistic railroading of the story in the propagation of consequences though the dialogue logic web and in other important plot mechanics.

I hope this negative review will affect the people responsible for the sloppiness of the final product (likely stupid leech deadlines imposing financiers) rather than the brilliant creators such as designers, directors, writers, actors, artists, coders and others who did their job well but were under a very stupid deadline or other stupid leadership.

This is probably the most realistic simulation of ancient battles, but the competition is bad in many ways, so this at best mediocre portrayal beats out even worse ones. It has glaring gameplay and technological shortcomings.

The visual quality of the gameplay elements is decent in the sense of depicting a miniatures board game. However, aspects of the portrayal are functionally deficient. The depictions of some troops are erroneous or misleading. Often it is nearly impossible to differentiate certain very important terrain features and the cohesion status of certain troops under certain flag colors, without zooming in or hovering over the tile or unit.

The visual quality of the fluff art and of the backend GUI is brilliant or very close.

The functionality of the interface can use work, such as the ability to remove the omnipresence of hover tips for all terrain tiles and all troop units. Sometimes, immediately relevant options, such as list filtering, require steps back to other screens.

The gameplay is far from polished. Looking up an enemy's possible army composition during the purchase phase is easy. Looking up their units' stats at that time is very hard, although it can be done by starting a single player game with that hitherto enemy army, then recording their stats for later use. Looking up one's own troop stats during purchase is needlessly clunky - one needs to purchase a unit, then look up its stats, then refund it if necessary, and so on. When playing hotseat mode, the camera does not rotate automatically when a player's turn is finished, but stays exactly where it was for the opponent's turn. The first time I played this mode with a friend, he accidentally ended one of my turns before I got a chance to do anything in it.

The rules are complicated, but the manual does not provide all of them. The tutorial provides much less. Good luck searching forums and YouTube videos so you can become a strong player. Some rules the developers have even kept obscured behind whimsically functioning game engine algorithms defying apparent design intent of simpler rules. For example, the obscure way in which the game resolves superimposed primary zones of control.

The tutorial is the most annoying one I encountered in a game. Little effort was put into sensible sequencing, pacing, and completeness. Throws you into a game and when you click on things once, it pops up multiple lengthy instructional essays having only a small direct relationship to what was just clicked. After finishing with a round of pop ups, one struggles hard to remember what transpired in the game thus far and what one's intent was. Then upon another click somewhere else, the process is repeated with a new set of essays. Over and over again.

I do not agree with much of the workings of the underlying game rules system. To the developer's credit, it has been improved significantly since the release of the game (making it more realistic), but it still has big problems. Probably the most glaring example: when a unit is engaged in melee, it can not be shot at. Charging a currently meleeing unit from the back or the side is highly desired and in this game it is very possible due to said unit having the same footprint as when it is idle. In the present rules, the meleeing unit occupies its space and it is wide open for full charges like it was when idle, and nobody else can occupy that space (the unit that it is engaged with it is still occupying its own space), but shooters are prevented from shooting it as though it is thoroughly mixed with the enemy unit it is meleeing. Thus an extremely important part of history has been perverted and the game system itself has done so in a blatantly internally inconsistent way. Here are two idle units open to every sort of missile, yet here again they are in exactly the same position, occupying the same exact footprints, but while engaged in melee along one of their sides, they can not be shot at, though they can be charged at from all non-engaged sides. Obviously an attempt was made to simulate friendly fire concerns, but was implemented in an extremely inept way. And this game has a bunch of other problems of similar nature - design problems encountered in the simplification process of reality to board game, solved very badly.

The AI is mediocre and below. Rudimentary rules of thumb are followed. Once the player learns those rules, the single player game becomes very boring. There is no difficulty setting for the AI. The single player difficulty settings are accomplished by using always equally tuned AI to control various size armies. If you want more difficulty, you get the same AI in charge of a larger army. If you want less difficulty, you get the same AI in charge of a smaller army.

The modes of play are unrealistic. Examples: Open battles have no objectives, but only routing a relative amount of the enemy. This promotes stalemate-like conditions and other ahistorical or historically fringe strategies. The Baggage Train mode remedies the above Open Battle problems, but it has a glaring problem of its own. After the troop picking phase, the computer breaks off two flanking wings from the human defender's forces according to its obscure and stupid whim. It deploys them with similar aptitude. It does all of the above much less intelligently than when it uses its armies in single player Open Battle mode, where it performs mediocre at best.

It is easy to cheat in this game and that is no idle exaggeration. It can be done very subtly and unnoticeably. I am very sympathetic toward the boomer grognards who, due to their ignorance of the relevant tech, are oblivious of the multiplayer's glaring openness to evil doers. Using the word "evil" is no idle exaggeration either, probable mental illness label notwithstanding.

