Songs of Conquest

This is a fantasy strategy war game set in a unique world where wielders (sorcerers) gain essence (mana) from their soldiers in large scale battles and then unleash spells on their enemies. There are four major factions: knights, dragons, undead, and gunpowder.

Songs of Conquest has two main game modes:

1. A bird's eye view strategic mode where your wielder uncovers resources, starts battles, and you manage your cities.
2. A bird's eye view tactical mode where you command your troops in battle. You may feel momentarily confused because your wielder does not appear in the battle, but their participation is in boosting your troops with magic and leading from the rear. Magical items the wielder accumulates make the troops more powerful.

The game offers free-form multiplayer (which I didn't try) as well as 4 campaigns, one song per faction, each split into 4 parts for a total of 16 missions.

I played through the campaigns, which took me about 62 hours. It was fun, but I didn't really feel like buying the DLC and playing more.

THE GOOD:

• Interesting tactical combat. There's a definite skill curve.
• Great music that never feels like it's playing on loop and never gets old!
• Pixel graphics that are very well done and with great attention to detail.
• Each faction has its own songs and visual assets, giving them each a very unique artistic feel.
• I liked how the campaigns were structured to give you the origin story of each faction. Each faction seems reasonable and sympathetic (even the undead!) when you're fighting for them—perhaps less so when fighting against them.
• You can have the AI fight for you if you're tired of doing it.

THE BAD:

• The campaign scenarios are generally well-written and designed. However, several missions involve enemy wielders appearing out of nowhere with giant armies. I found this very frustrating, since I was often out-of-position and it feels quite unfair for armies to just appear. This effect can be especially difficult when you're facing multiple factions on a giant map.
• Each faction works more-or-less exactly the same way. There is a bit of variation with the top-level troops (and the undead faction), but it doesn't amount to much difference. The game could have offered more variety and replay value in this regard.
• The spells are the same for each faction. I think the game would have been more interesting if each faction had their own magic specialty.
• In the Baryan campaign (the gunpowder faction), you end up fighting another faction because you're both jerks. Then you get told that you shouldn't have attacked them because this territory rightfully belonged to your enemy a long time ago and that as a result you owe them huge reparations. The reparations are so big that you end up fighting an entire war of conquest for them, supposedly to repatriate their own land, but you know the land doesn't really belong to them. Somehow, that doesn't affect the fact that you have to fight the war for them. It's completely absurd and defies all suspension of disbelief. Like, couldn't you have paid them 10,000 gold in compensation and been on your way?

THE UGLY:

• The game crashed once but was otherwise stable. Since I set the game to auto-save every turn I didn't lose any play time.
• I didn't encounter any bugs.
• There were some minor usability issues in the strategic map. For example, there was a part in the very last mission where an obstruction could be removed if and only if you moved your wielder next to it. My wielder was trapped for a long time in there without me realizing I could do that. This was poor affordance. Usually, the obstructions are not passable, but this one was and the game-makers didn't make it obvious. To make matters worse, the moment I figured that out and finally left the trap, an enemy suddenly appeared where my wielder had been stuck the whole time. Grrr.