Iratus

Iratus is a turn-based combat game where you play the role of the eponymous necromancer trying to escape his tomb and take over the world, one small-scale battle at a time. Iratus is basically the inverse of Darkest Dungeon. Instead of playing heroes delving into dungeons and slaying sanity-fraying monsters, you play the monsters and destroy the sanity and lives of heroes.

Combat has a lot in common with Darkest Dungeon. Your minions have various abilities, with limits on which enemy positions they can hit, and limitations on which abilities they can use depending one where they themselves are positioned. Combat is divided into a series of rounds, and each round each minion and enemy gets to take an action (usually attacking). You, Iratus, also cast some spells to have a minor effect on the battlefield.

In-between battles you manage your roster of minions, heal them, train them, equip them, and construct new ones. You can also gain experience, which you can invest in more spells and abilities, and equip yourself with artifacts. You have a graveyard with special buildings in it that you can upgrade over time.

I played for about 16 hours before I grew bored. This was enough time to finish one playthrough.

THE GOOD:

• The inverse-Darkest-Dungeons conceit has some merit. Perhaps you'll really like it? I thought it was OK.
• The graphics for the minions, enemies, and backgrounds are surprisingly nice.
• Probably the most interesting part of the game for me was the mini-challenges required to unlock minion types. You start the game with a limited subset of minion types. To unlock the remainder, you need to do things like drive X enemies insane, or do X damage to your own minions.
• It was fun to experiment with different minion types and equipment combinations to see what I could come up with.

THE BAD:

• The animations are a bit stale, especially when compared with Darkest Dungeon! For example, in Darkest Dungeon, hits and dodges are expressed with cool graphics and sound effects, which makes combat feel visceral. Whereas, in Iratus, the game just posts damage or writes "Miss!".
• Further reducing the impact of actions in combat, both minions and enemies have a lot of health. It takes many, many hits before enemies die, making combat rather drawn out and less exciting than it could be.
• In Darkest Dungeon, the exact positioning and classes of your heroes are crucially important to a delve. It's actually quite a tough challenge to figure out exactly where to place heroes to make them effective and to synergize with their companions. This is in large part because heroes have only 4 abilities, each of which can be quite restrictive regarding its position requirements. In Iratus, on the other hand, each minion type has 6 abilities and it's very liberal regarding the positions you can use them from and affect among enemy ranks. Plus, you have low-cost spells available right from the beginning of the game to move your minions around. Overall, this makes the positioning mechanic a lot less impactful than it could be.
• When you equip a minion with an item, you can never re-equip that item to anyone else. You can replace the item with a different one, but this destroys the original! This just rubs me the wrong way.
• I played through the game on the easiest difficulty. I unlocked most of the minion types that I could, excepting a few that required me to beat the game on a higher difficulty, buy DLC, or be a backer. I didn't really feel motivated to do another playthrough because by then the game was starting to feel repetitive.

THE UGLY:

• Iratus's voice gets repetitive pretty quickly. E.g. I really don't need to hear his "bony weather incoming" song every time I cast the bite spell.
• It's annoying to have to pick your active team before every interaction on the map. I failed to do this probably 90% of the time.