How much of the problems will be fixed and how soon... Gauging based on the age of the game (Steam release was on Oct 12, 2017), my experience exploring and participating for solutions to problems on the forums, the developer's apparent attitude toward certain complaints and past speed at fixing problems, and their focus on derivative alternate work carrying the same problems forward (first DLC's and now FOG II: Medieval), the prospects for strong or fast improvements are not good.

An excerpt from the December 17th, 2020 patch notes: "In MP Custom Battles the second player will no longer get a move on his first turn, just force selection and deployment like the first player. This is so that if the game goes to the turn limit both players will have had the same number of turns. The Turn Limit has not been increased."

I noticed the above mentioned phase problem quickly after starting multiplayer games. It was very noticeable and likely an easy fix (I have a decent amount of experience coding), but apparently it was not fixed for over 3 years. It wasn't much of a problem after one got used to it, but it was annoying and it showed blatant lack of commitment to both 1.0 quality assurance and to subsequent easy and timely bug fixing.

I played multiplayer for several dozen hours.

Used Automatch exclusively and kept all the matchmaking filters on the default wide open setting. Didn't get matched to anything but the Classical map being played at about 60-120 second turns. My rank gradually rose to Intermediate. The match filters don't even have single map filtering ability, but only map pack filtering. The classical map is the only one I care to filter at this point and I simply can't unless I filter a bunch of others along with it. So it is needlessly hard to filter out the boring Classical map.

Eventually I tried to use the lower limit on the rank filter and found it doesn't work in Automatch. So it's needlessly hard to find ranked games where my rank is not unfairly endangered by inaccurately ranked people. I didn't find a complete formulation of the ranking system but what was there is worrying.

My friend on mobile says he tried to friend me, but didn't find me. Ditto vice versa. Thus my test of the crossplatform functionality thus far is a fail. Maybe he was afraid of his high rank being endangered by me and somehow hid his profile and lied about searching for mine.

He says that the high rankers tend to have secret friend allies in order to attain and maintain their high ranks - i.e. they prearrange playing together against unwitting opponents. Reportedly SMG stated the enforcement mechanism depends on whether the cheaters are social network (maybe Risk too) friends.

He also says that I should have had the ability to play in other people's paid map games even while I only had the free version. What use is that ability however when very few people stage such games and in any case the Automatch for whatever reason never matched me to them.

The first two ranks are Novice and Beginner. Took me a while to remember which came first, because for a while I kept oscillating between them without being given an explanation of whether I had recently gone up or down in rank and why exactly. And because they could have been better labeled as the two words used here are synonyms in this context.

The problem of higher rank players avoiding playing lower ranks for fear of unfairly going down in ranking would be ameliorated by introducing the noobs in the middle, like in ELO, instead of at the bottom. But then that would be one more reason to relabel the ranks.

Tight turn limit but clunky interface.

The movement of troops is very slow when done with complete accuracy. As well, the transition to the Fortify phase is easily clicked by mistake because its visual cues and mechanic are too similar to the very frequent movement of troops finalizations. Also because by far the biggest text item in the phases menu cluster says Attack with the big Fortify button with no obvious appropriate label to its right. The nearly 100% prevalence of typical 120 sec and lower timers greatly exacerbate this problem.

Hard to read the continents, sea routes, and wall borders on a bunch of maps and I am playing fullscreen on 1920 X 1200. Count this as messy art of the gameplay fouling type.

Lux Delux is a superior clone in some important ways.

I haven't got around to reinstalling Delux after playing a few years ago. I remember it being far better in total number of maps and efficient play including an interface capable of faster and more accurate use and map art more clearly showing gameplay relevant features. I don't know who currently has better mods and integrations into communities and ranking system. In theory, Risk is decent in the integration and ranking regard, but in practice has the annoying problems I mentioned above.

The Risk AI is seriously "challenged" compared to Delux. I played a couple maps with it on Expert, and they lost both the first times. I beat the free single player undead scenario ("Final Stand"), labeled "Insane" difficulty, in about half a dozen tries. In Delux I seriously struggled at about medium AI difficulty.

I recently changed my Steam handle, but this did not propagate to Risk. I troubleshot for a while and solved it in a somewhat non obvious way. I am fairly certain solution involved pressing the "Restore Purchases" button though there were no purchases to be restored.

To give credit where it is due, SMG Studio - the company who made the licensed Hasbro product, put plenty of love into mod type maps, scenarios, and avatar characters, such as the undead ones, and into making the game in a Hasbroish and fun art style. SMG Studio also has a bunch of other quite creative and interesting games on their page and I recommend checking those.

A decent and very famous grand strategy game. Turn based world map strategy with city and armies building and armies moving with optional real time land battles. The multiplayer is only real time battles. The armies in the real time battles can be customized far more, and the action is far more realistic, than in the vast majority of games in this genre. If you like grand strategy, this may well satisfy. If you like real time, the single player may well not be for you, due to the very time consuming management, but you probably would appreciate the rare real time multiplayer action.