Druidstone - Review @ IndianNoob

IndianNoob has reviewed Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest:

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest Review (PC) - Against All Odds

Detailed Review

Well-made tactical RPGs are hard to come by these days. In fact, the last full-fledged tactical RPG I played after 2015's Blackguards was Pathway and that didn't go down so well. But when I learned that the creators of Legend of Grimrock that breathed new life into modern blobbers were making a new tactical RPG, I couldn't be more excited. Their latest outing, called Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is out on now Steam and your boy got to dabble a little more than 20 hours in the game. Is it good, is it bad and should you buy it? Well, read on below!

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VERDICT
Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is a challenging, satisfying and well-made tactical experience fully worth the price tag. The combat is excellent, there are a lot of skills to fiddle around with and the game keeps you on your toes at all times. Just don't expect a fully fledged RPG with extensive customization. There are a few balancing issues and some frustrating mission structures that need fixing, but nothing a few patches and the promised mod support can't fix.

Score: 7.7/10

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More information.

Good to hear there might be mod tools!
If somebody can take out the time limits and endless respawns this might become a great game.

Darkheart said:

Good to hear there might be mod tools!
If somebody can take out the time limits and endless respawns this might become a great game.

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Certainly possible. But that would mean these modders would also need to rebalance the whole game as it wouldn't work otherwise.
Like disabling the fleet which chases you in FTL. If you remove that, you'd break the balance. So you'd need to add in other challenges. E.g. increase amount of enemies, change enemy AI (more passive and in groups, so that there are 2 or 3 waves of current respawns already there from the start but they are not "activated" right away) and you'd probably need to decrease the damage to make the fights challenging, and maybe add some regeneration to Enemies so that you couldN't kite them as well.

Afaik for FTL players did something like this. But I have never played it with these mods.

Darkheart said:

Good to hear there might be mod tools!
If somebody can take out the time limits and endless respawns this might become a great game.

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I also hate this, but I've found that it may be that actually there aren't infinite overwhelming respawns. As I've put more hours into the game, my party got pretty strong and I decided to do a revisit of old levels to get the 100% out of them, and in all of the levels which I thought there were infinite spawns, they actually stop respawning at some point, normally after 4-5 additional waves.

You can get to the point where nothing else spawns and you can just happily move around an empty map to complete all objectives without pressure. However, for that you need to be able to overpower the enemy and some maps seem pretty hard thing to do, but I'll find out if it's a valid tactic even in those maps as my party gets stronger, but if it is, that's a playstyle I can get to enjoy more than having to play with that constant rushed feeling in every mission.

There are of course exceptions... for example there is a map where you have to defuse 6 explossive barrels in 8 rounds, and there's no way to extend it past that. Either you defuse them, or it goes boom and you lose.

Kordanor said:

Certainly possible. But that would mean these modders would also need to rebalance the whole game as it wouldn't work otherwise.

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Sure, that would have to be done. And the resulting game would certainly look and play different than vanilla.

Depending on the power of the mod tools/support, one might even make a real tactical turn-based RPG out of this.