Exp:Conq Expeditions: Conquistador - Review Roundup

Expeditions: Conquistador

Myrthos

Cave Canem
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Here are a few more reviews for Expeditions: Conquistador.
Indie Luchador, 4/5
Outside of combat, Expeditions Conquistador has a lot of great RPG elements. You will take missions from the Spanish governor as well as others along the way. The dialogue for this is great and makes you feel like you're in the historical time period of the 1500s. The characters match the setting perfectly, and saying the right thing can give you an advantage. You can use things such as diplomacy to avoid combat in certain situations altogether. You will also have a lot of interactions with your team of conquistadors -- during exploration you may take some time out to get to know a few of them better or make some decisions based on their actions. This can help them trust you or despise you and everyone on your team will react in a positive or negative way depending on your reaction. These decisions range from outside opportunities for team members or even religious beliefs which really adds morality and your own belief structure into the game. This helps to gain attachments to some of the characters, and it is some great storytelling.
Rock Paper Shotgun
Although the writing, and its depiction of characters both American and European, doesn’t shy from the horrors of the situation, the portrayal has enough complexity to avoid generalisation. Indeed, it uses fantasy tropes – forbidden rites, abandoned temples, mysterious shaman – and then casts them on their head. The writers also avoid the temptation of creating pure and noble natives pitched against thoroughly nasty Europeans. The people, whatever their culture, are flawed, interesting and frequently unusual.
The characters and plotlines are the game’s strength and they’re strong enough that even when I was feeling the strain of yet more wandering, camp management and combat, I still wanted to continue, to see what happened next. In its depiction of the theme and times, the writing hits the sweet spot between historical accuracy and flexibility, allowing female characters much more active roles on the frontline than might be expected, and permitting the player to make decisions that are modern and almost entirely based on hindsight and an anachronistic worldview.
Leviathyn, 9
No matter where you are in the world, what you do, how the people are spoken to, the decisions that you make, everything affects each and every person in your crew. Have a few aggressive followers? They won’t hesitate to assert their feelings on the natives, but don’t be too hasty! The more open-minded, peaceful folk might take offense to purging a town full of women and children. Do enough to upset specific followers and they could leave your expedition altogether or, even worse, rise up in attempted mutiny. Character interaction on this level hasn’t been done this well since Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn – which, to those in the know, understand how large of a feat that is.
This last review is also available in a video version

More information.
 
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An interesting tidbit from the comment section of the RPS article, it's a comment by Jonas, one of the developers of E:C:

Jimbo: we’ve been doing just that, actually. You can expect some timed battles and some nasty tricks in Mexico in the first free content update. We’re also going to make things a bit harder in general, and we’ll try to add some usability features such as setting a far away destination by clicking on a marker on the 2D map.

So it seems like a substantial patch / upgrade is on the way, and they are tweaking the difficulty. Very nice :)
 
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If anything, the unique setting and gameplay devices should be enough to convince almost any semi-hardcore rpg fan to buy this. Its not like this is a $50 game which you switch of after 30mins and throw away, then slit your writst because there are just no more original games coming out. This is $20 of exstacy.
 
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If anything, the unique setting and gameplay devices should be enough to convince almost any semi-hardcore rpg fan to buy this. Its not like this is a $50 game which you switch of after 30mins and throw away, then slit your writst because there are just no more original games coming out. This is $20 of exstacy.

Its got some fitting dialogue and the setting hasn't been used in ages, but there's no items to equip your party with. The class "builds" and items are combined into this linear horizontal bar. eg. The soldier class Sword 2/9 points. Gun 3/9 points. You roll your avatar by putting points into skills and not ability scores which don't exist.

"30 minutes and throw away" is exactly what I did. :( I pretty much had no fun at all in character creation where I usually spend hours thinking up my race/classes then after the tutorial battle, knowing my party pretty much had all the moves it was going to ever get already, I thought I'd go play something else that didn't suck.

That's how it went down for me. But I am more into gameplay than narrative where games are concerned. Maybe you can show me the light, i dunno. I didn't uninstall it yet, there's still hope!

Also, I've come from playing Fallen Enchantress:LH very recently with vast amounts of customisation in unit ability and appearance. To a certain degree I'm probably still playing that in the back of my mind. Only now its broken and awful and the only item is "equipment points". :/
 
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Yeah I guess this is more of a logistics, management, exploration, survival game with some decent turn based combat. Some of the micro management you talk about has been abstracted and simpliefied, so if you enjoy kitting out your characters with all kinds of stuff (also lots of fun) you are going to miss it here.

What I liked about the game was the somewhat historical setting, of which I know very little as well as the above average writing in the encounters. The idea of being an explorer in a hostile environment where resources are scarce, and disaster lurks around every corener had me fully emersed. Also the turn based combat was enjoyable.

Maybe not everybodies cup of tea but definitely above expectation for games released in the past 4 or 5 years. I say complete at least the first part of the campaign before judging it too harshly.
 
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