Bump. Went to a friend's earlier today and played this. We started talking about it again just now and I feel compelled to share my thoughts.
I played this game and I am impressed by the game's idea and design, but I am utterly unimpressed by how "finished" this game is.
The camera controls are completely shoddy. I tried to map the arrow keys to the camera but up and down refuse to work, only WASD works perfectly.
The "men" have stuffty pathfinding skills. Seriously, it's a loving hill of sand that grows gardens. Get the forget over it and get to the loving water-be-gone spellstone so you all don't drown you slaves.
The lack of options is appalling. The water texture is stuff. Trying to zoom in (which is awkward as hell due to the shoddy camera controls) into the water you'll see that it is somewhat pixelated and ugly.
The Ubisoft DRM is atrocious. I feel like it's a second Origin and I'm worried that it probably logs my moves too. Seriously, I know they're trying to get into the digital distribution service and get directly to their customers but they all suck in comparison to Steam (the point is I don't want to have to manage more than one DRM program. It's bad enough some games on Steam actually come with GFWL still *cough arkham asylum*.
The 30 FPS cap is ridiculous. I have a god damn powerhouse computer. If computers were cars, mine would be at least a slightly aged, higher middle class "sports car". With racing stickers. So why the hell can't I play this how normal games are played? I don't know if those of you with lower end computers can tell the difference, but when you're someone like me and you have been playing on a high end system for a long time, you can notice the difference between a solid steady 60 FPS and a solid steady 30 FPS. Despite the human eye only being able to only see at 16 FPS, there is still a noticeable difference.
For some stupid reason there is some sort of limit as to how "high" the camera can go. On certain levels this ceiling is incredibly annoying and difficult to work with and completely inhibits your ability on some levels.
Speaking of which, on the "volcano" level (where the ceiling for the camera is too low), my villagers are just standing around with their richards hanging out, watching forests burn and lava flow next to them while not reclaiming a village that had burned down earlier due to them not getting the forget out of the way of a lava flow when I moved their village totem.
tl;dr/final verdict: GREAT IDEA, nearly no effort put into testing.
It's like they finished developing the game and they were just like "well, forget it, just throw it out now". I'm figuring Ubisoft is responsible for this likely, developers will always want to give a finished product.
