WITWI - Sands of Salzaar COMPREHENSIVE CRITIQUE (Simplified Mount & Blade)
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This game comes from Chinese Indie studio: 汉家松鼠 Han-Squirrel Studio. If the Chinese portion is not correct blame steam! This is an early access open world title in which you form your own caravan of armed forces and go on a journey of mostly fighting other groups and running errands for various characters.
Sands of Salzaar somewhat throws you into the open world that it has to offer to you very abruptly. Armed with a couple of items and a companion that cannot be dismissed, you make your way around the map trying to figure out what the goal is.
The main purpose of the game is as follows. You are the leader of the group. Your responsibility is to hire and take on as many units as possible. Help them grow by levelling up, promote them to the next rank, and progress through the story. There are battle sequences in which you mostly control your character that can get quite easily overwhelmed if too many enemy units focus on attacking you.
There is no voice acting, just a lot of text that you have to go through. If you are ok with a lot of it repeating when you are going through options then you might not have an issue. If however you do not like repetition, you might find this annoying. Going through options that will bring you back to the original menu choice of dialogue, will have the characters repeating their welcome message, which can be quite lengthy at times. This might sound like picking on the details, but it is a detail that is related to the majority of the game, and that is text based dialogue.
The world is pretty big and you can go anywhere you want that is so far available. Be prepared for long journeys however since there is no fast travel yet. You can have your character auto travel to distant locations, but that literally means sitting back an watching them travel on their own. Inevitable, is their struggle to find the road which they have to follow once they begin auto travelling. If you have emails to go through, now might be a good time to take out your phone.
Sadly, you cannot organise your squad or open a menu either to check on your inventory. When you open up another window in the game, whether that be the inventory or talent tree, or anything really, the movement pauses. It would be nice if you could organise your things and strategise on levelling up your squad while you are letting your character travel for a few minutes.
The battle sequences are satisfying, at least for a while, with the maximum number of units stretched to 200 for now. You can either issue mass orders to different unit types such as defend, follow and attack, or have them automatically decide, often the bad, choice of action. You also have full control of your character. Do not expect a dynasty of warriors type of battle system, as this has been previously described. This is a MOBA style top down battle system. You point and click to move and attack, and aim skills with the mouse. There is no WSAD movement.
I have had most of my fun levelling up my units and promoting them to the next rank. The more you upgrade them, the slower the upgrading capability gets. The game has resources, and among them is one called Jade. It is very seldom to come by and at later ranks, a considerable amount of it is required in order to further promote your units.
The talent tree is nothing to write home about at least at the current state that it is in. It is somewhat unbalanced since you can choose the auto XP talents, allowing them to stack and quickly level up your units. Be warned however. If your unit dies, you cannot get it back. I would prefer that the unit gets injured to the point where it needs to recover fully in order to return to battle rather than having the unit completely disappear after putting all the hard work and effort into promoting it to the level that it is at.
The skill tree is not impressive either. You can equip yourself with consumables you find throughout the world that add some skills you can use a limited amount of times. You can also unlock a limited amount of skills you can use in battle that are indeed very limited. I am sure these are things that will be improved upon full release, or at least I have faith that they will.
IMPROVEMENTS:
-Improve ranged combat
-Add quest markers on the map
-Make Jade and healing items more common
-Balance and improve Talent tree
-Unleash the skill tree for more freedom of choice
-Render squads injured instead of disappearing once dead
-Remove item durability
-Skip text quicker
-Fast travel
If you like squad managing open world adventure games but do not want to pay the premium price of M&B, then this is the game for you. It looks simple but there is a lot of depth to it in general, with a lot of things to explore in the world.
Publisher: X.D. Network Inc.
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