…what is a 4X game?

Ok. Tried it and my review is:

It makes me miss Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

The world graphics in Songs, being 3D with swaying trees and such is much better, but meh. It has the same sort of issue as HOMM3 where gameplay comes down to memorizing how strong each unit is in comparison to others and knowing matchups. Heroes build buildings instead of it being an option in towns, and generally building choices for structures are far more simplified. Biggest thing causing me to stop playing is that the characters lack personality in normal noncampaign. What do I mean?

In HOMM3, let’s say I want to be a Necromancer. There are a bunch of different ones, with different backstories, stats, specializations. There are male necromancers and female necromancers… I like Vidomina. Her story text: “At a young age, Vidomina showed promise as a great Alchemist, but was driven from Bracada when it was discovered that she had been using her skills not to animate inanimate matter, but to attempt to bring life to previously living creatures.” And her pic is this intimidating boss woman. Only problem is the model on the map is the same for all necromancers.

So in Songs it’s more like I choose the mage hero of the Old Ones. They only have one pic, and it’s a woman, so all mage heroes of this type are women, and they only vary in name. Basically heroes lack character and are generally interchangeable. In HOMM3 I could play a game and really like the witch Verdish and be like “ya she my main hero she rlly cool”. Songs lost this aspect of ‘heroes’… the Unique and Character aspect. In Songs they should be called ‘bigger units that command other units’. It is otherwise similar enough to HOMM3 that it makes me miss HOMM3. MAY continue playing and rlly I’d complain about the building in comparison to HOMM3 too, but I haven’t made it far enough to know if my complaints are valid. The lack of heroes being individual characters I can become attached to is too big a turn off for me. Without that, it’s basically building units and attacking stuff, which, for me, gets boring. I think they have one artist, which is the one that did the cover pic. And they paid that artist to do a certain number of pictures. So all the game art is by that artist and if there is only one pic for a certain type of hero, too bad. Anyway, I disagree with the style being ‘impeccable’ as in faultless. I actually think that they felt so strongly they had to only have one type of image in one type of style from one artist to be among their greatest weaknesses and the lack of diversity it caused, especially in heroes being able to be different from each other, is, for me, gameruiningly bad. Kid with a free ai art generator could make better.

That looks interesting. When I get through my current Factorio relapse, I’ll have to give it a try.

It also has a demo for everyone to try out