I’ll start this review by saying that I didn’t actually like this game very much but I guess I liked it enough to play for more than 80 hours. Fell Seal really spoiled me for these types of combat minimap, squad based, turn based tactical games. That game had such a wonderful means of customizing your entire squad’s builds and using the minimap in various ways. This game does far less of that. You mostly only customize the protagonist’s stats and equipment. The combat minimap is a simple, flat hexgrid with occasional obstacles that do no more than block movement and or provide buffs or debuffs. It’s all kind of boring, made worse by the fact that everything takes so damn long!!! Movement, action, blah blah!!! I would walk away from my Steam Deck or PC when the enemy turn came up because I knew it would be five minutes before I could act. You could turn up the combat speed but that only seemed to work on PC.

The combat is certainly difficult but not in a way that felt like it mattered. So long as my team won the combat eventually, I would just heal up my main characters and replace my faceless units then back to it. There were a few fights where I was wiped out, especially early on, but I learned how to strategize the combat a bit better and soon it was all too often a bit of mailing it in where the most difficult part was the waiting. A few times, I faced an overpowered enemy but, unlike some other tactical games, there didn’t seem to be enough variety in combat for me to find new ways to defeat them so I would just level up and come back. Or maybe I didn’t care enough to find alternate tactics? The combat isn’t all bad. Some of the powers and enemies are pretty cool. But it really felt like a game that was built to reward grind and the grinding wasn’t fun.

I’ve never played a Disciples game so I don’t know the background to the story. What was here was also kind of meh. Dark fantasy is fine but this game seemed to just replace any semblance of a coherent plot with an endless parade of absurdly over the top dark fantasy. Cooking zombie flesh, harvesting organs, turning people into monsters, etc. It felt so dark that it reached the level of absurdity, almost parody.

I also did not really like the voice acting. It just comes across like real people trying to sound like various monstrous humanoids or monsters.

It worked close to flawlessly on my Steam Deck. The cloud saves also worked very well which is how I discovered that mouse and keyboard on PC is a bit easier to use than a gamepad setup. Cloud saves that work are not a given with SteamOS and Windows, I’m discovering.

I wouldn’t say the game is horrible. If it were a 10 star system, I would probably rate it 5. I don’t have that option so I had to choose between 2 and 3. In the end, I thought of Divinity Original Sin 1, a game that eventually got so on my nerves I couldn’t finish it and rated it 2 stars. While I did beat Disciples Liberation, that was only because it was fairly easy to do so. D:OS had a better story and your companions didn’t feel so one-trick ponyish. I remember actually caring about their part of the story. There’s no way I could rate this game higher than that one. Still, I can see there being an audience for this game that might really enjoy what it offers.