Many nice ideas, but it ultimately gives that Genesis Rising feeling of bad execution. Recommended for strategy fans.
Medieval town builder with colorful graphics and a tongue in cheek attitude. The big twist is that you don't raise an army as you would in any other RTS. Instead you hire a few heroes of all sorts of classes from warriors to rangers and rouges to mages and priests. You are not in direct control of them, instead you put out bounties for hunting down monsters or rewards for completing different quests, and the characters decide if the payment is good enough to worth their trouble. Now I think the idea is nothing short of wicked awesome, but a few hours in the drawbacks of such a system start to take shape.
You see different classes of heroes have different personalities and their decisions of taking a quest or not are made on different variables. For example a Knight will go around the world for a worthy opponent, but you'll never get him to do a recon mission. A mage will go after anything as long as it's near by, but if it's far away it'll cost you a fortune to get him to go. Now these differences are great at first, but when the harder enemies come, and you would need many different classes of them to get the most out of the situation you will almost never be able to get the attention of every one of them unless you spend half your treasury on it.
Difficulty is another thing. The story mode starts with a tutorial and a few first missions that are cakewalk, but then suddenly at level 4-5 it gets so difficult that I just quit the game in frustration.
Of course there are the inescapable problems with the AI. When you build a watchtower it comes with a guard who then patrols around it and attacks enemies who come close. The problem is that the range is so restrictive, that if the enemy is attacking a building just two steps outside of his patrol path he won't care about it. The same with the heroes. Picking flowers while the building behind him gets razed. Of course since you don't have direct control over anything the best you can do is put a bounty on that stupid little wolf or rat and hope that your level 15 paladin doesn't take it as an insult. The AI also lacks any notion of teamwork. If you have many heroes attacking the same enemy building and one of them comes under attack, then he and only he will defend himself, while the others continue like nothing happened. This can sometimes lead to them getting picked off one by one by some single strong unit. This kind of behavior wouldn't be a problem in a normal RTS where you can just group select and right click, but here it presents a problem not easy to solve. There are also difficulties when you want to attack more than one thing at once. Now this can be a really annoying thing. You can only do it by putting a bounty on both targets and hoping not everyone goes to the same one.
The one thing this game would really need is a wall. You just can't build walls and any enemies that come on a path that doesn't pass next to a watchtower will just stroll right into the middle of your base, since all the guards are where the towers are and all the land in between is unprotected. Towers cost more money the more you build, so at around 9-10 they will get unaffordable. Keeping your entire base protected is borderline impossible unless you have some idle heroes walking around in it all the time.
From all this it might seem this is a piece of s*it, but even with these problems it's still a pretty immersive game that will draw you in if you're into that kind of thing. Many ideas in it are quite revolutionary, but they're also the drawback because noone knew how to incorporate them properly. If you're the strategy/RPG gamer you will have some good times with this game, but also quite a few facepalm moments. The most frustrating thing is that many of these small problems could have been avoided by some very simple programming solutions and I could have given this game a score in the 8s.